FIG. 3. Hans Jonas, Mönchengladbach, c. 1932. Photo by his cousin, Lisl Haas.
Hans Jonas: The Philosopher of Life
Being As Fate
ON APRIL 9, 1964, an intellectual event of international magnitude took place. The occasion was a Drew University conference on the relevance of Martin Heidegger’s thought to Protestant theology. Originally, Heidegger himself had been scheduled to give the inaugural lecture, but a few months before the event he withdrew for reasons of health. In his stead, the conference organizers invited New School for Social Research philosophy professor Hans Jonas to give the opening address. The choice of Jonas as a replacement seemed a logical one. For four years during the 1920s, Jonas had studied philosophy under Heidegger at the University of Marburg. Under the guidance of Heidegger and the Protestant theologian Rudolf Bultmann, Jonas wrote a brilliant dissertation on the varieties of Gnostic religion in late antiquity. In 1934, the first volume of Jonas’s study appeared in Germany. But by then Jonas had long fled his native land. Hitler’s Law for the Reconstitution of the German Civil Service had effectively barred Jews from university posts. In 1933, Jonas sought refuge in London. Two years later, he emigrated to Palestine.
By the time of the Drew University gathering, the “Heidegger and theology” vogue had reached its pinnacle. The later Heidegger’s celebration of an ineffable and primordial “Being,” whose “call” humankind was supposed reverently to heed, was surely an oblique way of talking about God. In his 1947 “Letter on Humanism,” whose title was suggestive of an apostolic epistle, Heidegger characterized Being in neoscholastic terms as a type of first unmoved mover. Its mysterious “destinings” had nothing to do with “man” or “humanity,” Heidegger claimed: “Man does not decide whether and how beings appear, whether and how God and the gods or history and nature come forward into the lighting of Being…. The advent of beings lies in the destiny of Being.”1 In a celebrated 1966 interview with the German news magazine Der Spiegel, Heidegger boldly proclaimed that so forlorn and misguided had modern humanity become that “only a god can save us”—which seemed to clinch matters indeed. After his apostasy in the 1920s as proponent of a “existentialist humanism,” Heidegger, the lapsed Catholic and the world’s greatest living philosopher, had surely returned to the fold. Theologians everywhere could barely conceal their glee.
Few were prepared for the unyielding, yet sober, polemic that Jonas delivered from the podium that afternoon. Theologians had been seduced, he claimed, by the pseudo-religious implications of Heidegger’s notion of the “fate-laden” character of thinking. Yet true Christian faith, explained Jonas, meant that the believer would be delivered from the arbitrariness of fate. Redemption, moreover, and the belief that inspired it, were not events of this world and thus were far from predestined or “fated.” Instead, Christianity had always depended on a spiritual dignity that transcended mundane temporality and the injustices of fate. Lastly, God’s biblical injunctions—to Adam, to Cain, to Abraham—were all ethical commandments, not summonses to blind ontological obedience. And in the event the audience had any doubts as to where Heidegger’s own “obedience to fate” had led during the 1930s, Jonas took it upon himself to refresh their memories:
As for Heidegger’s Being, it is an occurrence of unveiling, a fate-laden happening upon thought: so was the Führer and the call of German destiny under him: an unveiling of something indeed, a call of Being all right, fate-laden in every sense: neither then nor now did Heidegger’s thought provide a norm by which to decide how to answer such calls…. Heidegger’s own answer is, to the shame of philosophy, on record and, I hope, not forgotten: “Let not doctrines and ‘ideas’ be the rules of your Being. The Führer himself and alone is the present and future German reality and its law. Learn ever deeper to know: that from now on each and everything demands decision, and every action, responsibility. Heil Hitler!”2
Jonas’s astute critique of the ethical deficits besetting “fundamental ontology” had a marked impact on subsequent Heidegger scholarship. Although the Drew University conference had been conceived and staged as a “pro-Heidegger” event, Jonas’s moral eloquence and humanity ultimately held sway: as he finished speaking, the audience rose to give him a standing ovation. The Heideggerian faithful proffered their rebuttals. Yet, by daring to confront Heidegger’s Nazism directly and—what was at the time even more controversial—by seeking to tie the philosopher’s political lapsus directly to the deficiencies of his thought, Jonas displayed the unwavering moral integrity that would become the hallmark of his life and work.
Untimely Meditations
Hans Jonas was born in 1903 in Mönchengladbach, Germany. Though his philosophical studies began in 1921, for the next three years he was also a student at Berlin’s University for the Science of Judaism. An interest in Jewish theology remained an abiding concern until the end of his life. As émigrés, Löwith, Jonas, and Hannah Arendt would, in succession, assume positions in the philosophy department of the New School for Social Research. Jonas’s tenure there began in 1955 and ended with his retirement in 1976.
With the exception of Jonas, for whom Judaism had always been a living concern, the rest of this group came from highly assimilated backgrounds. In the late 1920s, like most acculturated Jews, they labored under the delusion that German nationality was largely a question of language and culture, not one of race. Circa 1933, the scales abruptly fell from their eyes. In My Life in Germany Before and After 1933, Löwith provides eloquent testimony concerning the shock of recognition experienced by assimilated Jewry at the outset of the Nazi years. Speaking of fellow-Heidegger student Oskar Becker, Löwith observes: “The same person who in our Freiburg student days had studied mathematics, music and philosophy, read Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard, and whose best friends had been a Jewish girl and I, had not the least scruple about showing complete indifference to the universal fate of the Jews.”3
In a lecture delivered at a memorial tribute to Rudolf Bultmann following the theologian’s death in 1976, Jonas recounts a more heartening experience from the same dark hour of German-Jewish history:
It was the summer of 1933, here in Marburg. We sat around the dinner table with [Bultmann’s] lovely, so richly emotional wife and their three schoolgirl daughters, and I related what I had just read in the newspaper, but he not yet, namely, that the German Association of the Blind had expelled its Jewish members. My horror carried me into eloquence: In the face of eternal night (so I exclaimed) the most unifying tie there can be among suffering men, this betrayal of the solidarity of a common fate—and I stopped, for my eye fell on Bultmann and I saw that a deathly pallor had spread over his face, and in his eyes was such agony that the words died in my mouth. In that moment I knew that in matters of elementary humanity one could simply rely on Bultmann, that words, explanations, arguments, most of all rhetoric, were out of place, that no insanity of the time could dim the steadiness of his inner light.4
Upon emigrating to Jerusalem, Jonas supported himself by teaching and part-time publishing work. With the onset of the war, he promptly enlisted in the British Army’s Jewish Brigade, bypassing a position in military intelligence to serve on the front lines. He fought for five years—the Italian campaign of 1943 proved particularly brutal—and in 1945, still wearing a British uniform, he participated in the liberation of his native Germany, thereby fulfilling a vow of twelve years earlier to return to German soil only as the soldier of a conquering army. Only upon returning to Jerusalem in 1945 did he receive the crushing news that, in 1942, his mother had been murdered at Auschwitz.
