The Life and Thought of Hans Jonas: Jewish Dimensions (review)

In Germany, during the early decades of the twentieth century, there was one of the greatest flourishings of Jewish intellectual life. Martin Buber, Gershom Scholem, Hans Jonas, Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse (and many others) came to intellectual maturity in the period just around and after World War I. All of them fled from Germany with the virulent rise of antisemitism and the Nazis. Scholem, Buber, and Jonas, who were committed Zionists, made their way to Palestine. Others like Strauss, Arendt, and Benjamin first moved to Paris. Arendt and Strauss managed to escape to the United States; Benjamin committed suicide just after he had been turned back at the Spanish border. Adorno and Marcuse, who were members of the famous Frankfurt Institute of Social Research, moved to New York when the Institute was relocated there. What is so remarkable about these thinkers is not only the sheer concentration of talent but the profound influence that they have had on shaping the cultural life of Europe and the United States during the twentieth century.

Hans Jonas, whose book, The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics in a Technological Age, became a best seller when it was originally published in Germany in 1979, is still barely known and appreciated in America, even though he was appointed Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research in 1955 and lived in the United States until his death in 1993. Born in 1903, he came from a liberal middle class “post-assimilationist” German-Jewish family whose Jewishness was expressed primarily in a sense of Jewish belonging rather than in religious practices. But as a student in gymnasium (secondary school), he joined the local Zionist circle. He went on to study philosophy and theology with Martin Heidegger and Rudolf Bultmann and wrote his doctoral dissertation on Gnosticism under the supervision of Heidegger. But just when his dissertation—a path-breaking work—was about to be published, Hitler came to power. Bitterly disappointed by the capitulation of Heidegger, who became rector of Freiburg under the Nazis, Jonas left Germany for Palestine vowing never to return to Germany unless as a soldier of a conquering army. In his youth he had “dreams of glory” that he would help lead a conquering army to redeem the dignity and honor of the Jewish people who had been so humiliated by the Nazis. In 1939 when World War II broke out, Jonas issued a manifesto to his fellow Jews to join the fight against the Nazis. He hoped there would be an international Jewish army fighting Hitlerism under the Jewish flag. He subsequently joined the famous Jewish Brigade of the British Army. At the end of the war, Jonas returned as a soldier to Germany and discovered that his book on Gnosticism was being hailed as a major scholarly achievement. He also confirmed that his mother had been murdered in Auschwitz. Jonas returned to Palestine, and during the Israeli-Arab conflict, at the age of forty-five, he was drafted into the Israeli army and lived through the siege of Jerusalem. After all these years as a soldier fighting wars to defend the honor and survival of the Jewish people, Jonas longed to return to the scholarly life. When he was offered an academic position in Canada in 1949, he was happy to accept it. Even though he was finally offered a professorship at the Hebrew University in 1951, he decided to stay with his family in North America.

Jonas, who had spent so much of the war years confronting the horrors of death, became increasingly concerned with the sanctity of life and the miracle of creation. In 1966, he published The Phenomenology of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology—a work that helped to lay the foundations for the field of bioethics. He also severely criticized his former teacher Heidegger for what he took to be the...