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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2010
ABSTRACT: This essay aims at clarifying the content of Jonas’s philosophy of responsibility. First, an analysis is given of the connection between nihilism and modern technology. Jonas’s contribution to the problem of ethics in this context is prepared by an interpretation of the way in which fear and the myth respectively function as motivations for his work. This paves the way to a reconsideration of the content of Jonas’s philosophy, whereby two notions of responsibility should be identified: (1) responsibility as ethicity and (2) responsibility as foundational rule. With this distinction a number of problematic issues associated with his ethics of responsibility can be clarified.
RÉSUMÉ: Cet article vise à clarifier le contenu de la philosophie de la responsabilité de Hans Jonas. L’article commence par une analyse du rapport entre le nihilisme et la technique moderne. La contribution de Jonas sur cette question éthique doit être située par une interprétation de la façon dont la peur et le mythe motivent son travail. Ainsi s’ouvre une reconsidération du contenu de la philosophie de Jonas : deux notions de responsabilité peuvent être distinguées : (1) la responsabilité comme éthicité et (2) la responsabilité comme règle fondatrice. Cette distinction permet de clarifier un nombre de dilemmes associés à son éthique de la responsabilité.
The following abbreviations are used to refer to the works of Jonas in this essay and the essay that precedes this one: PL: The Phenomenon of Life. Toward a Philosophical Biology (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1966); PE: Philosophical Essays: From Ancient Creed to Technological Man (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1974); PV: Das Prinzip Verantwortung. Versuch einer Ethik für die technologische Zivilisation (Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp, [1979]1984); TME: Technik, Medizin und Ethik. Zur Praxis des Prinzips Verantwortung (Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp, [1985]1987); WpE: Wissenschaft als persönliches Erlebnis (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1987) and PUV: Philosophische Untersuchungen und metaphysische Vermutungen (Frankfurt-am-Main/Leibzig, 1992).
Once again, for the purposes of this study, the books are referred to in the language — English or German — in which they first appeared. For Das Prinzip Verantwortung, I used the translation entitled The Imperative of Responsibility. In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1984), abbreviated as IR. The page numbers indicated refer first to the page in the German text and then to the page in the English translation; for references without quotations, the page numbers refer to the German text, where that is the original and first publication.
1 See Ernst Wolff, “Responsibility in an Era of Modern Technology and Nihilism, Part 1. A Non-Foundational Rereading of Jonas,” in Dialogue 48 (2009): 577–99.
2 Modernity is characterized by dynamism (PV 216) and this in turn is due to the “‘Selbstbewegung’ der Technik” (PV 404 n. 22). It should be borne in mind that the word “progress” as used in this sentence is used first and foremost as a descriptive, rather than as an evaluative, term (cf. TME 20).
3 My translation (IR) does not appear to contain this passage: “Verantwortung ist die als Pflicht anerkannte Sorge um ein anderes Sein, die bei Bedrohung seiner Verletzlichkeit zur “Besorgnis” wird.”
4 At this point “kommt die Gottheit zur Erfahrung ihrer selbst” (PUV 195).
5 See a similar point in Philosophie. Rückschau und Vorschau am Ende des Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1993), 31, where Jonas refers to the “warnenden Wetterleuchten nahender Krise.”
6 Jean Greisch’s elucidation of the kind of fear that is active in Jonas’s work, holds only for the fear of the heuristics of fear (what Jonas calls “Furcht geistiger Art”— PV 65) and not for the fear that put Jonas’s later philosophical development in motion. Greisch explains that it is “exactement l’inverse de la peur “pathologique.” Là où la peur pathologique nous affecte en déclenchant des pensées ou des représentations de panique, dans le cas présent [la peur dans l’heuristique de la peur — EW] nous avons affaire à des pensées (ou des représentations) qui sont à la recherche des affects qui incitent à l’action et à la réflexion,” cf. Jean Greisch, “L’amour du monde et le principe responsabilité,” in La responsabilité. La condition de notre humanité. (Paris: Editions Autrement, 1994), 72–89, citation p. 75. It is then the heuristics of fear that identifies the emotions that testify to the subjective response to the other. However, I want to suggest that there is another fear underlying the heuristics of fear.
7 Jonas’s description of his optimism after the Second World War is in line with this idea: “I had returned from the war experience and the nightmare preceding it in an optimistic frame of mind as to the condition of the world about to emerge from the holocaust. Humanity, so it seemed to me, had passed through a crisis which, at its excessive and totally unacceptable price, would still have the effect of a catharsis, at least of a calm after the storm. It was the illusion that crushing one supreme evil, after it had taken its terrible course, would halt the public power of evil in general, if only by sheer exhaustion, for a goodly time to come. Of the better things mankind could now turn to I held good hopes — paradoxically derived from the most frightening technological bequest of the war” (PE xv).