In 1948, he once again donned a uniform, this time assigned to an artillery unit during the Israeli war of independence. Following demobilization, he emigrated to Canada, where for six years he taught at McGill and Carleton Universities before settling permanently in New York. Jonas always maintained that his combat experience permanently altered his philosophical views. One of the noticeable gaps of his professional training in Germany during the 1920s had been a lack of focus on both the body and nature. In the course of Heidegger’s seminars, for example, there was never much discussion of either theme. For Jonas, conversely, the body and nature represented fundamental aspects of what it meant to be human. Hunger and mortality—two fundamental instances of our indebtedness to the natural world—were irreducible components of human experience, no matter how much post-Cartesian philosophy had sought to minimize or deny them. As Jonas explains in a brilliant and moving essay, “Science as Personal Experience,” the opportunity for reflections on the somatic dimensions of human existence
came with [my] years as a soldier during the Second World War, when I was forced to abandon historical research for what one can reflect upon without books and libraries, since it is always at one’s disposal. Perhaps the sheer fact of physical exposure, in which the body’s fate thrust itself to the fore, and in which its mutilation became a primary fear, helped facilitate this new way of thinking. In any event, at this point I fully rejected the idealist prejudices of the philosophical tradition. I saw its hidden dualism, a thousand-year legacy, refuted by the organism, whose existential attributes we share with all living things. An ontological appreciation of the organism would close the gap that separates the self-awareness of the soul from the knowledge of physics.5
In this way, Jonas sought to broaden the methods of existential analysis he had learned during his apprenticeship with Heidegger in Marburg. By appreciating those aspects of being we share with nonhuman life, humanity is not thereby degraded; instead, the prospect of a new cosmic harmony appears. In Jonas’s philosophy of nature, possibilities for a genuinely symbiotic relationship between man and nature—suppressed for centuries as a result of the technological domination of nature—reemerge. Thus, amid the agonies and deprivations of battle, Jonas had put his training as a phenomenologist to good use. The essential precariousness of human existence made clear to him our irreducible existential proximity to the rest of organic nature.
Jonas’s philosophical output was modest by conventional standards. He had three major books and several volumes of essays to his credit. Nevertheless, there is little doubt that his was one of the more original and important philosophical minds of the twentieth century. Sadly, it seems that his philosophy never really caught on in North America. Although his work was certainly admired and appreciated by cognoscenti, it never received the broad attention it truly merited. German literary critic Walter Benjamin always feared that, were he to emigrate to the United States, he would be put on public display as “the last intellectual.” So integrally bound were his ideas and persona to a European cultural context that they were predestined to be misunderstood in a civilization in which Geld was of greater import than Geist.
Jonas, who made few compromises with the dominant intellectual trends of his adoptive homeland, seems to have suffered a fate roughly analogous to the one Benjamin feared. The reigning schools of American philosophy—logical positivism, linguistic analysis, and pragmatism—had little use for the incurably European metaphysical habitudes that were the mainstays of his approach. For most of his professional life, Jonas remained preoccupied with “eternal” philosophical questions—humanity’s place in the cosmological scheme of things; the meaning of God after Auschwitz; the ontological basis of ethics—that American philosophy, with its hard-nosed empirical bent, had long condemned to the realm of intellectual irrelevancy. Such concerns were officially belittled as “pseudo-problems.” They proved refractory to the sober and painstaking methods of philosophical analysis. As such they should be left to the fantasies of poets, theologians, and Luftmenschen.
Ironically, it was in his native Germany—the land Jonas was forced to flee upon pain of death in 1933—that his intellectual legacy received its proper due. Jonas wrote his major philosophical work, The Imperative of Responsibility, in German. Published in 1979, five years before it appeared in English, this breathtaking meditation on the ethical implications of modern technology catapulted him to international renown. To date, the German edition alone has sold an astounding 200,000 copies: a figure that is especially remarkable, since, of all his books, it is the most philosophically recondite. But with this insightful meditation on the unprecedented moral challenges posed by an age of nuclear fission and environmental devastation, Jonas’s philosophical instincts proved, for once, perfectly in tune with the Zeitgeist. Scholarly conferences were devoted to his work. Captains of German industry vied to appear alongside him in public discussions. German news magazines eagerly sought him out for interviews and professional counsel. The Imperative of Responsibility (Das Prinzip Verantwortung) became something of a shibboleth among the German Greens and their sympathizers. Allusions to Jonas and his work became de rigeur at almost any discussion or forum where environmental ethics were at issue. Rival philosophical schools set out to refute him. In 1987, at the age of 84, Jonas was awarded the prestigious Peace Prize of the German Booksellers’ Association. That same year, he received the Federal Republic of Germany’s Distinguished Service Cross. Most of this acclaim took place during the ninth and final decade of his life. On February 5, 1993, the eighty-nine-year-old Jonas died at his home in New Rochelle, New York.
Nihilism and Gnosis
Jonas achieved intellectual maturity amid the turmoil and uncertainties of Germany’s short-lived Weimar Republic. The 1920s remains one of the defining decades of the twentieth century, in part because of the profound problems of political and cultural instability it posed. In many respects, it represented the high-water mark of aesthetic modernism. While stationed in provincial Marburg, Jonas personally had little direct contact with the modernist spirit. Yet the intellectual disorientation and perplexity that were its signatures left a profound imprint on his thought, in ways both subliminal and manifest.
Jonas’s inaugural study of Gnostic religion, written under the tutelage of Heidegger and Bultmann, was a resolutely antiquarian undertaking.6 Gnosticism—from the Greek word for “knowledge”—was a religious orientation peculiar to early Christianity. As a doctrine, Gnosticism’s signature is a radical dualism between God and the world. Gnosticism begins by positing a primordial condition of divine integrity. This original unity is subsequently disrupted, accounting for the emergence of the world and the demonic powers controlling it. “Man” becomes the crucial pawn in this eschatological pageant, with the restoration of cosmological wholeness contingent upon his salvation. The cleft between heaven and earth is one of Manichean intensity. God is alleged to be entirely supramundane, even acosmic. Only by purifying itself of all mundane attributes—symptomatic of the purgatory of earthly existence—and associating itself exclusively with the transcendent divine pneuma, or spirit, can humanity attain salvation. Gnostic doctrine is to provide the secret “knowledge” leading to redemption and a restoration of cosmic unity. As Jonas describes this process:
The human constitution is comparable to an onion with many layers, on the model of the cosmos itself but with the order reversed; what is outermost and uppermost in the cosmos is innermost in man, and the innermost or nethermost stratum of the cosmic order, the earth, is the outer bodily garment of man. Only the innermost or pneumatic man is the true man, and he is not of this world, as his original in the total order, the deity, is external to the cosmos as a whole. In its unredeemed state the spirit, so far from its source and immersed in soul and flesh, is unconscious of itself, benumbed, asleep, or intoxicated by the poison of the world—in brief, it is ignorant. Its awakening and liberation are effected through knowledge…. Revelation, or the “call,” is already a part of salvation. Its bringer is a messenger from the world of Light who penetrates the barriers of the spheres, outwits the archons, awakens the spirit from its earthly slumber, and imports to it the saving knowledge from without.7
Jonas described the fundamental Gnostic dualism between God and world as deriving from specific sociohistorical conditions: “the immanent experience of the disunion of man and world [which] reflects a human condition of alienation.”8 In the early 1930s, Jonas believed he had uncovered an analogous dualism, a parallel “human condition of alienation,” in the modern period. He concluded that existentialism expressed the same pronounced man-world dualism, the same heightened sense of human alienation from the world. This realization caused him to reassess his entire scholarly focus. He gradually relinquished his antiquarian concerns; instead, his work became relentlessly present-oriented. In direct response to the agonizing historical catastrophes that Jonas had witnessed firsthand—the rise of Nazism, two world wars, and the Holocaust—he set himself an enormous intellectual task: to uncover the philosophical origins of the crisis of Western civilization, and thereby to suggest, however tentatively, a new, positive orientation for humanity.
