Hans Jonas, like Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jean-Paul Sartre, Emmanuel Levinas, Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and J rgen Habermas, learned his philosophical trade in the school of Martin Heidegger. And like these other luminaries in the darkness of the late 20th century, Jonas adopts much of Heidegger's mode of inquiry while abandoning many of his values.

Heidegger's well known dictum, "Language is the house of Being. In its home man dwells," is accepted, although in a rather different way, by Hans Jonas.

As Richard Rorty put it, "For Heidegger, history is a sequence of 'words of Being' -- the words of the great philosophers who gave successive historical epochs their self-image, and thereby built successive 'houses of Being.' The history of the West, which Heidegger also called the history of Being, is a narrative of the changes in human beings' image of themselves, their sense of what ultimately matters. The philosopher's task, he said, is to 'preserve the force of the most elementary words' -- to prevent the words of the great, houses-of-Being-building thinkers of the past from being banalized."

Jonas assimilates this theme to the question of responsibility which he sees increasingly loosing any clear sense of reference.

For Heidegger "Americanization, modern technology, the trivialization of life and the utter forgetfulness of Being (four names, he thought, for the same phenomenon) were irreversible." For the most part Jonas would agree here as well, although his pessimism doesn't lead to fatalism as it seems to in Heidegger.

In this chapter we will try to extract Jonas' version of this sentiment of Heidegger especially as it pertains to the question of ethical responsibility. To demonstrate how Jonas applies the notions of language and the forgetfullness of being I shall regard mass media and information technology as the language or speech of today -- the house of our Being in which we dwell.

I. Hans Jonas' Concept of Responsibility

Asking about the meaning of responsibility in the technologically shaped world of today, Hans Jonas proclaims

"man is evermore the maker of what he has made and the doer of what he can do, and most of all the preparer of what he will be able to do next. But who is 'he'? Not you or I: it is the aggregate, not the individual doer or deed that matters here; and the indefinite future, rather than the contemporary context of the action, constitutes the relevant horizon of responsibility. This requires imperatives of a new sort. If the realm of making has invaded the space of essential action, then morality must invade the realm of making, from which it has formerly stayed aloof, and must do so in the form of public policy. Public policy has never had to deal before with issues of such inclusiveness and such lengths of anticipation. In fact, the changed nature of human action changes the very nature of politics."

This statement anticipates the main features of Hans Jonas's public philosophy:

1) Humankind weaves the web upon which life's options are enacted; (What we do makes a difference. Nature, we now know, is not inexhaustible and without our stewardship even the most elemental requirements for life are in jeopardy.)

2) The particular web on which we are nurtured contributes to our most basic capabilities and propensities to act; (Human choice is not unconditioned but historically shaped; previously undreamed of options are now routine while other historically prominent dilemmas are almost totally forgotten.)

3) The web of the late 20th century, due to the power inherent in modern technology, is more binding in this respect than has ever before been the case; (Human agency itself is limited by certain natural capacities; most things that are the direct result of actions performed on an unassisted human scale can be corrected, revised and even undone. But with the enormous increase in power that modern technology has put at our disposal, many actions have consequences which are irreversible. Others may set into motion a chain of occurrences which are beyond our capacity to control. Such circumstances call always for new technologies and in this way we become ever more tightly bound.)

4) It is not the "individual" who acts, but "we" -- and the we is not a group, not the polis , not even society, but an impersonal massification of humanity; (Using Hannah Arendt's useful distinction of labor, work and action one notes that virtually all labor and nearly all work are organized according to various economies that leave no place for a unique or distinctive contribution from an individual. The professionalization taking place in more and more work venues, with the attendant codes of professional ethics, appears to free the individual from genuine responsibility. The basis of action is speech which is likewise falling prey to economies of various sorts. The rhetorical art is subordinate to economies of wealth, power and desire to a degree which makes the speaker a mere cypher of those economies.)

5) Distinctions between the social/economic order and the political realm cannot be maintained as the very essence of politics, action, is defined within the domain of making; (Political action is understood as a productive art. Voters hold elected officials accountable for what they have accomplished. Politics is a making art. Politicians see themselves not as primarily responsible for the public discourse, but for doing a job, producing a new law or creating a new bureau {or more likely these days destroying an old law or eliminating a bureau.})

6) Politics in the form of public policy faces an unprecedented task, viz. , preserving institutions of morality for a future the character of which cannot even or adequately be imagined. (This gets at the heart of Jonas's critique. Political action cannot be structured along contractual lines because one party to the putative contract is unable to respond. Action creates the political, social and moral world {and governs the underlying conditions for this world} which [a] endures beyond the term where the contract's maker can be held accountable and [b] is itself constantly revising itself in ways that render the contract moot. Jonas's point is that our responsibility to the world, amor mundi or tikun olam , must recognize the totally non-reciprocal character of this responsibility. It seems unthinkable that we should have no responsibility to the future which inherits the consequences of our choices; but it is precisely our relationship or non-relationship with this future that problematizes our understanding of the imperative of responsibility.)

