Erinnerungen

by Hans Jonas, Christian Wiese

When Hans Jonas died in 1993 at the age of 89, he was revered among American scholars specializing in European philosophy, but his thought had not yet made great inroads among a wider public. In Germany, conversely, during the 1980s, when Jonas himself was an octogenarian, he became a veritable intellectual celebrity, owing to the runaway success of his 1979 book, The Imperative of Responsibility, a dense philosophical work that sold 200,000 copies. An extraordinarily timely work today, The Imperative of Responsibility focuses on the ever-widening gap between humankind's enormous technological capacities and its diminished moral sensibilities. The book became something of a cultural shibboleth; he himself became a celebrated public intellectual.

For Jonas, this development must have been enormously gratifying. In the 1920s, Jonas studied philosophy with Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger at the universities in Marburg and Freiburg, but the Nazi regime's early attempts at Aryanizing the universities forced Jonas to leave Germany for London in 1933. He emigrated to Palestine in 1935 and eventually enlisted in the British Army's Jewish Brigade to fight against Hitlerism. Following the Israeli War of Independence (in which he also fought), he emigrated to the United States and took a position in 1955 at the New School for Social Research in New York. He became part of a circle of friends around Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blucher, which included Adolph Lowe and Paul Tillich.

Because Jonas's life spanned the entire twentieth century, this memoir provides nuanced pictures of German Jewry during the Weimar Republic, of German Zionism, of the Jewish emigrants in Palestine during the 1930s and 1940s, and of German Jewish emigre intellectuals in New York. In addition, Jonas outlines the development of his work, beginning with his studies under Husserl and Heidegger and extending through his later metaphysical speculations about "God after Auschwitz."

This memoir, a collection of heterogeneous unpublished materials--diaries, memoirs, letters, interviews, and public statements--has been shaped and organized by Christian Wiese, whose afterword links the Jewish dimensions of Jonas's biography and philosophy.

Genres: Philosophy, Biography

503 pages, Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Hans Jonas was a German-born philosopher who was, from 1955 to 1976, Alvin Johnson Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York City.
Jonas' writings were very influential in different spheres. For example, The Gnostic Religion, first published in 1958, was for many years the standard work in English on the subject of Gnosticism.
The Imperative of Responsibility (German 1979, English 1984) centers on social and ethical problems created by technology. Jonas insists that human survival depends on our efforts to care for our planet and its future. He formulated a new and distinctive supreme principle of morality: "Act so that the effects of your action are compatible with the permanence of genuine human life".
While The Imperative of Responsibility has been credited with catalyzing the environmental movement in Germany, his work The Phenomenon of Life (1966) forms the philosophical undergirding of one major school of bioethics in America. Murray Bookchin and Leon Kass both referred to Hans Jonas's work as major, or primary, inspiration. Heavily influenced by Heidegger, The Phenomenon of Life attempts to synthesize the philosophy of matter with the philosophy of mind, producing a rich existential understanding of biology, which ultimately argues for a simultaneously material and moral human nature.
His writing on Gnosticism interprets the religion from an existentialist philosophical viewpoint. Jonas was the first author to write a detailed history of ancient Gnosticism. He was also one of the first philosophers to concern himself with ethical questions in biological science.
Jonas's career is generally divided into three periods defined by the three works just mentioned, but in reverse order: studies of gnosticism, studies of philosophical biology, and ethical studies.

Reviews

[Amanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hans Jonas taught me about the inextricable link between a person's biography and his philosophy.

[FERNANDO CALOCA AYALA · Rating 4 out of 5]

Al igual que Felipe Teixidor, Hans Jonas va recordando y platicando sus experiencias de vida ya apunto de cerrar y bajar el telón. Se siente a un anciano con suficiente lucidez y educación para recrear situaciones que lo hacen a uno quedarse a escuchar y seguir leyendo. Desde luego son las memorias de un intelectual y hombre de letras. Su primera incursión en la Antigüedad Tardía lo hizo un filósofo humanista. Esta apertura a explorar territorios que, a su juicio, no habían sido suficientemente explorados, lo llevó ya en Estados Unidos a intuir que la vida de los seres vivos ofrece una base filosófica para entender la importancia de la Responsabilidad humana. Resulta sorprendente ver y leer a un scholar que va caminando en paralelo con otras tantas figuras del judaísmo (Viktor Frankl, Erich Fromm, Primo Levi, Etty Hillesum, etc.).
Inevitables imágenes cinematográficas sobre la gran amiga Hannah Arendt. Su resentimiento hacia Heidegger y, al final, su necesidad de pensar a Dios hacen que cualquier lector con vocación a las humanidades pueda disfrutar el ir escuchando los recuerdos de un gran conversador.

[Sam Schulman · Rating 5 out of 5]

So charming and heroic. One thing to which attention must be paid: Hannah Arendt, with all her faults and snobbish anti-Semitism, was something of a slut - in a good way. She told Jonas about having given a lecture at Union Theological Seminary one evening. She offered a professor a lift home.
Arendt: Suddenly he threw himself at me and began hugging and kissing me. So I said to him, 'Listen, young man, pull yourself together!'
Jonas: That was a bit much for him!
Arendt: Well, he had to find some way to express his enthusiasm.
Jonas. There are more acceptable ways to express enthusiasm.
Pause
Arendt: That's the only<\i> way.