Hans Jonas
German-American philosopher of environmentalism and Gnosticism (1903–1993)
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Biography
Jonas was born in Mönchengladbach, on 10 May 1903 to a Jewish family. He studied philosophy and theology at the University of Freiburg, the Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin and Heidelberg University, and finally earned his Doctorate of Philosophy in 1928 from Marburg University with a thesis on Gnosticism entitled Der Begriff der Gnosis (The Concept of Gnosis) and directed by Martin Heidegger. During his study years his academic advisors included Edmund Husserl and Rudolf Bultmann. At Marburg University he met Hannah Arendt, who was also pursuing her PhD there, and the two of them were to remain friends for the rest of their lives.
When Heidegger joined the Nazi Party in 1933, it may have disturbed Jonas, as he was Jewish and an active Zionist. In 1964 Jonas repudiated his mentor Heidegger for his affiliation with the Nazis.
He left Germany for England in 1933, and from England he moved to Palestine in 1934. There he met Lore Weiner, to whom he became betrothed. In 1940 he enlisted in the British Army. He served in the Jewish Brigade and was sent to Italy, and in the last phase of the war moved into Germany. Thus, he kept his promise that he would return only as a soldier in the victorious army. In this time he wrote several letters to Lore about philosophy, in particular philosophy of biology, that would form the basis of his later publications on the subject. They finally married in 1943.
Immediately after the war he returned to Mönchengladbach to search for his mother but found that she had been sent to the gas chambers in the Auschwitz concentration camp. Having heard this, he refused to live in Germany again. He returned to Palestine and took part in the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. Jonas taught briefly at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem before moving to North America. In 1950 he left for Canada, teaching at Carleton University. From there he moved in 1955 to New York City, where he was to live for the rest of his life. He was a fellow of the Hastings Center and Professor of Philosophy at New School for Social Research from 1955 to 1976 (where he was Alvin Johnson Professor). From 1982 to 1983, Jonas held the Eric Voegelin Visiting Professorship at LMU Munich. He died at his home in New Rochelle, New York, on 5 February 1993, aged 89.
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Philosophical work
Jonas's writings were very influential in different spheres. For example, The Gnostic Religion, based on his early research on the gnosis and 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 moral imperative: "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 Martin Heidegger but also one of Heidegger's most outspoken philosophical critics, 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. On the question of abortion, Jonas was against it, saying, "a mother-to-be is more than her individual self. She carries a human trust, and we should not make abortion merely a matter of her own private wish", society had a "social responsibility" to pregnant mothers, and "To give this mission [motherhood] over completely to individual choice oversteps the order of nature."
His writing on the history of Gnosticism revisits terrain covered by earlier standard works on the subject such as Ernesto Buonaiuti's Lo gnosticismo: storia di antiche lotte religiose (1907), interpreting the religion from a unique version of existentialist philosophical viewpoint that also informed his later contributions. He was 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 his three primary works, but in reverse order: studies of gnosticism, studies of philosophical biology, and ethical studies.