8 Cited from the myth in the version of the notion of God after Auschwitz essay: “Mit dem Erscheinen des Menschen erwachte die Transzendenz zu sich selbst und begleitet hinfort sein Tun mit angehaltenem Atem … sich ihm [dem Menschen — EW] fühlbarmachend, ohne doch in die Dynamik des weltlichen Schauplatzes einzugreifen: Denn könnte es nicht sein, daß das Transzendente durch Widerschein seines Zustandes, wie er flackert mit der schwankenden Bilanz menschlichen Tuns, Licht und Schatten über die menscliche Landschaft wirft?” (PUV 197).
9 Both “Prinzip” and “Grundsatz” can of course be translated by “principle”; my decision to render “Grundsatz” with the somewhat clumsy “foundational rule” is motivated by the need to distinguish clearly between these two German terms. Furthermore, I refrain from rendering “Grundsatz” as “axiom,” as Jonas and Herr did in IR, to avoid the impression that this “rule” is to be accepted without justification or that it is supposed by Jonas to be self-evident — Jonas’s point is precisely that he intends to provide a justification for it. The translation of the entire citation is my own.
10 Here, as often in PV, “Menschen” (human beings) means “Menschheit” (humanity), since in special cases the “Grundsatz” is not applicable to individuals.
11 I take “der Beginn der Ethik” to be equivalent to “das Ethische” (the ethical), or as I shall call it here, “ethicity.”
12 Micha Werner, “Dimensionen der Verantwortung: Ein Werkstattbericht zur Zukunftsethik von Hans Jonas” in Ethik für die Zukunft. Im Diskurs mit Hans Jonas, ed. D. Böhler and I. Hoppe (München: C. H. Beck, 1994), 303–38, here especially 303–12.
13 Werner, 313.
14 An example of the ambiguous statements made by Jonas is found in PV 9, where he describes the historical factors that shift “Verantwortung ins Zentrum der Ethik” (as Kettner rightly points out) — this is said of responsibility in practice, which Jonas himself (as Werner, “Dimensionen der Verantwortung,” op. cit. p. 312 correctly quotes) typifies as “Notstandethik,” or “Minimalethik” or “Vermeidungsethik”; in other words, responsibility as an “ethics of completion.”
15 It might also be useful to recall the wish that Jonas expresses for ethics at the end of PL and to which PV is his answer: “[O]nly an ethics which is grounded in the breadth of being … can have significance in the scheme of things. … However far, therefore, the ontological quest [in PL — EW] may have carried us outside man, into the general theory of being and of life, it did not move away from ethics, but searched for its possible foundation” (PL 284).
16 The criticism pronounced here against M. Werner also applies (albeit to a lesser degree) to Jean Greisch, the French translator of Das Prinzip Verantwortung, who comments as follows on the use of the word “Prinzip” in the title of the book: apart from the polemics with Bloch, “[I]l [“the principle”— EW] révèle aussi ses [Jonas’s — EW] ambitions véritables: faire de l’idée de responsabilité qui, à première vue n’est qu’une vertu parmi d’autres, le fondement même d’une conception inédite de l’éthique.”Greisch, “L’amour du monde et le principe responsabilité,” op. cit. p. 73. I do not agree that the principle that Jonas defends is a principle only of the new ethics, but of all ethics.
17 If the long duration of the cosmos, as portrayed in Jonas’s myth and in his philosophy of the organism, is taken into account, the principle of responsibility could be said to be as old as the self-conscience of God in the human being. Hence the description of this ethics as “a-historical”— it is the same principle of all ethics of humanity.
18 See also the discussion above — in the first article, §3.2.
19 Cf. especially PV ch 3, IV, 3, d, entitled “Der Zweckbegriff jenseits der Subjektivität: Sinn des Begriffs.”
20 See also PV 156–157, where Jonas speaks of “das Interesse in der Intensität der Selbstzwecke der Lebewesen selber, in denen der Naturzweck zunehmend subjektiv, das heißt dem jeweiligen Vollzieher als der seine zueigen wird.” An intriguing question, which I can only mention here, would be to enquire how Jonas would respond to the question of how non-life-affirming conduct is possible at all.
21 This is argued for in Jonas’s Macht oder Ohnmacht der Subjektivität? Das Leib-Seele-Problem im Vorfeld des Prinzips Verantwortung. (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1981), but added as Appendix to IR.