The key to Jonas’s probing diagnosis of the modern age and its failings lay with the idea of nihilism. Modern nihilism was preponderantly an outgrowth of modern science. Science had been so successful in challenging and unmasking every variety of superstition and ungrounded belief that, in the end, it left men and women with nothing left in which to believe.
For Jonas, the parallels between modern science and the worldview of Gnosticism were undeniable. Both eras suffered from a radical crisis of meaning that led to a profound sense of homelessness. Worldly existence was wholly scorned or devalued. All that remained was humanity’s self-inflated belief in its own subjectivity as a key to restoring the immanence of meaning. Yet this made for a volatile situation that was paradoxically capable of encouraging a frenetic voluntarism as humanity desperately sought to reestablish the lost connection between existence and meaning. In the case of Gnosticism, acosmic sentiments, in alliance with the precepts of negative theology, could easily lead to an antinomian attitude of untrammeled licentiousness: since law applied only to the profane sphere of worldly existence, transgressions were viewed positively insofar as they might point the way to redemption. As Jonas explains: “there is a positive duty to perform every kind of action, to leave no deed undone, no possibility of freedom unrealized, in order to render nature its due and exhaust its powers; only in this way can final release from the cycle of reincarnations be obtained.”9 Political Messianism arose in response to nihilism in order to restore, via secular means, the condition of integrity that had been lost amid the lacerations and divisions of modern society. Political Messianismi—communism, fascism, varieties of integral nationalism—also displays antinomian traits insofar as it sanctions unethical means to further the ends of political salvation.
Science and Existential Homelessness
In “Gnosticism, Existentialism, and Nihilism,” which appeared as part of The Phenomenon of Life, Jonas traced nihilism’s origins back to the scientific revolution. According to the cosmologies of classical antiquity and Christianity, there was as yet no ontological abyss separating humanity from the natural world. For the ancient Greeks, who were denied an afterlife, virtue was primarily oriented toward worldly achievement. Greek religion, moreover, was naturalist and nondualistic. With Christianity, a fissure between humanity and the world began to emerge. Humanity’s higher self was spiritual, and the earth was a vale of tears. Yet (fallen) nature, too, was ultimately God’s creation, and with the Second Coming, the original harmony between humanity and nature would be restored.
But with the emergence of modern science, prospects for reconciling humanity and nature were abruptly suspended. Nature was viewed primarily through the lens of instrumental reason: as an object to be controlled, exploited, and manipulated. In the words of Francis Bacon, “the sovereignty of man lieth hid in knowledge…. Now we govern nature in opinions, but we are thrall unto her in necessity: but if we would be led by her invention, we should command her by action.”10 And so the hunt began. By the time of Descartes, the final traces of nature’s ensoulment, of all prospects for maintaining a fraternal bond between humanity and nature, had been extirpated. Instead, nature was degraded to the status of res extensa or “extended substance.” “Man,” conversely, was redefined as res cogitans or “thinking substance.” The ontological chasm between these two types of being—one of the hallmarks modern thought—became essentially unbridgeable.
A moment of delectable absurdity arose when the question of how to classify animals—which appeared to fit neatly into neither category—arose. Descartes’s solution to this Hobson’s choice was to claim that animals were “inanimate” and thus to subsume them under the res extensa side of the ledger. The folly of such reductive and dichotomous schemes culminated in the high Enlightenment, when philosophe Julien de La Mettrie decided the world would be better off if humans, too, were understood in exclusively physicalist terms. The consequences of this ingenious deduction were well-expressed in the title of his 1748 work, L’Homme machine (“Man a Machine”). Between the extremes of mind and the physical world, a third term, organic nature, had been inexplicably left out of the picture.
In “Gnosticism, Existentialism, and Nihilism,” Jonas expressed the basic paradox of Descartes’s philosophical legacy as follows: “That by which man is superior to all nature, his unique distinction, mind, no longer results in a higher integration of his being into the totality of being, but on the contrary marks the unbridgeable gulf between himself and the rest of existence.”11 With this insight, the reasons subtending humanity’s “existential homelessness” first become intelligible. Once the universe is so thoroughly divested of intrinsic meaning—Galileo thought of the moon as little more than a big rock—values forfeit their ultimate ontological basis, and the isolated human self is confronted with the daunting prospect of having to generate meaning entirely from within itself, solipsistically. According to the cosmology of the Middle Ages, all created being is separated into existence and essence, and God alone exists perfectly or essentially. Once the perfection of the creator is eliminated, both humans and world are catapulted into unbounded existential flux. As Jonas observes:
modern nihilism [is] infinitely more radical and more desperate than gnostic nihilism ever could be for all its terror of the world and its defiant contempt of its laws. That nature does not care, one way or the other, is the true abyss. That only man cares, in his finitude facing nothing but death, alone with his contingency and the objective meaninglessness of his projecting meanings, is a truly unprecedented situation.12
The coup de graçe for our understanding of the natural world as inherently meaningful occurred with Darwinism. According to the traditional view, nature functioned teleologically. As such, it was interpreted as a repository of prior causes or ends that were predestined to come to fruition. All such assurances were cancelled in the aftermath of Darwin’s theory of evolution. Instead, it became clear that the course of organic life failed to conform to any preconceived pattern. The watchwords of the post-Darwinian understanding of nature became: chance, natural selection, and diversity. At a later point, the durability of heredity was undermined by the notion of mutation as a driving force behind evolutionary “progress.” As Jonas affirms in The Phenomenon of Life: “The Darwinian theory of evolution, with its combination of chance variation and natural selection, completed the extrusion of teleology from nature. Having become redundant even in the story of life, purpose retired wholly into subjectivity.” In this way, the doctrine of evolution “completes the liquidation of immutable essences, and thus signifies the final victory of nominalism over realism, which had its last bulwark in the idea of natural species.”13
Nietzsche once remarked that, “Since Copernicus, man has been rolling from the center to point X.”14 Darwinism delivered an additional traumatic blow to human narcissism. Humanity ceased to be the crown of creation. Instead, its undignified simian origins unmasked, humans, like all other species, were reduced to the status of a biological accident.
The Imperative of Life
From the recesses of modern nihilism, Jonas painstakingly began to reconstruct a philosophical program capable of raising questions concerning the ultimate ends of human existence. His undertaking was unfashionable, even anachronistic in crucial respects. Yet the conclusions he reached were no less remarkable for that reason. Unlike many of his contemporaries interested in similar problems, Jonas refused to regress behind the empirical standards that had been established by modern science. Instead, he attempted to utilize them as the basis for a new philosophy of nature. Yet, whereas modern physics and biology had come to the conclusion that the universe and life on earth were essentially devoid of intrinsic meaning, Jonas boldly took it upon himself to provide a restoration of purpose and meaning. To this end, Jonas sought to reestablish the fact that organic life, insofar as it is governed by purposes or ends, is meaningful; and that humanity’s place in the cosmological scheme of things, when viewed against the background of purposive nature, is similarly replete with purpose.
