Jewish Religious Thought, the Holocaust, and Darwinism: A Comparison of Hans Jonas and Mordecai Kaplan

The writings of two twentieth-century New York-based religious thinkers, Mordecai Kaplan and Hans Jonas, shared a common concern to find an alternative approach to the problem of evil in general and to the religious challenge of the Shoah in particular. For Kaplan, the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism, it was possible to draw upon his already well-developed, scientifically augmented (or inspired) revisions of the Jewish religion and the Jewish God. For the philosopher of technology, Jonas, the revisions to the traditional categories of Jewish theology arguably followed from his struggle to make some kind of moral sense of the Holocaust in the light of his interest in the biological emergence of selfhood. At the heart of the revisions of each, however, was a kind of cosmic evolutionism that necessitated an understanding of the origins of human ethics from an evolutionary perspective. While neither could be said to have demonstrated an intimate understanding of Darwinian theory (this is especially true of Kaplan), both viewed themselves as critically engaged with it and sought to utilize Darwin in offering accounts of a genocidal world that were neither entirely naturalistic nor entirely supernatural.