To be sure each of the above theses invokes serious questions and none is self-evident; yet together they present a compelling vision of the moral and political dilemmas facing mankind at the close of this tumultuous century. Indeed these items all echo the voices of the European intellectual coming to terms with the political upheavals of this century and the previous. What is important is the distinctive and unique way in which Hans Jonas approaches the probable tragedy to come. Jonas cries out in hope against the possibility of hope that a new and new kind of imperative of responsibility is required for the technological age lest the very idea of responsibility be itself abrogated and human experience irredeemably debased.

II. The Imperative of Responsibility

Challenged by this apprehension it may be valuable to examine the key elements of Jonas's position with particular reference to that most ubiquitous and perhaps most powerful of contemporary technologies, media technology, and in respect to the instruments of public policy, especially the law. What are the imperatives of responsibility in an era of media technology and the rule of law? It should be noted that for Jonas the rule of law is itself a moral imperative. But in his view the rule of law is not now nor ever has been sufficient to guarantee responsible action. The current debates over regulation of the emerging medical and information technologies do not, for the most part, address the crucial questions of the responsible practice of these technologies, except within limited contexts.

Jonas has singled out media technology as one of the major phenomena separating the possibilities of 20th century humanity from those available to the Greeks.

"Immortal fame is thus public honor in perpetuity, as the body politic is human life in perpetuity. Now, already Aristotle pointed out that honor is worth just as much as the judgment of those who bestow it. But then, the desire for it, and a fortiori the desire for its extension into posthumous fame, and ultimately the estimation of this form of immortality in principle, are justified only by the trust we can reasonably place in the integrity of its trustee and master, namely, public opinion: in its enlightenment now, its faithfulness in the future -- and, of course, in its own unceasing continuity, that is the indefinite survival of the commonwealth. Now on all these counts the modern temper cannot permit itself the innocent confidence of the Greeks. The selectiveness as such of this "immortality": that it admits few and excludes most, we might accept if only we could believe in the justice of the selection. But for that we know too much of how reputations are made, how fame is fabricated, public opinion engineered, the record of history remade, and even premade, to the order of interest and power. In the age of the party line, and, for that matter, of Madison avenue, in the age of the universal corruption of the word, we are sadly aware that speech, the vehicle of this immortality, is the medium of lies as well as of truth, and more often the former than the latter in the public sphere -- with a busily fostered growth between them of unmeaningness, not even fit for either, eating away into both; and the older suspicion whether we are not dealing with a tale told by an idiot is overshadowed by the worse that it might be a tale concocted by knaves."

What Jonas here refers to as the engineering of public opinion and the source of the universal corruption of the word is, in his view, invidious because it produces a specious form of immortal fame by debasing the primary vehicle of human action, i.e., speech. Both Pericles and Herodotus see speech and its preservation in history as enobling. Pericles' lofty view in his Funeral Oration -- "They received, each for his own memory, praise that will never die, and with it the grandest of all sepulchers, not that in which their mortal bones are laid, but a home in the minds of men, where their glory remains fresh to stir to speech or action as the occasion comes by." -- sets the standard of an abiding praise of the realization of the good in human life and experience. This ideal celebrated by Pericles has not disappeared in our day. Jonas for example cites the self-declared motivation of an astronaut speaking in a TV interview to be nothing other than immortal fame; but such immortality as we know it today has been mass produced by media technology. Andy Warhol's prescient fifteen minutes of fame is now daily produced across all social strata by such technicians as Rikki Lake (hip), Jenny Jones (suburban), and Montel Williams (urban grit).

In this context we should recall how Norbert Wiener defined for us the modern notion of information . Information, according to Jonas, forms together with teleology and mind the three-legged stool of cybernetics, that technology which claims most to grasp and emulate human behavior. Wiener said, "Information is a name used to designate the continuity of that which is exchanged with the exterior world to the degree that we adapt ourselves there, and apply to ourselves the result of that adaptation. ... To live effectively is to live with adequate information. Thus communication and regulation concern the essential part of the inner life of man, even as they concern his life in society. Although Jonas generally finds the claims of cybernetics "spurious and mainly verbal" he would agree with Wiener in this assessment of the formative power of technologically managed information on both the inner and public life of man.