We know that life is governed by certain necessities and regularities: the imperatives of nourishment, procreation, and mortality. But what sense does it make to describe life—not just human life, but the totality of organic life—as intrinsically meaningful? For Jonas, life is meaningful insofar as all of organic life may be said to display purposes, strivings, even—in however rudimentary a form—“subjectivity.” Ultimately, Jonas would take this controversial argument a step further, claiming that all life manifests an inclination toward freedom. As he remarks in The Phenomenon of Life: “it is in the dark stirrings of primeval organic substance that a principle of freedom shines forth for the first time within the vast necessity of the physical universe—a principle foreign to suns, planets, and atoms.”15 With the emergence of life, the existential distinction between being and non-being first becomes meaningful: perennially threatened by the prospect of its negation, life must tenaciously maintain itself in being; it must undertake a series of elaborate and resourceful acts of self-preservation if it is to avoid succumbing to its diabolical contrary, death. In this way the drama of life, momentarily suspended between non-being and negation, initiates the idea of existential purpose in a manner that is entirely foreign to the realm of inorganic nature. Thereby, the concepts of “concern” and “meaning” enter into being for the first time. As Jonas expresses it:
Not-being made its appearance in the world as an alternative embodied in being itself; and thereby being itself first assumes an emphatic sense: intrinsically qualified by the threat of its negative it must affirm itself, and existence affirmed is existence as concern. So constitutive for life is the possibility of not-being that its very being is essentially a hovering over this abyss, a skirting of its brink: thus being itself has become a constant possibility rather than a given state, ever anew to be laid hold of in opposition to its ever-present contrary, not-being, which will inevitably engulf it in the end.16
The “existential paradox” of life may be summarized as follows: the fact that life carries its own negation within itself is what provides it with the ultimate incentive for self-affirmation (self-preservation). The imminent prospect of non-being—life’s ultimate existential precariousness—is what drives it on to maintain itself in being.
In Jonas’s view, an understanding of the “unity of life” allows us to surmount the dualisms of modern thought—mind and body, subject and object, idealism and materialism—in the direction of a holistic naturalism. He accomplishes this not by downgrading or relativizing humanity’s singularity, but instead by arguing that nature itself—like man, though on a more humble scale—manifests traces of subjectivity. To be sure, this contention is one of the more controversial aspects of Jonas’s philosophy. One of the keys to his argument is a brilliant, if highly speculative, understanding of the teleological implications of “metabolism.”
Jonas concurs with modern science that metabolism is something that distinguishes organic from inorganic life. However, he views this claim as being replete with metaphysical significance. For Jonas, metabolism suggests a capacity for existential autonomy that distinguishes organic life from the rest of the physical world. The organism’s capacity for freedom—the defining expression of its “subjectivity”—lies in its formal independence vis-à-vis the material world. At one point, Jonas goes so far as to speak of the emergence of life as marking an “ontological revolution in the history of matter.”17 Whereas matter remains self-identical, life is self-mediating and self-transformative. Life’s formal independence versus inorganic nature manifests itself in the internal identity of the organism above and beyond all metabolic transformations it might undergo.
Because of this capacity to maintain their identities, Jonas attributes “selfhood” to the entities of organic nature. The understanding of life that emerges is quasi-Hobbesian: “An identity which from moment to moment reasserts itself, achieves itself, and defies the equalizing forces of physical sameness all around is truly pitted against the rest of things…. The challenge of selfhood qualifies all [that is] beyond the boundaries of the organism as foreign and somehow opposite: as ‘world,’ in which, by which, and against which it is committed to maintain itself.”18
Jonas terms the freedom, or selfhood, of organic nature “dialectical”; the capacity for metabolism is both a sign of independence and a mark of biological necessity—hence dependency, for life cannot cease to metabolize without ceasing to be. Jonas phrases the problem succinctly: “its liberty itself is its peculiar necessity.”19
Jonas’s metaphysical reinterpretation of the workings of organic nature discerns subjectivity, freedom, and selfhood where one might least expect to find them. In life’s struggle for self-preservation, its efforts to maintain its boundaries vis-à-vis the inorganic world, Jonas sees anticipations of “mind.” In his view, even the lowest forms of sentient life anticipate inwardness or spirit, however faintly. As Jonas explains: “Whether we call this inwardness feeling, sensitivity and response to stimulus, appetition or nisus—in some (even if infinitesimal) degree of ‘awareness’ it harbors the supreme concern of organism with its own being and continuation in being…. With the first dawn of subjective reflex, the most germinal ‘experience’ of touching, a crack as it were opens in the opacity of divided being, unlocking … the dimension of inwardness.”20
Speculative theses such as those attributed by Jonas to organic life can be neither wholly proved nor disproved. Instead, they require that we suspend our customary, objectivating attitude toward nature—the attitude predominant among the natural sciences—and take time to marvel at the wonder of life.
The Technological Threat and the Heuristics of Fear
When Jonas was born in 1903, the horse-drawn carriage was still a leading mode of transportation. By the end of his life, nuclear fission had been discovered, jet travel had become routine, and “moonwalks” were commonplace. An ambitious scientific study was underway to discover and map human genetic makeup in its entirety. The ethical repercussions of this undertaking—the so-called Human Genome Project—the seemingly unlimited prospects it provided for biological engineering, gave pause to many. In human history, the period spanning the invention of tools to the advent of modern technology was an eternity. On the scale of evolutionary history, it represented the blink of an eye.
During the twentieth century, the balance between humankind and the natural world has been radically and permanently altered, largely due to humanity’s technological inventiveness. Such changes have unleashed a wholesale transformation of the parameters of human experience. Its familiarity and predictability can no longer be presupposed in view of the drastic rate and scope of scientific change. As Georg Simmel observed in “The Metropolis and Mental Life”: “The psychological foundation upon which [modern] individuality is erected is the intensification of emotional life due to the swift and continuous shift of external and internal stimuli: rapid telescoping of changing images, pronounced differences within what is grasped at a single glance, and the unexpectedness of violent stimuli.” Whereas traditional forms of life placed an emphasis on the personality as a whole, the modern division of labor militates against wholeness. Instead, the individual is reduced to a “negligible quantity”: “a single cog as over against the vast overwhelming organization of things and forces which gradually take out of his hands everything connected with progress, spirituality and value.”21
In The Imperative of Responsibility, Jonas sought to confront the moral implications of humanity’s unprecedented technological reach. When the work appeared, Hannah Arendt reportedly exclaimed, “Hans, that is the book that God had in mind when he created you!”22 In Jonas’s view, so formidable and potent have the new technologies at humanity’s disposal become that they have rendered obsolete 2,500 years of ethical discourse. Heretofore, humankind’s interventions in the natural world were limited in scope, and their consequences were readily foreseeable. For this reason, the balance between humanity and nature was never fundamentally in doubt. No such assurances can be provided concerning the impact of modern technology, which, contrary to all precedents, has already permanently altered the earth’s biosphere in numerous respects and which continues to do so in ways whose consequences have yet to be fully determined.
The breathtaking pace of technological change not only affects the interchange between humanity and nature; it precipitates a rash of existential doubt, a crisis in human self-understanding. Ironically, humanity’s enhanced mastery of external nature has often left it feeling more vulnerable, more exposed to unanticipated side effects and risks. Who is controlling the process? Who is dictating the rate of technological change? No one knows for sure. Human ingenuity has engendered a giant mechanism, and no one can tell what its ultimate repercussions might be. As Jonas puts it: “Outshining in prestige and starving in resources whatever else belongs to the fullness of man, the expansion of his power is accompanied by a contraction of his self-conception and being.”23
Traditional approaches to ethics—Aristotle’s “phronesis,” Kant’s “categorical imperative”—were accustomed to dealing with human action that fell within well-defined and familiar parameters. Such doctrines were based on seemingly immutable historical and biological regularities. Under the radically changed situation inaugurated by technological modernity, however, ethical prescriptions that are merely oriented toward “the good” (Aristotle), or that rest content to treat persons as “ends in themselves” (Kant), might well prove defenseless in the face of the worst-case scenario of ecological catastrophe. Under such conditions, argues Jonas, a fundamental reevaluation of humanity’s relation to the natural world has itself become an ethical imperative.
