Hans Jonas 1903 – 1993

Hans Jonas was a German-Jewish philosopher, a student of Husserl, Heidegger, and Bultmann, who emigrated first to Palestine and then to North America. After early work on Gnosticism and the philosophy of life, he turned in his later years to an ethics adequate to the unprecedented powers of modern technology. The Imperative of Responsibility argues that traditional ethics, oriented toward the near-term and toward face-to-face encounters, is inadequate to a civilization whose actions can affect distant generations and the integrity of the biosphere. His thought has been foundational for environmental ethics and bioethics.

Hans Jonas was born in 1903 at Monchengladbach in the Rhineland into a Jewish industrialist family. He studied philosophy and theology at Freiburg and Marburg under Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Rudolf Bultmann, writing his doctoral thesis on the concept of gnosis (1928). Convinced after 1933 that German Jews were finished in their old country, he moved to Britain and then to Palestine, where he served from 1940 in the British Army's Jewish Brigade and again in 1948 in the Israeli War of Independence.

His writings divide into three main periods: the studies of ancient Gnosticism that culminated in The Gnostic Religion (1958); the philosophy of biology and organism, especially The Phenomenon of Life (1966); and the late ethical-political writings led by The Imperative of Responsibility (Das Prinzip Verantwortung, 1979) and Mortality and Morality (posthumous, 1996). He taught from 1955 at the New School for Social Research in New York until his retirement.

Jonas argued that the unprecedented scale of technological power demands a new ethics — the responsibility of humanity for the continuation of authentic human life on earth — and reframed the philosophy of organism around the metabolic, vulnerable, mortal living being. His break with Heidegger over the latter's complicity with National Socialism, articulated in moving essays of his last years, shaped postwar German ecological and bioethical thought. He died at New Rochelle, New York in February 1993.