The philosophical/political issue posed by Pericles in his oration upon the Athenian dead is the problem of law and justice as taken up in Plato's Republic . In a different vein than Jonas Karl Popper found incipient social engineering in Plato's approach to justice. For Popper, this kind of technology is to be feared because it denies basic liberties and foreshadows totalitarianism. Its mistake, Popper argues, is a specious account of natural and historical law. Popper is one with Jonas in the view that we cannot ordain the future, even for the sake of the good, and also in utter distrust of any form of utopianism. But Popper's recommendation of "piecemeal" engineering, while certainly an antidote to scientism and historicism, is for Jonas inadequate in that does nothing to insure that the legacy we thereby leave to the future is responsibly drafted. Indeed it would do nothing to overthrow the narrowness and shortsightedness of Thrasymachean egoism.

Glaucon's interpretation of the Thrasymachean account of justice is supplemented by Adeimantus who sees the issue more explicitly in terms of opinion, which is of course formed by rhetoric (the art of Thrasymachos.) What most troubles Adeimantos is that justice is generally not praised for its own sake, but for its rewards. If justice itself is not good or pleasant, as Adeimantos allows the poetic tradition as well as the laws teach, then what incentive is there for one to strive for justice?

More to the point for Jonas is the reward structure itself. If justice is only praised for its rewards, then it can only be praised it terms of benefits understood and appreciated in the present. But just as children often do not appreciate the same rewards as their parents, the justice of today if it is based on rewards may have no bearing or a negative one on the future.

When Adeimantos objects to the conception of justice held by Thrasymachos, it is largely because he fears that Periclean like rewards and praise can be easily meted out without regard for true virtue. This is similar to the apprehensions of Jonas. The Socratic solution in the Republic is utopian; Jonas fears that the assent of technology takes utopianism beyond the status of philosophical dream to where it "appears to be capable of turning into a task, and Marxism has seized on this novel chance to give its political gospel eschatological exaltation and pragmatic credibility at the same time."

As Jonas sees it technology, and especially media or information technology, facilitates the rise of utopianism by simultaneously undermining the meaning of praise, distorting memory, and reconfiguring the rule of law to conform with highly temporized intentionalities. The antidote to this situation is the moral virtue he calls responsibility, but it is precisely this virtue that he laments is so profoundly ill defined for the present age.

Under such circumstances the development of moral virtues is confounded. The Aristotelian expectations of the reliability of doxic exchange and the function of the law as educator are both rendered false by the omnipresent engineering of public opinion.

Let us consider the possible limitations of the concept of responsibility as it is currently used both within and without legal discourse. Before examining the distinctions Jonas makes with regard to responsibility, the analysis of the eminent legal philosopher H.L.A. Hart will be indicated. Hart classifies responsibility under four heads:

(1) Role-Responsibility

(2) Causal-Responsibility

(3) Liability-Responsibility

(4) Capacity-Responsibility

Hart does not claim this classification to be exhaustive, but at least to identify the main types of responsibility to which reference is commonly made. However, Hart's categories all seem to fall under what Jonas denotes as Formal Responsibility.

All of the senses of responsibility noted by Hart are used to assign and clarify the appropriate, i.e., just, forms and degrees of accountability. For example, Benjamin Disraeli's role as British Prime Minister (ÿ) defines certain responsibilities as tasks, obligations inseparable from the job. To say that "Disraeli was responsible for the fall of the government" is (Ö) meaningful just in case some action of his can be related to the fall of the government in the same way as ice on the roadway can be related to an automobile accident. Whether or not he should be turned out of office is (Ü) another matter, one that has both legal and moral dimensions. Of course if illness or something else were to denature his (¢) very capacity to act, then his accountability for the actions is weakened. It is hard to see a single moral virtue central to any of these senses of responsibility. Rather it is the assignment of and explanation for proximate causation as relevant to praise and blame. Given the malleability of the body politic such determinations offer no beacon to guide human action.

It is this lack that concerns Jonas. The proliferation of tort litigation in the civil courts only testifies to this. That a plausible case to hold someone accountable can almost always be made is perhaps the clearest expression of the general lack of clarity regarding responsibility. Yet confusion on this level is not primarily what Jonas finds disturbing.

In his analysis of the various senses of responsibility Hans Jonas enumerates six types:

(1) Formal Responsibility

(2) Substantive Responsibility

(3) Natural Responsibility

(4) Contractual Responsibility

(5) Political Responsibility

(6) Parental Responsibility

In Jonas's view responsibility of any sort presupposes what he calls causal power, control by the agent and foreknowledge of the consequences. For the notion of responsibility to be at all meaningful an agent must posses the power and control to carry out an act for which some consequences are anticipated. These are minima before responsibility can even be considered and thus are the formal conditions of responsibility. H.L.A. Hart, therefore, offers only an analysis of these conditions for the sake of fair accountability. Hans Jonas, on the other hand, is inquiring into what calls forth a sense of responsibility, i.e., what makes an action as such responsible. The problem is similar to that faced by Aristotle' phronemos in attempting the practical syllogism. However, Aristotle takes for granted the basic continuity of the body politic because the judgments pertain to the foreseeable future. The question Jonas pursues demands a practical wisdom about a future which will be radically different in large measure because of actions performed in the present.

