Hans Jonas

Life, Technology and the Horizons of Responsibility

Lewis Coyne

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350102415
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Ética y filosofía moral

Hans Jonas (1903–1993) was one of the most important German-Jewish philosophers of the 20th century. A student of Martin Heidegger and close friend of Hannah Arendt, Jonas advanced the fields of phenomenology and practical ethics in ways that are just beginning to be appreciated in the English-speaking world. Drawing here on unpublished and newly translated material, Lewis Coyne brings together for the first time in English Jonas's philosophy of life, ethic of responsibility, political theory, philosophy of technology and bioethics. In Hans Jonas: Life, Technology and the Horizons of Responsibility, Coyne argues that the aim of Jonas's philosophy is to confront three critical issues inherent to modernity: nihilism, the ecological crisis and the transhumanist drive to biotechnologically enhance human beings. While these might at first appear disparate, for Jonas all follow from the materialist turn taken by Western thought from the 17th century onwards, and he therefore seeks to tackle all three issues at their collective point of origin. This book explores how Jonas develops a new categorical imperative of responsibility on the basis of an ontology that does justice to the purposefulness and dignity of life: to act in a way that does not compromise the future of humanity on earth. Reflecting on this, as we face a potential future of ecological and societal collapse, Coyne forcefully demonstrates the urgency of Jonas's demand that humanity accept its newfound responsibility as the 'shepherd of beings'.

1

The gnosticism of modernity

I The gnostic principle

Jonas’s philosophical system, from his metaphysics and his ethics to his political theory, is a corrective to modern gnosticism and its threefold legacy: nihilism, ecological ruin and biotechnological transformation. But what exactly is gnosticism, and what is peculiar to its modern form? We said in the Introduction that the latter could be provisionally understood as another name for the technological drive that characterizes our time, but this was only a cursory definition. The purpose of the present chapter, therefore, is to properly define gnosticism and explain the significance Jonas attributes to it. Although, as indicated, modern gnosticism is Jonas’s ultimate object of concern, to understand the latter we must begin with an account of its original incarnation.

The Greek word gnōsis, from which the term ‘gnosticism’ derives, simply means knowledge, and used in this everyday sense it can be found throughout the works of the great Greek thinkers. Gnosticism, however, refers to something more specific: namely, a world view with certain key themes and tropes.

The history of gnosticism begins in the period of antiquity defined by the Roman Empire, dated from the latter’s foundation in the first century BCE through to fall of the Western Empire in 476 CE. Over the course of this half-millennium the Abrahamic religions, in many ways at odds with the old Greco-Roman paganism, gained prominence across the Mediterranean world. The Roman emperor Constantine’s conversion to Christianity in c.312 CE was a symbolic turning point in this process, as was the legalization of Christianity throughout the empire in the following year. Meanwhile, beyond the walls of Rome various ascetic cults and sects had taken root. Christian monasticism, which would later become a mainstream form of that religion, developed in Egypt; in Syria, Stylites demonstrated their devotion to God by praying and fasting atop pillars. Perhaps most bizarrely, the Hermetics developed a cosmology that fused Mediterranean paganism with monotheism, alchemy and magical practices. In terms of independence of character and philosophical depth, however, the most significant such sect were the Gnostics.

Emerging in the first and second centuries CE, the Gnostics were, according to Jonas, something of an oddity even in their own time. Although their thought owed most to Christian scripture, it was nevertheless a ‘wild offshoot’ from conventional Christianity, informed by Platonic, Judaic, Persian and Egyptian elements ( WPE : 30). Besides being of interest in its own right, Jonas holds that the Gnostic religion was also of philosophical significance, and to this end his interpretation seeks to uncover the underlying and unifying character of the Gnostic texts. Using Heidegger’s existentialism as an interpretative framework, Jonas’s analysis identifies the essence of Gnostic thought as its ‘radical and uncompromising’ understanding of being, both in terms of individual existence and the nature of the cosmos as such ( GR : 26).¹

The radicalism of the Gnostic religion is most clearly illustrated by comparing its basic cosmology with that of Christianity. The latter is summarized by Jonas as follows:

The created world of Genesis is not a god and is not to be worshipped instead of god. […] Jewish monotheism had abolished the deities of nature and all intermediary powers, leaving God and world in clean-cut division. The Christian hierarchy of angels and saints did not bridge the gulf between God and the world, but that between God and the human soul which, not being of the natural order itself, shares their preternatural status. ( PL : 71)