One of the features that makes Jonas’s approach to environmental ethics appealing and that distinguishes it from various trendy eco-fundamentalisms is that his strategy is both rationalist and anthropocentric. According to Jonas, one ought to approach nature with a measure of ethical forbearance not because the earth represents something sacred (as “Gaiaists” would have it), nor because all living species are of equal worth; instead, it behooves us to act responsibly toward nature insofar as the survival of humankind itself is at stake. In this respect, Jonas unfashionably wears his indebtedness to the Western tradition on his sleeve. He has no doubt that humans are the noblest creatures that the evolutionary process has yielded. He readily owns up to the fact that the philosophy of nature adumbrated in The Phenomenon of Life is anthropocentric, insofar as it attributes human purposes (mind, subjectivity, and freedom) to subhuman organic life. Lastly, there is nothing remotely anti-intellectual about Jonas’s approach. He does not seek to explain the current ecological threat, for example, by claiming that the culprit is a surfeit of human reason. To be sure, the one-sidedness of human rationality—its instrumentalist biases—plays an important role in his account. But Jonas firmly believes that only the hand that has inflicted the wound—in the case at issue, human ingenuity itself—can cure the disease.
In keeping with this avowedly anthropocentric orientation, Jonas defines the “imperative of responsibility” as follows: “Act so that the effects of your action are compatible with the permanence of genuine human life.” Expressed negatively, it reads: “Act so that the effects of your action are not destructive of the future possibility of such life.” Thus formulated, the imperative of responsibility seeks to respond to the fact that, for traditional ethics, the scope of human action has al ways been strictly limited. Never before has ethical theory been forced to confront the prospect that technology could place life as a whole at risk.
One of the controversial features of Jonas’s attempt to provide an ethics appropriate to the age of modern technology is that his efforts fly in the face of the philosophical injunction against deriving “ought” from “is,” the adage that value judgments cannot be based on statements of fact. The “fact/value” distinction suggests that merely because things exist in a certain way does not mean that this was the way they were meant to be or that they should necessarily continue to be that way. Instead, “ought” or “right” are the province of human reason; they are not constants inscribed in the laws of nature.
Part of the reason Jonas feels compelled to transgress this hallowed philosophical precept pertains to the dire nature of the present crisis: when the fate of life itself hangs in the balance, moral foundations must be forceful and unarguable, even if this means grounding them ontologically—in Being as such. Thus, by referring to “life” as an inherent value and claiming that we have a duty to ensure its future viability, Jonas implicitly relies on the metaphysics of nature he sketched in The Phenomenon of Life. The preservation of life is not merely something that we owe to ourselves qua humans. It is an imperative that is incumbent upon us as part of a greater living whole for which we, as nature’s most potent creation, bear special responsibility.
By seeking to ground ethics in life, Jonas seeks to provide morality with an objective basis, in contrast to the merely subjective, hence nonbinding, character of most modern ethical systems. As Jonas succinctly phrases matters: “Being, in the testimony it gives of itself, informs us not only about what it is but also about what we owe it.”24 Were Being deprived of the richness and variety proper to organic life, it would become faceless and mute, devoid of purpose, ontologically impoverished to an extreme. Like the later Heidegger, Jonas believed that the “remembrance of Being” should become a spur to the ethical betterment of humanity in the here and how. As Jonas concludes: “Only from the objectivity of value could an objective ‘ought-to-be’ in itself be derived, and hence for us a binding obligation to the guarding of being, that is, a responsibility toward it.”25
The urgent demands of the contemporary historical hour suggest the need for what Jonas calls a “heuristics of fear.” Since humanity’s hypertrophic technological capacities have placed the future of life as such in jeopardy, the threshold for experimentation or risk-taking must be reduced to an absolute minimum, he argues. Motivated by a sense of imminent catastrophe, the “heuristics of fear” suggests that our technological interventions must be tempered and guided by a “comparative futurology” that places a premium on the elaboration of worst-case scenarios. With stakes of such magnitude, to proceed other than with the greatest circumspection and vigilance would be to succumb to the temptations of irresponsibility. It would be tantamount to flirting with collective self-annihilation; a course that, in view of the sanctity of life, is ethically impermissible. According to Jonas, therefore, we need the “threat to the image of man to assure ourselves of his true image by the very recoil from these threats.”26 Too often, long-term environmental risks—whose realities are often matters of conjecture—exist at such a temporal remove from the historical present that they are very difficult to factor into the horizon of our short-term ethical purview. A heuristics of fear is needed, argues Jonas, as an urgent reminder of the unprecedented nature of our new technological reach.
But also at stake in the use-value of this concept is a crucial insight into the workings of human psychology. According to Jonas, once again agreeing with Hobbes, it is an empirical fact that humans are often more readily motivated by fear than by an appreciation of the good. “This is the way we are made,” he contends: “the perception of the malum is infinitely easier to us than the perception of the bonum; it is more direct, more compelling, less given to differences of opinion or taste…. An evil forces its perception on us by its mere presence, whereas the beneficial can be present unobtrusively and remain unperceived, unless we reflect on it.”27 Developing an attitude of existential “openness” toward the prospects of this malum is, therefore, one of the primary duties of the ethic of responsibility that Jonas favors.
Perils of Political Guardianship
While the dynamism and scope of Jonas’s metaphysical vision are undeniably powerful, that vision, like all claims to knowledge, is hardly above criticism. The strategy of his philosophy of life, which insists vitalistically upon attributing “mind” and “subjectivity” to all manifestations of organic nature, down to the cellular level, entails intellectual and ethical risks. By humanizing nature and naturalizing humanity, we in effect strip humankind of its specifically human capacities. Is it meaningful to speak of the “freedom” of organic molecular life, when, as Jonas himself points out, such freedom, in the form of metabolism, is governed by an overriding necessity? In truth, organisms have no choice: they must metabolize or die. By metabolizing, they gain a measure of formal independence vis-à-vis the dead matter of inorganic nature; but does it make sense to equate such limited independence with “freedom”? By virtue of such comparisons, do we not risk remaining satisfied with a seriously truncated definition of freedom? Viewed historically, freedom connotes a hard-won achievement, a condition that is the result of struggle and courage. To suggest affinities between freedom and metabolism implies that we should rest content with a subhuman notion of freedom’s entailments.
Another risk entailed by Jonas’s insistence on life as an absolute value is that our conception of the human good is devalued. Instead of setting our sights high and aiming at a notion of the good in which individuals are encouraged to flourish—where they are allowed to realize or fulfill their capacities—Jonas’s metaphysical vitalism tends to privilege “mere life” or survival over the “good life.” If we accord normative priority to aspects of life we share in common with the rest of organic nature, those features of human life that are peculiarly human—cultural excellence, friendship, productive communal ties; in sum, all the characteristics of human life that separate us from the animal world—suffer. Thus, the price one pays for reintegrating humankind with the natural world is a diminution of human distinctiveness.
