An Interview with Professor Hans Jonas

IN THE spring of 1990, the author conducted an interview spanning four long mornings with Professor Hans Jonas at his home in New Rochelle, New York. Professor Jonas taught philosophy at the New School for Social Research from 1955 to 1976. Several of his articles were originally published in Social Research. The interview was to serve as background for an expository and journalistic piece concerning Professor Jonas’s thought, with particular attention to The Imperative of Responsibility. The primary purpose of the essay would have been to analyze that work and to bring it to the attention of a wider American audience. To this day, The Imperative of Responsibility has achieved much greater attention in Europe—and in Germany and France especially—than in the United States, where Professor Jonas had, at the time of the interview , lived and worked for approximately 40 years. The interview itself was not intended for publication. Professor Jonas’s work is usually divided into three periods: an early one of gnosis studies (The Gnostic Religion [Boston: Beacon Press, 1958]), a period of work concerning the development of a philosophical approach to biological phenomena (The Phenomenon of Life [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966]), and a late period of applied philosophy in which ethical questions— particularly those raised by technology and the new relationships of man to the earth and to his own nature that modern technology has brought in its train—are treated (Philosophical Essays [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974] and The Imperative of Responsibility [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984]). From Jonas’s point of view, the period of gnosis studies represented an immersion in a representative form of Western dualism in which SOCIAL RESEARCH, Vol. 70, No. 2 (Summer 2003) An Interview with Professor Hans Jonas HARVEY SCODEL 340 SOCIAL RESEARCH photo tk the human subject is radically distinct from God or being and from nature. The middle stage represents an attempt to overcome dualism. The final period, characterized by the “heuristics of fear,” is generally a treatment of problems occasioned by technology and the contemporary world that must be addressed for a satisfying and philosophical human life to remain possible. The interviewer’s acquaintance with the work of Hans Jonas began when he was an undergraduate at the University of California , Santa Cruz. Jonas’s work is characterized by its seriousness of purpose in the search for truth and by its clarity of expression. The extracts from the interview published here cannot, and were not intended to do justice to the beauty to be found in Professor Jonas’s books and articles, most of which amply repay repeated reading. On the occasion of the centenary of Professor Jonas’s birth, Social Research decided that the publication of portions of the interview transcript would provide a suitable, although hardly adequate, commemoration of Professor Jonas’s legacy. Liberties have been taken with the wording of the interviewer’s questions (some have been shortened and made more intelligible ), as well as with the sequence of the conversation. The transcript printed represents approximately one-third of the entire transcript. Professor Jonas’s words have been emended as little as possible, but they have in some cases been altered by the interviewer to make the English more idiomatic. Minor grammatical infelicities, redundancies, a tendency to use German word order, and the anacoloutha that are inevitable in prolonged and somewhat informal oral discourse have been removed. Words in brackets have been supplied by the interviewer to complete the sense of a passage or to indicate nonverbal actions. In no case has the editorial process described occasioned any material distortion of Prof. Jonas’s meaning. —Harvey Scodel INTERVIEW WITH HANS JONAS 341 I. Biographical/The Economy of Life/Theory and Practice Question: I wonder if you could tell me something about the extent of your Jewish education before you went to Palestine. Jonas: I come from a Jewish family where a certain liberal Judaism was practiced in the house. We observed the High Holidays , and occasionally a Sabbath service on Friday nights. But we had religious instruction and my father played a certain role in the Jewish Gemeinde, synagogue. I had a great uncle, the uncle of...