About Formal Responsibility Jonas acknowledges it is the basis for praise and blame and legally the foundation for the important distinction between civil liability and criminal culpability. Civil liability presumes the ongoing responsibility of the agent whereas a criminal judgment asserts a failure of responsibility which may require correction, deterrence and/or retribution. Justice, in demanding a fair accounting, posits an ideal world based on a reasonable assessment of the status quo . This standard cannot apply to a future different than the present unless the future can be prefigured (as in utopian solutions). Indeed utopianism is the tempting solution to the dilemma Jonas raises.

Substantive Responsibility is the category that includes actions which will make a difference for the future, both foreseeable and unforeseeable. This sort of responsibility can never be fulfilled by obedience to the law. Of course obedience to the law may insure that an individual's actions will not be found formally to violate the requirements of responsibility and Jonas, like Paul, Augustine and Kant, does not advocate disobedience. In fact, Jonas's respect for the law is central to the imperative of responsibility.

In an essay drafted in 1929, but not published until 1964 on the occasion of Rudolph Bultmann's 80th birthday anniversary, a philosophical meditation on the Seventh Chapter of Paul's Epistle to the Romans , Jonas develops his first thoughts on the practical and metaphysical necessity of law. Jonas's view is that we, in this case the universal, existential we and not the massified we engendered by technology, do not have it within our power to will the good; we therefore require the formal structure for the will which is the law. Our reverence for the law, an attitude Jonas also notes in Kant, is not because the law itself is or could be sufficient; rather it is because it keeps us from full acquiescence to inclination, or what he refers to as the affectations of objective experience. In The Imperative of Responsibility Jonas summarizes his own view of the limitations of law with reference to Kant:

"While not denying that objects can affect us by their worth, [Kant] denies (for the sake of the 'autonomy' of reason) that this emotive affection supplies the true motive for moral action; and while stressing the rational objectivity of a universal moral law, he concedes the necessary role of feeling in conforming to it. What is unique is that this feeling is directed not at a material object but at the law itself. It was indeed among the profound insights of Kant,the more telling for coming from the champion of unadulterated autonomy of reason in moral matters, that besides reason there must also be sentiment at work so that the moral law can gain the force to affect our will. ... this sentiment [is] evoked in us ... by the idea of duty, that is, of the moral law itself; ... this sentiment was "reverence" ( Ehrfurcht )

Of course it would be incorrect to treat law simply as the formal rational structure for emotive and affective experience. Law is present to us, as Pericles pointed out, in the way it is administered. The º³   ÿ° áó   of law is the human instantiation of the metaphysical formality of law and is most evident in legal institutions such as courts of law. Jonas understands the operations of legal institutions teleologically, as fulfilling the ends that called them into existence in the first place.

Jonas asserts that the court of law was established in order to administer justice and justice is that for which it was created. That is to say the formal and final cause coincide and are immanent in the operation of the institution. "The will of the instituting power continues itself in the will of the institution, or else is perverted in it, or modified, enlarged, restricted ... it is true for the 'court of law' ... that a purpose is not only objectively its raison d'être but also subjectively the continued condition of its functioning, insofar as the members of the court must themselves have appropriated the purpose for the court to function as a court." Clearly on this account the subjective appropriation by the members of the court of the idea of justice is the sine qua non for the responsible administration of the law.

The subjective appropriation of the idea of justice has always depended on speech, whether words of praise and blame or the straightforward statement of the law. Whether one holds that our performance of just acts follows immediately from our knowledge of the just and the good, or requires the inculcation of habit, the institutions of justice are those of speech. Freedom of speech is more than a right to enjoy, it is the condition for the institutionalization of justice.

What if speech is debased as Jonas suggests? Can speech be preserved in the era of information technology? Does the enormous power of modern media technology to shape opinion, present virtual realities, excite an ever changing panoply of economies of desire, and finally overwhelm us with the sheer volume of available information make the subjective appropriation of justice a humanly unattainable goal? And if this is so, what beacon guides us into the dark future?

In the end Hans Jonas's trenchant analysis of how technology shapes the life world and its institutions must leave us aware of our need for some redeeming insight. It is far too early to announce the end of philosophy.