Many of the aforementioned difficulties crystallize in those aspects of Jonas’s thought that one might describe as Hobbesian. Like the author of Leviathan, Jonas’s conception of human life is predicated on a pessimistic philosophical anthropology. For both Hobbes and Jonas, the state of nature is anything but benevolent. Hobbes describes human interaction there as a bellum omnium contra omnes—a war of all against all—in which life is “violent, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” The motivations compelling individuals to abandon this state and form a social compact are anything but noble or exalted. Instead, the primary incentive to establish society is fear—fear of a violent death. Jonas’s proximity to Hobbes (not to mention Darwin) becomes clear in his characterization of life as essentially a competitive struggle for survival. By taking nature and biology as his normative points of departure rather than, say, life in civil society, Jonas is led to anticipate the worst from humanity, rather than to expect the best.
The element of resignation implicit in Jonas’s metaphysical vision cannot help but affect his approach to ethics. For example, in The Imperative of Responsibility, Jonas contends that the parent-child relationship is the archetype or primal instance of human responsibility. For Jonas, one will recall, compelling ethical claims cannot be a matter of arbitrary subjective preference. Instead, in order to be truly persuasive, they must be rooted in the nature of things or in “Being.” This is one reason why the parent-child relationship suggests itself to him as the paradigmatic case of responsibility. It is in principle something nearly all humans have experienced, either as parents or as children themselves. In Jonas’s view, the fundamental intensity of this bond, though it might be dishonored in individual cases, is so indubitable that he considers it to be universal. As Jonas observes: “When asked for a single instance where that coincidence of ‘is’ and ‘ought’ occurs, we can point at the most familiar sight: the newborn, whose mere breathing uncontradictably addresses an ought to the world around, namely, to take care of him.”28
But the problems involved in trying to establish values on the basis of facts haunt Jonas’s analysis. It is not the fact that there are many historical and empirical exceptions to the parent-child bond that undermines its plausibility (hence, its universality) as a model. Instead, the problems pertain to the lack of generalizability of the model itself. The very uniqueness of the rapport between parent and child interferes with the prospect of transposing it to extra-familial settings. Its exclusive nature poses serious obstacles to extending it to other human relationships, let alone to humanity in general. One could easily turn the tables on Jonas and avow that it would be impossible to feel a degree of commitment toward fellow men and women, qua strangers, comparable to what a parent feels for a child. Instead, it may be more productive to own up to the fact that the social bond will inevitably prove thinner than familial ties and proceed from there to construct a theory of human solidarity.
When Jonas extends the results of his ethical reflections to the realm of politics, the conclusions are similarly flawed. Once again setting the parent-child bond as the archetype of human responsibility, he contends that one can perceive a kindred ethical imperative in the duty of a statesman to care for his citizens. The paternalistic, antidemocratic implications of such an approach to politics are patent. The idea of citizens as political “charges” whose welfare the statesman must cultivate follows logically from Jonas’s pessimistic conception of human nature. It is, moreover, of a piece with premodern theories of political guardianship, whose locus classicus is Plato’s notion of the philosopher-king. According to this theory, since the majority of men and women are incapable of leading virtuous lives, the next best thing would be for them to follow the directives of a sapient elite who comprehend the good and are capable of instructing their intellectual inferiors accordingly. As Jonas remarks:
There is a natural element also within the artificially created officium of the statesman, when he—stepping out of the equality of siblings and citizens—assumes for all of them a role which is parent-like in its responsibilities…. The “statesman” in the term’s full sense has, for the duration of his office or his power, responsibility for the total life of the community…. It extends from physical existence to the highest interests, from security to abundance of life, from good conduct to happiness.29
The Advantages of Tyranny
Jonas’s prophecies of impending ecological catastrophe are empirically uninformed. Remarkably, he takes into consideration none of the relevant scientific debates concerning the extent and gravity of environmental devastation. Instead, his depiction has the character of a transcendental deduction; his findings are merely assumed rather than demonstrated or argued for. Like his mentor Heidegger—whose name is curiously nowhere to be found in The Imperative of Responsibility—Jonas’s discussion of modern technology and its effects proceeds on an a priori basis. The devastation of the earth, as it were, inheres in the very concept of technology. There is little room for ambiguity, for nuanced discussion of alternative positions. The tone of his writings remains an apocalyptic one. From a performative standpoint, such categorical postulates compel compliance instead of fostering dialogue and debate.
Similarly, Jonas’s recourse to vitalism (or, to use the German term of art, Lebensphilosophie) suggests a number of troubling questions. As in Heidegger’s case, it raises concerns about an existential grounding of ethics: basing ethics on the way things are—on Being—rather than on principle. In Jonas’s case, the foundations of ethics are avowedly naturalistic, even quasi-Darwinian. As he remarks in The Imperative of Responsibility: “encroaching on other life is eo ipso given with belonging to the kingdom of life…. In simple words: to eat and be eaten is the principle of existence.”30 Of course, Jonas ultimately seeks to use Darwin against Darwin: his ethics employ a Darwinian point of departure against social Darwinism (“survival of the fittest”) and in favor of a vitalist sanctification of “life” as an ultimate good.
But in German Geistesgeschichte, vitalism has an ambiguous legacy. Historically, it has been employed as an intellectual weapon in the struggle against the (Western) idea of “reason.” Vitalism originated as a challenge to the scientific biology of Darwin. In opposition to the mechanistic implications of the doctrine of natural selection, vitalism claimed that life could not be explained in exclusively causal terms. Taking a page from Goethe’s philosophy of nature, it preferred to view organic life as ensouled. At a later point, “life” connoted a dimension of “experiential immediacy” that was purportedly superior to the intellect’s more abstract musings. In the German context, the ideological thrust of this standpoint is unmistakable. As Herbert Schnädelbach has remarked: “If the later history of life-philosophy is so little known … this is chiefly because life-philosophy is branded with the stigma of irrationalism and of being a precursor of fascism. It is certainly undeniable that the ‘heroic realism’ of Bäumler, Krieck and Rosenberg, which was considered to be the official philosophy of National Socialism, was ‘inspired’ by the traditions of life-philosophy after Nietzsche and above all by Oswald Spengler.”31 The subterranean affinities of Jonas’s position with the “German Ideology” in its vitalist phase are indeed troubling.
The questions and doubts that arise with regard to Jonas’s resolutely antimodern epistemological orientation are heightened when one examines his explicit political recommendations. The second half of The Imperative of Responsibility consists of a dialogue with the traditions of Marxism and state socialism. Strangely, in the secondary literature on his work, this dimension of his study remains entirely neglected. In the “political” chapters of The Imperative of Responsibility, Jonas adopts a position on the “decline of the West” that differs only by degree from the standpoint espoused by Spengler and Heidegger. Like Germany’s national revolutionaries, Jonas assumes that liberal democracy is without a future. Culturally and historically, it remains inextricably entwined with the scientific and industrial revolutions. Liberalism is therefore inseparable from the age of technology and the “planetary devastation” it has wrought. Consequently, for Jonas, the search for an alternative to liberal democracy became a political imperative correlative to his search for contemporary ethical renewal.
