Towards the end of his life, Hans Jonas increasingly pondered the relationship between man and nature.
Philosopher Hans Jonas traveled to Italy at the end of January 1993. He went on to receive a major recognition, the Premio Nonino Award.
Jonas gave a speech at the awards ceremony. Six days later, he died. He was 89 years old.
During his more than sixty-year career, Hans Jonas had published a thick stack of books and articles. He had studied Gnosticism and Martin Heidegger, among others. He had wondered whether the idea of God was possible at all after Auschwitz.
Many of the topics were directly related to Jonas ’own experiences. Heidegger had supervised Jonas’ dissertation at the University of Marburg in Germany in the late 1920s. A few years later, Jonas had fled Germany and Heidegger had joined the Nazi party.
The Nazis had killed Jonas’ mother in the Auschwitz concentration camp. Hans Jonas had joined the British Army Jewish Brigade and fought on the front lines against the Nazis. In 1955, he had moved to New York.
In his last speech, Hans Jonas did not talk about the Nazis, God, or Heidegger.
He spoke on a subject on which we are finally and finally waking up.
His life towards the end, Hans Jonas increasingly pondered the relationship between man and nature. He drew up his own philosophy of nature, a kind of existential interpretation of the realities of nature described by Darwin.
According to Jonas, all living beings accomplished their own inner purpose, but only man had the ability to observe himself. And therefore only man had the responsibility and duty to take care of everything else.
In the last speech of his life, Hans Jonas spoke of a tortured earth and man’s excessive desire to exploit his inventions at the expense of the ecological balance of the planet.
Mankind’s most important duty in a period of drastic technological development and the destruction of nature is to take care of the survival of the possibilities of life on our planet, Jonas said.
Philosopher was deeply concerned, but he was not desperate.
Hans Jonas ended his speech with a demand he made on each of us. We must join forces and fight against all of us with a threat of destruction.
Plants and animals cannot speak for themselves. We humans need to listen to the cry of dumb creatures.
The author is the editor of HS’s Sunday delivery.
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