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"Man is the only being known of us who may have a responsibility "
" The modern spirit is incompatible with the idea of immortality. " - Between nothingness and eternity
"Working on the concept of God is possible even if no proof of God ..." - Concept of God after Auschwitz
"Our thoughts today are under the dominance of ontological death." - Phenomenon of life
"God, having given fully in the changing world, has nothing to offer, now is the man to give." - The Concept of God after Auschwitz
(1903-1993) by Claudia Neubauer
Born in 1903 in Bavaria, from the great liberal Jewish bourgeoisie, Hans Jonas has studied philosophy among others, Heidegger and Bultmann. After defending his thesis, he left Germany in 1933 for Great Britain, and Jerusalem. From 1940 to 1945 he served in the British Army and in 1948-1949 in the Israeli army. He taught in New York at the New School for Social Research. In his bibliography include the phenomenon of life. Toward a Philosophical Biology (1963) and the Principle of Responsibility. An Ethics for the Technological Age (1979). Especially the environmental ethics and the principle of responsibility which the imprint of Jonah in the field of political ecology. On the principle of "responsibility," Jonas Kant meets (and its categorical imperatives) and Bloch (and his "principle of hope").
Disciple Heidegger and Hannah Arendt's friend, torn between his German homeland, his fight for the establishment of the State of Israel (new dream home and then abandoned) and his U.S. exile, Hans Jonas, philosopher of life after soldier, is one of the major references of the environmental movement.
During the Second World War, debating with Heidegger's affinities with Nazism, Jonas began to sketch a philosophical concept cons nihilism. It was, he said, is inherent in modern existentialism and responsible for the lack of intellectual resistance to the inhumanity of Nazi ideology. Jonas opposed to Heidegger who thought a draft would allow the man to feel part of nature is not indifferent and valuable.
Later, in a contribution on ethical issues (Aktuelle Probleme aus ethische Jüdischer Sicht, 1970), Jonas diagnosed a metaphysical void modern philosophical ethics which had known nothing against it. He said that in the modern world, ethical relativism and indifference had replaced the call to human responsibility. This leads naturally to his book The Principle of Responsibility (1979) which will see some success. Jonas exposes them his reflections on the relationship between technology and ethics, on the mastery by man of his own power (the irreversible effects that technology can have on nature). It stresses the difference with past periods which is the ability of man to destroy humanity. Which begs the question of the existence of the species. In addition, modern technology is characterized by the fact that it does not simply impose on society the conditions of its maintenance, but well beyond the terms of its capacity ... A vicious cycle that leads men to repair the damage caused by technology by new technical innovations that create their own new problems. Jonah refuses the belief that technology will always solve the problems it creates. For him, modern technology has become "wild" and therefore must be domesticated. Especially since it is grotesque in this context where man believed to control nature by means of a technique that does not control.
Beyond this, Jonas believes that the technique is at least as formidable by its successes than its failures. The destructive capacity of man, this "transformation of the essence of human action" is Based on the idea of Jonah to impose new obligations to Man in his report to the future. It requires a radical transformation of ethics into a less anthropocentric ethic that would enable man to find his biological roots and natural. In this ethic for the future that is before any thought of the long term, fear plays a key role as part mobilizer, since no one can anticipate the consequences of technical applications on life in the long term. For Jonas, the existence of God is not decisive for the purposes of this ethic, since the idea of responsible self-restraint Rights may be justified on the basis of reason alone. Its principle is forfeiting knowingly religious justifications and uses the collective and personal responsibility in developing strategies for voluntary restraint on human freedom and a deep respect for life.
Jonah was concerned about the proliferation of nuclear weapons and technology, the global ecological crisis and the widespread use of genetic technologies and biogenetic. In this regard, he put a special warning against genetic engineering experiments and irreversible. He proposed two types of arguments to justify the nature Rights must be respected: the religious-metaphysical argument (Man in the image of God that must be preserved) and the prudential argument (our system is a natural balance extremely complex and it would be arrogant and unwise to tinker). In this framework, Jonas criticized the inevitable drift utopian art ... the fantasy of the technical improvement of mankind.
The concept of responsibility is expressed as a categorical imperative: "Act so that the effects of your action are compatible with the permanence of an authentically human life on earth" and "Act so that the effects of tone action are not destructive to the future possibility of such a life. " (2) Jonas saw politics as primarily carrying out this responsibility, although it also referred to parents as responsible for their children: "It is clear that the new requirement is aimed much more to politics than public private conduct, it is not the causal dimension to which it may apply. In 1992, a year before his death, Jonah expressed at an awards ceremony that "if we continue to manage the planet as badly as we do now, the fate that threatens us, this evil, becomes all the more sure we see as inevitable. I warn against the danger of fatalism that is internal, which is almost as large as the external danger, which is our fault anyway. "
Hans Jonas, as some philosophers of the past century, noted how the existence of Nature and Man are threatened by long-term technological interventions in the latter in the ecosystem of planetary life. His philosophical legacy
is an impassioned plea for human responsibility. This legacy is still (and increasingly so) a burning issue. Personal orange
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