CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

PHILOSOPHICAL BIOLOGY AND ENVIRONMENTALISM

Carl Mitcham

One of the distinguishing features of Hans Jonas is his combination of philosophy, religion, politics, science, and technology in insightful thought and noble action. As a student in Germany in the 1920s, he studied under major fi gures in philosophy and theology, with a doctoral dissertation that adapted Martin Heidegger’s Daseinsanalyse (analysis of Being) to demythologize early common-era Gnostic texts after the manner of Martin Bultmann’s interpretation of the Greek Christian scriptures. His deconstruction revealed the extreme dualism and world estrangement of the Gnostic religious stance—a worldview toward which Jonas felt a complex attraction and repulsion. Increas- ingly aware during this same period of the social estrangement of Jews in Europe—his mother was to be murdered in Auschwitz—he joined the Zionist movement and as the Nazis came to power immigrated to Palestine. When World War II broke out he joined the Jewish Brigade of British forces in Italy as an artillery soldier and fought his way up the Italian peninsula. In 1948 he fought again in the Israeli War of Independence. I know of no other twentieth-century philosopher of stature who so clearly exhibited such physical bravery. In the 1940s Jonas also began to refl ect on the philosophical problems of modern science, especially biology. More profoundly than Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who sought to bring the lived body within the scope of phenomenological refl ection, Jonas confronted the failure of phenom- enology to incorporate an understanding of the unique being of plants ( phuta) and animals (zoa). From the home front his wife, Eleanor, would send works on biology which he read and refl ected on in the midst of his military campaigns. In the process he increasingly noticed parallels between the inimical cosmos of Gnostic belief and the conception of an indifferent cosmos implicit in modern natural science—an opposition that has contributed to the environmental challenges of the present, from biodiversity reduction to global climate change and aspirations to the biotechnological engineering of a post-humanity. In response he 504 carl mitcham undertook an ontological examination of the organism that led eventu- ally to a fundamental ethical criticism of modern scientifi c technology. As is made clear in the posthumously published anthology Mortality and Morality,1 his mature thought repeatedly sought to build a bridge between a philosophical-religious understanding of living beings that would eschew world alienation and the challenge of acting responsibly with a technology of unprecedented power. Thus it is most appropriate that these presentations by Martin Yaffe, Lawrence Troster, and Manfred Laubichler seek to explore and extend Jonas’s thinking in relation to philosophical biology and environmentalism by considering as well the relation of his ideas and arguments to those of Baruch Spinoza, Aldo Leopold, and Ernst Cassirer, respectively. All three articles witness the fundamental effort in modern philosophy to respond to the challenge of modern natural science with the devel- opment of an alternative to a reductionist or materialist understanding of the phenomenon of life, especially as this phenomenon is manifest in human beings. The enormous explanatory force and manipulative power of mechanistic and now molecular biology often appears to reduce life to complex material interactions and/or make life irrational and meaningless. This is a challenge to which all existentially serious twentieth-century philosophy has repeatedly responded. Henri Berg- son, for instance, another philosopher of Jewish heritage and noble behavior, sought to address the problem by postulating at the core of organic evolutionary processes an unique élan vital that transcended strictly material interactions. In their turn, sociobiologists have argued for morality as another outcome of natural selection, with Edward O. Wilson, following Erich Fromm, going so far as to propose the exis- tence of a sentiment of “biophilia” to ground a human appreciation and respect for the complexities and beauties of organic phenomena.2 By contrast, affi rming what he presents as the irreducible truth of a positivist scientifi c cosmology, Bertrand Russell in “A Free Man’s Wor- ship,” fi rst published in 1903, argued That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of

1 Hans Jonas, Mortality and Morality: A Search for the Good after Auschwitz, ed. Lawrence Vogel (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1996). 2 Edward O. Wilson, Biophilia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).