The Phenomenon of Life Quotes

“In living things, nature springs an ontological surprise in which the world-accident of terrestrial conditions brings to light an entirely new possibility of being: systems of matter that are unities of a manifold, not in virtue of a synthesizing perception whose object they happen to be, nor by the mere concurrence of the forces that bind their parts together, but in virtue of themselves, for the sake of themselves, and continually sustained by themselves. Here wholeness is self-integrating in active performance, and form for once is the cause rather than the result of the material collections in which it successively subsists. Unity here is self-unifying, by means of changing multiplicity. Sameness, while it last, (and it does not last inertially, in the manner of static identity or of on-moving continuity), is perpetual self-renewal through process, borne on the shift of otherness. This active self-integration of life alone gives substance to the term “individual”: it alone yields the ontological concept of an individual as against a merely phenomenological one. The ontological individual, its very existence at any moment, its duration and its identity in duration is, then, essentially its own function, its own concern, its own continuous achievement. In this process of self-sustained being, the relation of the organism to its own concern, its own continuous achievement.
In this process of self-sustained being, the relation of the organism to its material substance is of a double nature: the materials are essential to its specifically, accidental individually; it coincides with their actual collection at the instant, but is not bound to any one collection in the succession of instants, “riding” their change like the crest of a wave and bound only to their form of collection which endures as its own feat. Dependent on their availability as materials, its is independent of their sameness as these; its own, functional identity, passingly incorporating theirs, is of a different order. In a word, the organic form stands in a dialectical relation of needful freedom to matter.”
― Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life

“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... Will replaces vision; temporality of the act outsts the eternity of the "good-in-itself"As the product of the indifferent, his being, too, must be indifferent. Then the facing of his morality would simply warrant the reaction "let us eat and drink for tomorrow we die." There is no point in caring for what has no sanction behind it in any creative intention.”
― Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life

“Ontology as the ground of ethics was the original tenet of philosophy. Their divorce, which is the divorce of the "objective" and "subjective" realms, is the modern destiny. Their reunion can be effected, if at all, only from the "objective" end, that is to say, through a revision of the idea of nature. And it is becoming rather than abiding nature which would hold out any such promise. From the immanent direction of its total evolution there may be elicited a destination of man by whose terms the person, in the act of fulfilling himself, would at the same time realize a concern of universal substance. Hence would result a principle of ethics which is ultimately grounded neither in the autonomy of the self nor in the needs of the community, but in an objective assignment by the nature of things.”
― Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life

“For in the ever-repeated origination of highly organized individuals from an infinitesimal germ, the working-out of a prearranged plan of growth and development seems obvious. Thus the very idea of “development” which the facts of reproduction suggested stood in the way of applying to the living kingdom the same categories of genesis that were applied on mechanistic principles to reality at large. Indeed, the term “evolution” denoted originally just this phenomenon of individual genesis, and by no means the genesis of species. On the contrary, “evolution” in its literally sense presupposes the existence of the species, because it is precisely this which, in the person of parent individual, provides the prearranged plan to be “evolved” in every given case of generation. What evolves is not the model itself but its re-embodiment in each generation from germ to maturity: what evolves was involved in the germ, its potency there derived from its act in the progenitor. In terms of cause-effect relation, then, the parent accounts not only for its offspring’s existence, but also for its offspring’s form by its own possession of this selfsame form. This is a pattern very different from mechanistic chain of cause and effect and strongly suggest the operation of a causa formalis in addition to a causa effciens, or the existence of a substantial form, which were otherwise banned from the whole system of natural explanation. In short, the very concept of development was opposed to that of mechanics and still implied some version of other of classic ontology.”
― Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life