It is easy to see how, in an American political context, Jonas’s reflections on the virtues of economic planning would fall on deaf ears. However, in the Germany of the 1970s, an entirely different political constellation was operative. The Social Democrats, who had not yet renounced planning in favor of the market, were in power. Ostpolitik—a policy of rapprochement and conciliation vis-à-vis the German Democratic Republic—was still in vogue. Hence, from a German standpoint, The Imperative of Responsibility assumed an immediate and far-reaching political relevance. Moreover, Jonas’s implicit critique of anthropocentrism—his denigration of humanity’s preeminence in the natural hierarchy—found great resonance with the German peace movement. Thus, his claim that “Nature could not have incurred a greater hazard than to produce man” could have served as the credo of the movement’s fundamentalist wing.32
The “state of emergency” precipitated by the global environmental crisis informs the horizon of Jonas’s political thought. The crisis has gone so far, argues Jonas, as to impact necessarily all aspects of collective human decision-making. In view of the impending ecological catastrophe, questions of “the good” or the “best life” have become irrelevant: “In the total danger of the world-historical Now we find ourselves thrown back from the ever-open question, what man ought to be … to the first commandment tacitly always underlying it, but never before in need of enunciation: that he should be.” The authoritarian overtones of Jonas’s political prescriptions echo clearly in his claim that “only a maximum of politically imposed social discipline can ensure the subordination of present advantage to the long-term exigencies of the future.”33
In Jonas’s view, the idea that contemporary capitalism is incapable of reforming itself is treated as an established fact. Postwar transformations in the direction of the “social welfare state”—“capitalism with a human face”—fail to make an impression on him.34 Such palliatives serve system-stabilizing purposes and thus help perpetuate conditions that are in need of more fundamental and sweeping modification. Conversely, state socialism has staked a historical claim to surmounting the “anarchy of production” characteristic of capitalism, and Jonas considers this an option well worth exploring:
only the Marxist program, which integrates the naïve Baconian idea of dominating nature with that of reshaping society and from that expects the definitive man, can be seriously regarded today as the source of an ethic which aims action predominantly at the future and thence imposes norms on the present. One can say that it proposes to bring the fruits of the Baconian revolution under the rule of the best interests of man and thereby to redeem its original promise of an elevated mankind…. To an economy governed by the profit motive, socialism can oppose the promise of a greater rationality in the management of the Baconian heritage.35
The gist of Jonas’s political philosophy is contained in an ominously titled section of The Imperative of Responsibility, “The Advantage of Total Governmental Power.” His indebtedness to the antidemocratic prejudices of Plato’s doctrine of the philosopher-king—prejudices that also seduced Heidegger in the early 1930s—is palpable. Jonas openly praises the advantages of autocracy—for example, the fact that “the decisions from the top, which can be made without prior assent from below, meet with no resistance … in the social body.” In this way, total governmental power can circumvent the base instincts of the hoi polloi, who are, it seems, incapable of the virtues of sophrosyne or self-limitation. Jonas admits that his political views sanction the “governmental advantages of … tyranny”—albeit “a well-intentioned, well-informed tyranny possessed of the right insights.” But, given the proportions of the impending global catastrophe, he believes that an abrogation of basic democratic liberties has become unavoidable.36
Since the advent of autocracy is inevitable, the only question that remains is whether a dictatorship of “right” or “left” would be preferable. According to Jonas, left-wing dictatorship wins hands down: “in techniques of power [communist tyranny] appears superior, for our uncomfortable purposes, to the capabilities of the capitalist-liberal-democratic complex.” One of the distinct advantages of communism is the degree of moral commitment it demands (which conveniently obviates the need for governmentally enforced commitment, or “terror”), as well as the ascetic traits of “socialist discipline,” which are to be preferred to the administered hedonism of capitalist consumer society. As Jonas observes: “Now a great asset of Marxism is the emphatic ‘moralism’ with which it pervades the society formed and ruled by it…. To live ‘for the whole’ and to ‘do without’ for its sake is a credo of public morality.”37
Conversely, one of the primary drawbacks of the communist credo is its utopianism—an ethos that, in Jonas’s view, exists in symbiotic proximity to the Faustian aspirations of the industrial and scientific revolutions. Thus, whereas in the short run the ascetic traits of socialist discipline represent a distinct advantage, ultimately they run the risk of raising social expectations excessively; after all, the renunciations of socialism are supposed to be a temporary prelude to the advent of a classless society. To defuse this potential source of conflict, Jonas relies on another disputed Platonic legacy, the “noble lie” of Republic Book III. In order to ensure that the citizens of the ideal state will passively bear its regimentation and inequities, Plato’s guardians purvey the “myth of the metals.” The dissemination of lies is justified for the sake of preserving a greater truth.
Jonas hints that an analogous recourse to deception might be necessary for the success of his own authoritarian political construct (in passing, he notes the irony of the fact that whereas, heretofore, Marxism was predicated on the unmasking of “false consciousness,” in his scenario, it would become the purveyor of false consciousness for the sake of the true). Specifically, the guardians of Jonas’s ecological dictatorship may have to conceal the fact that, in light of current environmental limits, the renunciations demanded of its subjects are permanent rather than transitory in nature. Thus, the utopia in whose name sacrifice is demanded will never arrive. “I do not stand aghast at the thought [of institutionalized political deception],” admits Jonas. “Perhaps this dangerous game of mass deception (Plato’s ‘noble lie’) is all that politics will eventually have to offer: to give effect to the principle of fear under the mask of the principle of hope…. In special circumstances, the useful opinion may be the false one; meaning that if the truth is too hard to bear, then the good lie must do service.”38
That Jonas’s fascination with the lures of political autocracy was more than a passing fancy is documented in an interview he gave to the German news magazine Der Spiegel toward the end of his life. Seeking to refute optimistic prognoses concerning the triumph of liberalism following communism’s collapse, he vigorously restates the despairing diagnosis of the times formulated in The Imperative of Responsibility. If anything, the catastrophic outlook developed in his 1979 chef d’oeuvre remains even more relevant, argues Jonas. He fears the “tragic collapse of higher civilization as we know it, its decline into a new stage of primitivism … mass poverty, mass death and mass murder, the loss of all treasures that spirit has produced beyond the exploitation of nature.”39 To counteract such tendencies politically, Jonas engages in a thought experiment analogous to the one he undertook in The Imperative of Responsibility: he entertains the idea of a “world government,” “a dictatorship of the saviors of humanity.” Correspondingly, he views a curtailment of individual freedom as a “self-evident” requirement of the current ecological predicament. His verdict is driven by the suspicion that democracy as it now functions, with its narrow-minded orientation toward short-term consequences, is an “unsuitable form of government.”40
Ultimately, Jonas admits that the state socialist approach, too, must be rejected. In the last analysis, Marxism remains overly enamored of the ethos of modern productivism. Its promethean orientation and utopian telos suggest that the interests of nature would fare little better under Marxist jurisdiction than under capitalism. Marx himself never concealed the fact that he viewed communism as a rational consummation of the modern industrial system. In all likelihood, under a Marxist regime the exploitation of nature would merely proliferate exponentially. Nor, of course, does the environmental track record of the “really existing” socialist states inspire confidence. Jonas finds fault with these states for engaging in a type of rapacious “national egoism,” whereby unrealistic state production quotas are substituted for the profit motive of capitalism.
Nevertheless, Jonas’s willingness to contemplate seriously the merits of political autocracy is disconcerting, as is the alacrity with which he is willing to dismiss the virtues of political liberalism. In the aforementioned Der Spiegel interview, he engages in yet another nightmarish thought experiment. Could it be, he suggests pessimistically, that modernity as a whole might be a false path: “Was modernity perhaps an error that must be rectified? Is this path a correct one—the combination of scientific-technical progress along with the enhancement of individual freedom? Was the modern age in certain respects a false path that should no longer be pursued?”41 In his manner of posing questions, which craftily predetermines the parameters of possible response, one detects the return of a disconsolate, Spenglerian sensibility that was widespread in Germany during the 1920s on both the left and right sides of the political spectrum.
