Hans Jonas

Hans Jonas (Mönchengladbach, 1903 – New Rochelle, New York, 1993) was a philosopher who worked in Germany and later in the United States. He belonged to the phenomenological and existentialist tradition, and his training combined philosophy, theology and the history of religion. He is remembered for extending ethical reflection into areas that had received little attention before: technology, biology and the survival of humanity.

He studied philosophy and theology at Freiburg, Berlin and Heidelberg, and completed his doctorate at Marburg in 1928 with a thesis on Gnosticism supervised by Martin Heidegger. It was there that he met Hannah Arendt, beginning a friendship that lasted their whole lives. When Heidegger joined the Nazi Party in 1933, Jonas, who was Jewish and a Zionist, left Germany. He passed through England and Palestine, enlisted in the British Army during the war, and returned to Germany as a soldier. Looking for his mother afterwards, he learned she had been deported to Auschwitz, and he never again lived in Germany. He taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and at Carleton University in Canada before settling in New York in 1955, where he worked at the New School for Social Research until 1976.

His work falls into three phases: studies of Gnosticism, culminating in The Gnostic Religion; a philosophical biology that tried to unite matter and mind, presented in The Phenomenon of Life (1966); and his ethics of responsibility, set out in The Imperative of Responsibility (1979). In the last he proposed a new principle: act so that the effects of your action are compatible with the permanence of genuine human life on earth. Jonas argued that technological progress had expanded human power to the point of endangering both nature and the essence of humanity, and that we must be guided by a responsible fear of future consequences. His proposals have drawn criticism for their metaphysical grounding of value, their distrust of democracy and their restrictive view of human freedom.

His influence is strongest in environmental ethics, bioethics, the debate on technology and the study of Gnosticism, where his book long served as the standard reference in English.