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HANS JONAS and SECULAR RELIGIOSITY Ron Margolin

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HANS JONAS and SECULAR RELIGIOSITY Ron Margolin CHAPTER TEN HANS JONAS AND SECULAR RELIGIOSITY Ron Margolin Forward The epilogue to the English version of Hans Jonas’s The Gnostic Reli- gion1 reveals the connection between his studies of Gnosticism and his thoughts on modern nihilism and the problem of existential philosophy. Signifi cantly, the same chapter, titled “Gnosticism, Existentialism, and Nihilism” was included in another of his books, The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology,2 in which he elucidates the existential background of the moral weaknesses that have endangered humanity and the planet since World War II. Jonas opens this chapter with an insight into the modern human condition: Gone is the cosmos with whose immanent logic my own can feel kinship, gone the order of the whole in which man has his place. That place appears now as a sheer and brute accident. With the ejection of teleol- ogy from the system of natural causes, nature, itself purposeless, ceased to provide any sanction to possible human purposes. A Universe without an intrinsic hierarchy of being, as the Copernican universe is, leaves val- ues ontologically unsupported, and the self is thrown back entirely upon itself in its quest for meaning and value. As functions of the will, ends are solely my own creation. Will replaces vision; temporality of the act ousts the eternity of the “good in itself.” This is the Nietzschean phase of the situation in which European nihilism breaks the surface. Now man is alone with himself.3 This scientifi c concept of nature as “fact alien to value” is at the core of modern nihilism. Jonas summarizes the crisis of modern man thus: 1 Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity (London: Routledge, 1992), 230–40. 2 Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001), 211–34. 3 Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, 323–24. 232 ron margolin “Reason triumphant through science has destroyed the faith in revela- tion, without, however, replacing revelation in the offi ce of guiding our ultimate choices.”4 This is by no means a call for a return to religion, nor did Jonas believe religion per se could solve the ethical problems modern science and technology have brought upon humanity. In The Imperative of Responsibility he explains why religion and classical ethics afford no solutions to the long-term problems engendered by contem- porary science and technology, such as the consequences of genetic manipulation, the extension of the life span, and ecological damage.5 One of the tenets of secularism today is that religion cannot cope with situations that did not exist when the religions of revelation were developing. The new ethics Jonas elaborated (particularly in The Imperative of Responsibility) took on a function which religion could no longer fulfi ll, that of holding humanity accountable to future generations and safe- guarding the planet from irresponsible uses of science and technology. “Religion in eclipse cannot relieve ethics of its task; and while of faith it can be said that as a moving force it either is there or is not, of ethics it is true to say that it must be there.”6 These assertions on the important task of a new and alternative ethics in the modern world raise questions as to why Jonas wrote so extensively about theological issues and the contemporary meanings of religious texts.7 4 Hans Jonas, “Contemporary Problems in Ethics from a Jewish Perspective,” in Philosophical Essays: From Ancient Creed to Technological Man (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice- Hall, 1974), 168–82, here, 168–69. 5 Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 1–23. 6 Ibid., 23. 7 Jonas’s most essential ideas on the possibility of religious belief today can be found in these articles: “Immortality and the Modern Temper,” fi rst published in 1962; “The Concept of God after Auschwitz: A Jewish Voice,” fi rst published in 1968 and with changes in 1984; “Is Faith Still Possible? Memories of Rudolph Bultmann and Refl ections on the Philosophical Aspects of His Work,” written in 1977; and “Mat- ter, Mind, and Creation: Cosmological Evidence and Cosmogonic Speculation,” fi rst published in 1988. All these are in Hans Jonas, Morality and Mortality: A Search for the Good after Auschwitz (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1996), 115–97. See also Jonas, “Contemporary Problems in Ethic from a Jewish Perspective,”; Philosophical Essays, 168–82; Hans Jonas, “Vergangenheit und Wahrheit: Ein später Nachtrag zu den sogenannten Gottesbeweisen,” in idem, Gedanken über Gott (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1994), 5–25 (fi rst published 1990/91); Hans Jonas, “Heidegger and Theology,” in idem, The Phenomenon of Life, 235–61 (paper delivered in 1964). .
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