This notion of God and soul being at odds with the natural world also formed the basis of Gnostic cosmology, although in more extreme form. According to the Gnostics humans possess a divine spark, a vestige of God, in the form of a soul. Clearly, this much is in line with Christian doctrine. Yet the Gnostics went considerably further in their cosmological dualism, as they held the physical world to have been created not by God, but rather by the ‘demiurge’: a demonic entity, sometimes depicted as a snake-like chimaera, which imbued the natural world with darkness. As such, the God of the Gnostics is wholly removed from the world:

The cardinal feature of gnostic thought is the radical dualism that governs the relation of God and world, and correspondingly that of man and world. The deity is absolutely transmundane, its nature alien to that of the universe, which it neither created nor governs and to which it is the complete antithesis: to the divine realm of light, self-contained and remote, the cosmos is opposed as the realm of darkness. ( GR : 42)

This stark dualism extended to the Gnostics’ understanding of human beings themselves. According to the Gnostics, each human soul had been ensnared by the demiurge before being taken from the world of light to the material domain, and there imprisoned in a body. As such, in the Gnostic religion the human essence is wholly alien to the physical world it inhabits: each divine soul is shackled to a conscious mind, which is in turn incarcerated in a body, and stranded on an unholy world ( GR : 44).

The Gnostics held, nevertheless, that each individual has a chance of escaping its fallen condition in death. There the soul may find a release from the material plane provided one prepares in life by arriving at a true understanding of the world. Study of the Gnostic texts – made possible by a ‘messenger from the world of light’, most commonly identified as Jesus – reveals the truth of the natural world and the demiurge, and so allows the enlightened soul to find its way back to the world of light ( GR : 45). This is the revealed knowledge, the gnōsis, that gives the religion its name, and adherence to which represents the promise of salvation. In addition to tempering an otherwise strikingly bleak world view, this eschatologic al dimension rescues Gnostic thought from absolute nihilism: an objective good is believed to exist, albeit aligned with the unknown God and hidden from us by the dark shroud of our given reality.

For the purposes of this work the preceding account of Gnostic cosmology, though brief, will suffice – interested readers should consult Jonas’s masterwork of scholarship, The Gnostic Religion, which analyses the ancient texts in detail. What concerns us here is the significance he attributes to the religion. Its appearance is, to be sure, a curious episode in Western history. But is it any more than that? Jonas argues in the affirmative, for two reasons. The significance of the Gnostic religion lies firstly in that it tells us something about the period of antiquity in which it took root and grew; secondly, and more importantly, it sheds light on Western history as such. For it is Jonas’s contention that the essence of the Gnostic world view – which we shall call gnosticism or, following Jonas, the ‘gnostic principle’ – recurs throughout Western history, informing even our own time ( GR : xxxv). These are bold claims, and so we shall unpack and attempt to justify them in turn.

The Gnostics held, as we have seen, that the world in which we live is fundamentally opposed to the good, the latter belonging to the alien God and world of light alone. In this cosmic pessimism it constituted, according to Jonas, the pinnacle of nihilism in its period of antiquity. Although this does not make Gnostic thought ‘the key to understanding the whole epoch’– which is generally less apocalyptic – it nevertheless illuminates the time from which it emerged ( GR : 26). Most notably, the Gnostics’ identification of this world with malignant darkness represents a radical break with the culture of Classical antiquity – a break so severe that it was only credible in a historical moment of deep transformation.

Traditionally, Greco-Roman thought had held that the public realm of the polis, or res publica, made the good life possible, as only by living in such a polity could humanity fully realize itself in theoretical enquiry and political action. This world of human affairs, watched over by the gods, was thought in turn to be situated within the eternal workings of nature, together forming a harmonious and ordered cosmos ( PL : 222). Thus to the Classical mind what-is (Being) was intimately connected to what-ought-to-be (the good), a holistic perspective that formed the background for life in the Greek city states and Roman Republic of the Hellenic and Hellenistic eras.² However, following the transformation of the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire, active citizenship in the public realm was no longer possible – hence the good life, as it had been conceived of until then, was no longer attainable. Jonas suggests that the Roman intelligentsia attempted to compensate for this loss by adopting the cosmopolitan philosophy of Stoicism, but the shift away from Classical Greco-Roman thought nevertheless transformed the long-established connection between Being and the good life ( PL : 223). While this rupture gave rise to various eccentric philosophies and cults, none articulated this crisis more dramatically than the Gnostics, for whom, as we have seen, the good was conceived of as wholly separate from – and indeed, unrealizable within – the material world.