22 However, I affirm again that it is not possible to include all of Jonas’s statements in my categorization.
23 Jonas’s instruction of the primacy of the disaster prognosis, in other words, the essential prudence of the philosophy of responsibility, has attracted frequent criticism because of its alleged conservatism — cf., for instance, Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert’s “Ethos und metaphysisches Erbe. Zu den Grundlagen von Hans Jonas’ Ethik der Verantwortung,” in Philosophie der Gegenwart, Gegenwart der Philosophie, ed. H. Schnädelbach and G. Keil (Hamburg: Junius, 1993), 171–215, especially §2, “Der Konservativismus der Verantwortungsethik,” 183ff. The argument underpinning this criticism is that if invention is indeed eliminated by a process of imagination-induced fear, it would in practice imply a tendency toward the maintenance of the status quo. While I do not see anything wrong with the argument on the formal level, the picture does, however, change considerably if Jonas’s analysis of the modern world, of the “technological civilization,” is taken into consideration. This situation is characterized by technological progress as a “calling” and as an omnipresent imperative. If that is the status quo, it would mean that the prudence inscribed in Jonas’s heuristics of fear would in effect undermine this ambient imperative of technological progress, which is the status quo; it proposes an unsettling suggestion of a withholding or regional abolition in a context where the continuation of the march of technological progress is the often unexamined rule that governs the state of things. It should therefore be considered seriously whether his position could not at least equally be described as opposing the status quo as revolutionary or liberating.
24 Jonas argues that competence does not mean acting on the basis of theory, amongst other things, on the basis of the example of Lenin (cf. PV 205). It should strike the reader as interesting that Jonas, on this one page, repeats the word “Augenblick” five times, for example, “Theorie aber hatte an dieser Erkenntnis des Augenblicks keinen Anteil” (PV 205). This could well be an idea taken over from the early work of Heidegger — one should consider the latter’s reinterpretation of Aristotle’s notion of the agent of virtue, who is characterized, amongst other things, by the fact that he or she acts “in knowledge” (eidos): Heidegger associates this knowledge-drivenness of action with circumspection (phronesis~); in other words, acting with “Umsichtigkeit” that is directed at the particular occasion (kairos~ as Aristotle calls it; Augenblick as Heidegger translates it). See my “Aspects of Technicity in Heidegger’s Early Philosophy: Rereading Aristotle’s Techné and Hexis,” in Research in Phenomenology 38, no. 3 (2008): 317–57 (in particular, 345–6).
25 Cf. also PV 186: “die Möglichkeit, daß es Verantwortung gebe, ist die allem vorausliegende Verantwortung”; PV 92: “Idee von möglichen Täter überhaupt.”
26 The term “Ebenbild” is difficult to translate — from Jonas’s cryptic notes on it on the last page of PV (and absent from IR), it seems that he borrows it from the notion in Genesis (humans being created in the image of God), but believes that it also has a secular meaning which resides in the idea of humanity that is to be protected by the new ethics of responsibility. Hence my translation of “Ebenbild” as “image [that is not to be violated].”
27 This is in fact what Jonas claims is happening when he speaks of the contemporary technically induced phenomenon of “die wachsende Überlegenheit einer Seite der menschlichen Natur über alle anderen, und unvermeidlich auf ihre Kosten” (PV 32) and of the fact that technology takes a central position in the formation of the “subjektiven menschlichen Zweckleben” (PV 31); in other words, the conduct subject to moral judgment.
28 As has indeed been expressed, amongst others, by Dietrich Böhler, in “What Can the Meaning Be of Responsibility in High-Tech Civilization. A Socratic Discourse-ethical Perspective,” in Discursive modernity, ed. N. Gilje and H. Grimen (Oslo: Universitetsforlag, 2007), 199–229, and 250–5, here 214, and Richard Wolin, Heidegger’s Children. Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse. (Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001), 123–9.
29 Jonas admits this implicitly, in my opinion, in his reflection on the thought experiment seeking to determine whether a child or a valuable work of art is to be saved from a burning house (PV 188–189 and 400–401). What is interesting in Jonas’s handling of this dilemma is that neither the “obvious” decision for the life of the child (PV 189) nor the more argued defence of this decision (PV 400–401) is made with the help of the imperative of responsibility and neither could be reconciled with the manner of thinking of Jonas’s imperative of responsibility — in fact, there is no trace of the kind of collective, humanity-oriented decision-making that we found in the example of the statesman above. But this strange manner of tackling the dilemma is an eloquent indication of the importance of complementing the principle of responsibility by other ethics. In as far as the Jonasian principle of responsibility is taken into account alone, one should first recognize that this dilemma has no simple answer before proceeding by using the best possible information (the burning house, of course, limits the time available for such an exercise), and then to deploy a heuristics of fear to see what, in each of the two possible courses of action, the outcome would be if the humanity of the collective of humankind is at stake. It may well be that for some ethical agents it is valid to argue and it makes more sense to save the artwork. If such a conclusion bothers us — as it clearly bothered Jonas — it is only because we are already deploying an ethics of responsibility in coordination with other forms of ethics in the light of which it becomes clearly objectionable to consider saving the work of art rather than the child. One could, however, show that it is not absurd at least to consider the way of an ethics of responsibility’s concern for humanity, by a slight variation on the thought experiment: suppose we stood in a burning house in 1942 and had to save either a very valuable work of art or Adolf Hitler, trapped in a room — which one would we choose?