Hans Jonas
1903–1993 · German and American
Existentialist philosopher of gnosticism, biology, and technological ethics who reformulated moral responsibility for the technological age.
In the record
- Born
- 1903, Mönchengladbach, Germany
- Died
- 1993, New Rochelle, New York
- Training
- Philosophy and theology at University of Freiburg, University of Berlin, University of Heidelberg; PhD in Philosophy from University of Marburg (1928) on Gnosticism under Martin Heidegger
- Affiliation
- New School for Social Research, New York (Alvin Johnson Professor of Philosophy, 1955–1976); Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Carleton University; Hastings Center fellow
Key works
- The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God & the Beginnings of Christianity (1958)
- The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology (1966)
- The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of Ethics for the Technological Age (1984)
- Philosophical Essays: From Ancient Creed to Technological Man (1974)
- Mortality and Morality: A Search for the Good After Auschwitz (1996)
Sebastian reads Jonas
Jonas is one of the stranger presences in the tradition — a Heidegger student who took existential ontology somewhere Heidegger never followed, down into the body, into the living cell, into the metabolic neediness that every organism carries as its first form of intentionality. Where Heidegger heard Being in *Dasein*’s anxiety about death, Jonas heard it earlier, in the organism’s refusal to stop — in the fact that life must continuously incorporate matter from outside itself or cease. That refusal is, for Jonas, the original form of value: something matters to the organism before it can think. This makes him essential reading for anyone who finds the psyche’s affective ground — Hillman’s soul, Jung’s instinctual substrate — in need of a philosophical biology rather than a mythology. He also gives the most serious account of Gnostic dualism in the twentieth century, reading it not as heresy but as a coherent existential response to a cosmos experienced as alien. Come to Jonas when a clinical intuition about embodiment needs rigorous metaphysical footing, or when the Gnostic cosmology in a patient’s imagery wants scholarly placement.