Such is the meaning Jonas attributes to the religion with regard to its own time: it is the most radical philosophy to spring from the demise of the Greco-Roman public realm. As stated, however, he also claims that the essence of the religion transcends its original manifestation. This essence consists of the following three principles, distilled from the religious Gnostic texts:

1) The soul is separate from nature.

2) Nature has no value save that of providing for the soul.

3) The soul must transcend nature in death.

In various manifestations these notions have, Jonas suggests, recurred throughout Western civilization, to varying degrees informing the zeitgeist. At certain times and places, such as the Florentine Republic, the gnostic principle partly retreated from view, while at others – most obviously, perhaps, the High Middle Ages – it came to dominate an entire epoch. Jonas contends, however, that gnosticism finds its most extreme and consequential manifestation in the modern world. At first glance this claim appears improbable: modernity is secular and rational, with a technologically advanced capitalist mode of production, all of which could not be more different to the Gnostics’ own period of history. Jonas suggests, however, that on a deeper level the gnostic principle profoundly informs the spirit of our time.

It should be noted in advance that although Jonas’s analysis of gnosticism will prove to be overwhelmingly critical, he does attribute one significant positive effect to the phenomenon. By stressing the dissimilarities rather than the commonalities holding between humanity and nature, and by subsequently devaluing the latter, gnosticism turns humanity in on itself in search of meaning. Although meditative cultivation of the self pre-existed gnosticism, as evidenced by the Orphic mysteries, it is nevertheless ‘to the long reign of dualism […] that we in the West owe the exploration of the realm of the soul, indeed the enrichment of the soul through constant reflection’ ( MM : 47). The psychological depths plumbed by writers from St Augustine through to Kierkegaard and Dostoyevsky can be attributed to precisely this tendency; the same is true, of course, of the vast inner landscape revealed by the dualistic religions and philosophies of Asia. Since this cultivation represents a real gain we are all, to a degree, beneficiaries of the gnostic principle. Alas, the price paid for this enrichment of mind was high, in modernity taking the form of not only a nihilistic estrangement from the world but also the present environmental crisis and the prospect of our own biotechnological transformation. The remainder of this chapter will seek to justify this audacious claim.

II Nihilism, ancient a nd modern

Jonas’s discovery of the spiritual parallels between modernity and the Gnostics’ period of antiquity is the result of a curiously dialectical process, one that requires further biographical information. As indicated, Jonas uses Heidegger’s existentialist concepts to give voice to the Gnostic world view.³ It might seem, perhaps, to be an odd choice of interpretative framework, yet the parallels are striking in several respects. In order to sketch out this connection, we shall give a brief account of Heidegger’s thought as it had developed when Jonas was studying under him.

Heidegger’s lifelong concern was the ‘question of the meaning of being’, an issue he would eventually approach from a great many angles (2010a: 4). In his early work, however, which culminated in the ‘revolutionary’ Being and Time, Heidegger sought to clarify that question by asking after the being of the entity that could pose it ( HBT : 1).⁴ That entity was Dasein. The word Dasein is a common enough German noun typically translated into English as ‘existence’, although a direct translation of its component words would be ‘being-there’. Heidegger alluded to both senses, using the term to denote those beings that are concerned with their own being, and it is clear that when doing so he primarily had human beings in mind.

The most significant feature of Dasein, according to Heidegger, is the fact that it ‘is concerned about its very being’, and thus, however unconsciously, ‘understands itself in its being’ (2010a: 11). By this Heidegger meant that in its conduct and practices Dasein always demonstrates an implicit understanding of its possible ways of being: taking up one project and not the other, for example, or acting in one way rather than another. This understanding of the possibilities of its own being Heidegger called Dasein’s ‘existence’, alluding to the latter term’s etymological meaning of standing out or standing forth (2010a: 11). To make sense of this notion consider that human beings never abide in the way that a book, a mountain or a hammer does, say. On the con...