Hans Jonas

• 1. Introduction

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  Hans Jonas died at his home in New Rochelle, New York, on the 5th of February 1993, at the age of 89. He was a philosopher born in Germany who later became an American citizen. His career moved between two subjects that seem to share almost nothing: the ancient religious sects of Gnosticism, and the ethics of the technological age. Getting there took him through a lecture hall at the University of Marburg, a British Army uniform, and years spent in Palestine. What made a young Jewish scholar risk his life to fight his way back into the country he had fled? What happened to the mentor who first guided him toward Gnosticism's ancient texts? And what did Jonas find when he finally went looking for his mother once the fighting stopped?

• 2. Marburg and Mentors

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  Mönchengladbach is where Hans Jonas was born, on the 10th of May 1903, into a Jewish family. He went on to study philosophy and theology at the University of Freiburg, the University of Berlin, and the University of Heidelberg. In 1928, the University of Marburg awarded him a Doctorate of Philosophy for a thesis called Der Begriff der Gnosis, The Concept of Gnosis. That thesis was directed by Martin Heidegger, with Edmund Husserl and Rudolf Bultmann also serving as his academic advisors.

  Marburg was where Jonas met Hannah Arendt, who was pursuing her own doctorate at the same time. The two became friends and stayed close for the rest of their lives, even as war and exile later pulled them apart. Heidegger, the man guiding Jonas's early work, was about to make a decision that would test that guidance completely.

• 3. Breaking With Heidegger

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  In 1933, Heidegger joined the Nazi Party, a decision that likely disturbed Jonas, who was Jewish and an active Zionist. Jonas did not sever ties immediately. Three decades passed before he made his break public: in 1964, he repudiated Heidegger over that Nazi affiliation.

  His 1966 book The Phenomenon of Life carries Heidegger's influence throughout its pages, even after their break. By then, though, Jonas had also become one of Heidegger's most outspoken philosophical critics. That same Jewish and Zionist identity that made Heidegger's choice so hard to accept would soon push Jonas out of Germany altogether.

• 4. Exile and a Promise

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  England became Jonas's first stop out of Germany, in 1933; by 1934 he had moved on to Palestine. There he met Lore Weiner, and the two became engaged. In 1940, Jonas enlisted in the British Army and served with the Jewish Brigade before being deployed to Italy. As the fighting entered its final phase, his unit advanced into Germany itself. Jonas walked back onto German soil exactly as he had vowed years before: as a soldier in a victorious army.

  During his years in uniform, he wrote Lore a series of letters about philosophy, especially the philosophy of biology. Those letters would later form the basis of his published work on the subject. The couple married in 1943, while the war was still going on. Only after the fighting stopped would Jonas learn what the war had cost his own family.

• 5. What He Found at Home

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  Immediately after the war ended, Jonas returned to Mönchengladbach to search for his mother. He learned that she had been sent to the gas chambers at the Auschwitz concentration camp. After hearing this, he refused ever to live in Germany again. Instead, he returned to Palestine and took part in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. He also taught briefly at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem before deciding to move to North America.

  In 1950, he left for Canada, taking a position at Carleton University. By 1955, he had settled in New York City, where he lived for the rest of his life. There, he became a fellow of the Hastings Center. He also began a term as Alvin Johnson Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research, holding that post until 1976. From 1982 to 1983, he held the Eric Voegelin Visiting Professorship at the University of Munich. Across those same decades in New York, two of his books were already reshaping how English-speaking readers thought. One reshaped views of ancient religious history, the other of technology's ethics.

• 6. The Gnostic Religion

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  The Gnostic Religion, first published in 1958, grew out of his early research on the subject. For many years, it stood as the standard work in English on Gnosticism. His account revisited ground already mapped by earlier scholars. Among them was Ernesto Buonaiuti, whose 1907 study Lo gnosticismo: storia di antiche lotte religiose had covered the same movement. Jonas read the Gnostic texts through his own distinctly existentialist philosophy, an approach that would carry into his later work as well.

  Historians dividing Jonas's career into three stages name each for one of his three major books. The stages run in reverse of the order he wrote them: gnosticism first, philosophical biology second, ethics last. That same willingness to cross old boundaries made him one of the first philosophers to take up ethical questions in biological science. Those last two stages, on biology and on ethics, would each produce a book that reached well beyond philosophy departments.

• 7. The Imperative of Responsibility

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  Technology, not ancient religion, is the subject of The Imperative of Responsibility, published in German in 1979 and in English in 1984. The book examines the ethical strain that new technology puts on society. For Jonas, whether humanity survives depends on real efforts to protect the planet and its future. From that argument he drew a new moral rule: 'Act so that the effects of your action are compatible with the permanence of genuine human life.' In Germany, observers have traced part of the environmental movement's rise back to this very book. That argument about technology would soon meet an older question Jonas had already spent years exploring: the nature of biological life itself.

• 8. The Phenomenon of Life

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  Published in 1966, The Phenomenon of Life became the philosophical basis for a major strand of bioethics in America. Murray Bookchin and Leon Kass both pointed to the book as a major, even primary, inspiration for their own work. In it, Jonas tries to fuse the philosophy of matter with the philosophy of mind into a single account of biology. That fusion leads him to argue that human nature is at once material and moral, not one or the other.

  'A mother-to-be is more than her individual self,' Jonas wrote, arguing against abortion. 'She carries a human trust, and we should not make abortion merely a matter of her own private wish.' He also described society as holding a 'social responsibility' toward pregnant mothers. Handing that decision over entirely to individual choice, he warned, 'oversteps the order of nature.'

  In 1996, Northwestern University Press published a collection called Mortality and Morality: A Search for the Good After Auschwitz, edited by Lawrence Vogel. It carried Jonas's arguments into questions posed only after his own death.