On the 30th Anniversary of the Death of Hans Jonas

5 February 2023 is the 30th anniversary of the death of Hans Jonas.
 

Hans Jonas was born on 10 May 1903 in Mönchengladbach. He was one of the most important German-Jewish philosophers of the 20th century and majorly advanced the fields of phenomenology and practical ethics; he is considered one of the ground-breaking theorists of the international ecological movement. In 1933, he fled the National Socialists and emigrated first to Great Britain and Israel and finally to the USA, where he conducted research and taught at institutions such as the renowned New School for Social Research.

Hans Jonas’ magnum opus The Imperative of Responsibility is one of the most important works of modern philosophy. The ecological imperative, developed by Jonas in reference to Kant, represents a radical ethics of ecological responsibility to which individuals, corporations and governments are subjected alike. When The Imperative of Responsibility was published in 1979, the concept of the greenhouse effect had not yet entered the public consciousness. Today, the effects of climate change are evident: floods in warm winters, forest fires in dry summers. But in his standard work of environmental ethics, Jonas already gave answers to pressing moral questions four decades ago and they are now, thanks to the »Fridays for Future« movement, back at the top of the agenda: Are we responsible for humanity’s continued existence on Earth? Does each and every one of us share in that responsibility? And how can nations and their institutions be forced to act?

Apart from environmental ethics, Jonas was also »one of the first philosophers in America to take questions of medical ethics seriously back in the mid-1960s«, said Daniel Callahan, philosopher and former director of the Hastings Center, a research organization devoted to biomedical ethics, in Jonas’ obituary in the New York Times. »He made important contributions on the question of the definition of death and on the moral problems of the use of human beings for medical research. He was thus one of the pioneers in the field of biomedical ethics.«

To learn more about Hans Jonas’ biography in his own words, we highly recommend his Memoirs, the moving documentation of a life that spanned almost the entire 20th century. Jonas vividly talks about Jewish life in the Weimar Republic, about his emigration to Palestine, his military service in a Jewish brigade of the British Army, his travels through a destroyed Germany and his time in Canada and the USA, where he wrote The Imperative of Responsibility.

Hans Jonas died in New Rochelle, New York, at age 89.