Post-Holocaust Theology
Jonas’s contributions to post-Holocaust theology are among his most important writings, yet they represent the aspect of his work that is probably least known and understood. For obvious reasons, the Holocaust poses grave problems for Jewish religious thought. According to the classical texts of Jewish theology, the God of the Old Testament is both perfect and omnipotent, creator and redeemer. As lawgiver to the people of Israel, He is a benevolent God, but also one who is not averse to dispensing severe punishment for violations of His law. This traditional understanding of God is thrown into radical doubt in the aftermath of the Holocaust, where, unlike previous historical catastrophes, there seems to be no discernible correlation between the massive extent of Jewish suffering and religious transgressions of His people. The evils of the Holocaust are so extreme that they transcend considerations of theodicy. Even the concepts of martyrdom or bearing witness to God (Kiddush-hashem or “sanctification of the Name”), which were so important amid the persecutions of medieval Jewry, were rendered obsolete by virtue of the ignominious deaths the Jews endured at the hands of the Nazis.
Theological responses to the Holocaust span a wide spectrum. One of the first, entirely natural reactions to the catastrophe was simply to claim that Auschwitz proved the nonexistence of God, for if an omnipotent God did exist, He certainly would never have permitted the horrors of Auschwitz to come to pass. Even if by some strange reckoning the bestialities of Nazism could be construed as a form of divine punishment for Jewish impiety or misdeeds, the deaths of a million innocent Jewish children fall entirely outside of the calculus.
Other theologians argued that to interpret the destruction of the European Jews as evidence for God’s nonexistence would be to accord Hitler a posthumous and total victory over the Jewish people. Having deprived two-thirds of European Jewry of their lives, he would succeed in wresting from the surviving remnant their faith. One of the foremost representatives of this standpoint has been the philosopher Emil Fackenheim. Fackenheim argues that instead of an abandonment of Judaism, what is needed is a post-Holocaust theology; that is, a religious renewal that takes the caesuras of Jewish life and faith after Auschwitz into account. The theological task of “mending the world”—the ingathering of scattered fragments of divine substance—must continue.
Jonas opts for a via media between the two aforementioned positions. He denies that the Holocaust provides definitive evidence of God’s nonexistence. Yet he also argues that it would have been impossible for the benevolent and omnipotent God of the Old Testament to have presided in silence over the gruesome events of the Holocaust.
Instead, Jonas pursues a different theological tack—one that is highly speculative, just as all theology must deal with claims that are largely conjectural. According to Jonas, there is a further theological possibility that neither of the approaches just described has been adequately explored: the prospect that God exists but was powerless to intervene. Thus, for reasons unknown to us, God may have ceased to be omnipotent. It is possible that divine energies were exhausted in the act of creation. Another hypothesis suggests that, after creating the world, God engaged in an act of self-limitation in order to make room for free will. This theory is consistent with the Kabbalistic doctrine of tzimtzum, the self-contraction of God following the creation of the universe. To be sure, this relativizes our traditional notion of an omnipotent God. Yet, by virtue having “temporalized” Himself via the act of creation, and by allowing Himself to be affected by human suffering, His all-powerfulness had already undergone a diminution. As Jonas points out, the presumption of divine omnipotence makes for a theological pageant that is devoid of drama and interest. Under such circumstances, moreover, the concept of free will would be deprived of all meaning. As Jonas explains: “Absolute power, in its solitude, has no object on which to act. But as objectless power it is a powerless power, canceling itself out: ‘all’ equals ‘zero’ here…. Power meeting no resistance in its relatum is equal to no power at all: power is exercised only in relation to something that itself has power.”42
The only way to render the concept of God meaningful after Auschwitz is to avow that His goodness is compatible with the existence of evil. But to admit this fact is to recognize that God is not omnipotent. As Jonas puts it: “Having [in the act of creation] given Himself whole to the becoming world, God has no more to give: it is man’s now to give to Him.”43
Looking Back at Heidegger
Toward the end of his life, Jonas returned to the question of Heidegger’s impact and influence in the course of an interview broadcast on Swiss radio. Echoing the testimonies of other observers, Jonas remarked that, to a considerable extent, the philosopher’s capacity to mesmerize derived from the “impenetrable” nature of his discourse. Thus, students had the feeling that, despite their incomprehension, behind Heidegger’s words there lay “something worth understanding.” Jonas confirmed that, in informal settings, Heidegger betrayed an orientation toward German nationalism; nevertheless, the philosopher’s demonstrative embrace of Nazism in 1933 took him genuinely by surprise. This was not the case, however, for his fellow students, who, he recalls, retorted: “Why are you so astonished? They [Heidegger’s political affinities] were always there, you could tell by the style of his thinking.”44 On further reflection, Jonas was forced to admit that such compromising stylistic traits had indeed been present; for whatever reasons, he had merely failed to register them.
When pressed by his interlocutor to articulate what it may have been about Heidegger’s philosophical habitudes that may have pushed him in the direction of Hitler, Jonas suggested that the concept of existential “resolve” or “decisiveness” (Entschlossenheit) played a key role. According to Jonas, the problem with this concept was its contentlessness. It remained normatively vacuous, offering no intrinsic measure to distinguish ethical from unethical political commitments. Instead, the determinants of “resolve” were purely formal or (to highlight the parallels with Carl Schmitt) “decisionistic”: its effectiveness should be judged by the sheer quantum or degree of engagement on behalf of a given cause, regardless of ends.
According to Jonas, the “contentless” nature of resolve is crucial to understanding Heidegger’s political choice. It suggests that, in order to provide resolve with meaning and direction, one is both at the mercy of contemporary history and powerless to defend oneself against it. As Jonas explains:
As the hour of January 1933 struck, history offered the opportunity for decisiveness…. It was at this time that the enormous dubiousness of the Heideggerian outlook in its entirety became clear to me. Whereas he accused idealist philosophy of a certain idealism—it claimed to study the forms of thought, the categories, according to which the world is ordered, and thus [did] everything at a certain remove [from the world]—one could accuse him of something much more serious: the absolute formalism of his decisionism, where decision as such becomes the highest virtue.45
With his reflections on life, ethics, and theology, Jonas presents us, to borrow Nietzsche’s phrase, with a series of “thoughts out of season.” There remains a distinctly Sisyphean quality to his philosophical labors: in an era dominated by thoughtlessness and technological frenzy, Jonas refused to let the so-called “ultimate questions” of Western metaphysics disappear without a trace. His thought, which never shied away from taking risks, stands as a forceful indictment of the shortsightedness of contemporary humanity and the paltriness of its concerns. For Jonas, a humankind that refused to contemplate its own raison d’être remained impoverished and disoriented, fundamentally bereft. The American society that offered him refuge from a war-ravaged Europe was certainly preferable to the one he had fled. Yet, at times, he must have fretted for the condition of its soul. An often ruthless possessive individualism had replaced the traditional virtues that had once made the country an object of universal envy: piety, self-reliance, public-spiritedness, civic engagement, and rooted communities. Of late, such broader concerns have been almost wholly supplanted by a self-interestedness that is insular and smug. What makes Jonas’s thought an enduring achievement is that he was able to bring a keen sense of philosophical wonder to so many areas of human and cosmological concern.
