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The remarkable life and work of German-Jewish philosopher Hans Jonas have remained largely unknown in the English-speaking world. To the extent that he is noticed at all, it is by students of theology and ancient Christianity, for whom his 1958 study of Gnosticism, The Gnostic Religion, remains an important text. The relative indifference to Jonas’s later work is both unfortunate and surprising, considering the influence he has had on one of the most widely discussed political movements today: environmentalism. Published in German in 1979, Jonas’s book The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age became a European best seller and helped galvanize the continent’s nascent green movement. In Germany, his words have been echoed by politicians and intellectuals alike, and the German Green Party, founded in 1980, eventually rose to become the most successful organization dedicated to the environment in the world, sitting in the German federal government from 1995 to 2001. For environmentalists in Europe, and for many global activists, Jonas’s “ecological imperative,” which he articulated as “Act so that the effects of your action are compatible with the permanence of genuine human life,” has become something of an article of faith.
The remarkable life and work of German-Jewish philosopher Hans Jonas have remained largely unknown in the English-speaking world. To the extent that he is noticed at all, it is by students of theology and ancient Christianity, for whom his 1958 study of Gnosticism, The Gnostic Religion, remains an important text. The relative indifference to Jonas’s later work is both unfortunate and surprising, considering the influence he has had on one of the most widely discussed political movements today: environmentalism. Published in German in 1979, Jonas’s book The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age became a European best seller and helped galvanize the continent’s nascent green movement. In Germany, his words have been echoed by politicians and intellectuals alike, and the German Green Party, founded in 1980, eventually rose to become the most successful organization dedicated to the environment in the world, sitting in the German federal government from 1995 to 2001. For environmentalists in Europe, and for many global activists, Jonas’s “ecological imperative,” which he articulated as “Act so that the effects of your action are compatible with the permanence of genuine human life,” has become something of an article of faith.
In his native Europe, Jonas has long been recognized as an important and influential thinker. In 1987, he received both the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade and the Federal Republic of Germany’s Medal of Honor. Shortly before his death in 1993, he was awarded the prestigious Italian Premio Nonino. The Berlin-based Hans Jonas Center continues to research and discuss his work in relation to such questions as climate change, globalization, and theology. Elsewhere, however, Jonas remains somewhat obscure, something which the two books here under review attempt to rectify.
The first, Memoirs: Hans Jonas, was not, in fact, written by Jonas. It was compiled from the transcriptions of a series of conversations with Jonas about his life and work, held in Munich over two weeks in 1989, and taped by admirers Stephen Sattler and Rachel Salamander. These conversations have been ably edited and annotated by the historian Christian Wiese, who has thankfully added such previously unpublished material as Jonas’s intellectually penetrating and noble appeal, “Our Part in this War: A Word to Jewish Men,” written in Jerusalem in September 1939, and his philosophical letters to his wife, Lore Jonas, sent to her in 1944-1945 while Jonas was serving with the Jewish Brigade Group in Italy.
Wiese is the author of the second book, The Life and Thought of Hans Jonas: Jewish Dimensions, in which he takes up the complex question of the extent to which Jonas’s intense moral and ethical struggle with the questions of human well-being, the effects of modern technology, and even the persistence of life itself was a consequence of the “Jewish dimensions” of his life and thought. It is to be hoped that, thanks at least in part to these two volumes, the thinker who grappled with these complex questions will not remain obscure much longer.
Steven Grosby is a contributing editor of AZURE and a professor of religion at Clemson University.
