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Ethics After Auschwitz: Hans Jonas's Notion Of INTRODUCTION ETHICS AFTER AUSCHWITZ: HANS JONAS’S NOTION OF RESPONSIBILITY IN A TECHNOLOGICAL AGE Richard Wolin It is worth pausing for a moment at the outset to refl ect on what a remarkable life Hans Jonas led. Born in Mönchengladbach, Germany, in 1903, by the age of thirty Jonas had experienced, in extremis, the full array of early twentieth-century European cultural and political turmoil: World War I (albeit as a civilian), the rising tide of Central European anti-Semitism, Germany’s collapse on the home front accompanied by civil war, the proclamation of the Weimar Republic (Germany’s fi rst), anti-democratic coup attempts from both left and right, devastating hyperinfl ation, and the Crash of 1929, followed by renewed civil strife and the ominous rise of National Socialism. Hitler’s 1933 seizure of power would plunge Germany—and Europe—into a twelve-year night- mare of dictatorship, persecutions, concentration camps, and world war. In 1934, in light of escalating levels of anti-Semitic persecution, Jonas wisely decided to emigrate to Palestine. At the time, he pledged that he would only return to Germany as part of a conquering army. As it turned out, his vow proved prophetic. In 1939, he joined the British army’s Jewish Brigade, reentering his former homeland along with the victorious allies in 1945. Three years later, in 1948, Jonas would don military garb again to fi ght in Israel’s war of independence. Weary of war, Jonas and his wife, Lore, moved to Montreal in 1949, where he began a distinguished career as a university professor. Given these life experiences, it is little wonder that Jonas perceived the twentieth century as an age of “sound and fury”: a technological Moloch, whose hallmarks were genocidal excess, totalitarianism, death camps, crematoria, industrialized mass murder, and, ultimately, the specter of nuclear annihilation—an eventuality that, if realized, could result in the effacement of human life on earth. It was in opposition to these apocalyptic developments that Jonas boldly sought to formulate a philosophical ethics appropriate to the new hyperreality of modern tech- nology. One should not underestimate the determination and tenacity 2 richard wolin it took to confront such issues amid the political claustrophobia of postwar America. The 1950s was the heyday of analytic philosophy—a movement that, under Ludwig Wittgenstein’s tutelage, viewed political apathy as a badge of honor. In Wittgenstein’s view, philosophy had noth- ing positive to contribute. Its raison d’être consisted in the elimination of “pseudo-problems.” Thus, in Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein proudly declared that, when all is said and done, “philosophy leaves every- thing as it is.”1 In Jonas’s view this complacent, Oxonian, drawing-room approach to the life of the mind was a luxury that cold war America could ill afford. In retrospect, one senses that Jonas’s entire philosophi- cal being was directed against Wittgenstein’s well-nigh embarrassing proclamation concerning philosophy’s irrelevance. Wilhelmine Germany was in many respects a golden age of Jewish upward social mobility, despite the emergence, circa 1890, of a venom- ous racial anti-Semitism. Jonas belonged to a generation of assimilated Jews who came to view such opportunities for self-advancement as a birthright. Still, the social benefi ts of assimilation frequently came at high cultural cost: the wholesale renunciation of one’s Jewish specifi c- ity—a dilemma well captured by the popular saying among Germanized Jews: “Jewish by the grace of Goethe.” Understandably, among Jonas’s generation a strong reaction against the strictures and limitations of assimilated Jewry emerged. (The renowned scholar of Jewish mysti- cism Gershom Scholem tells the story of having been expelled from his parental home once they learned that he was studying Hebrew and attending synagogue.) This Jewish cultural renaissance was spurred by the publication of Martin Buber’s Three Speeches on Judaism (1911). It reached its zenith with the founding of Buber’s and Franz Rosenzweig’s legendary center for Jewish adult education, the Freies Jüdisches Lehr- haus, in the cosmopolitan milieu of Frankfurt am Main. As a youth, Jonas partook of this storied Jewish cultural revival, tak- ing classes at Berlin’s Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums (Academy for the Science of Judaism) and cultivating an active interest in Zionism. During the early 1920s he was on the verge of emigrating to Israel. He refrained from doing so since, as we will see, his youthful outlook was beset with competing loyalties. 1 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1972), no. 123..
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