The Phenomenon of Life

by Hans Jonas, Lawrence Vogel (Foreword by), Eleonore Jonas (Creator)

One of the most prominent thinkers of his generation, Hans Jonas wrote on topics as diverse as the philosophy of biology, ethics, social philosophy, cosmology, and Jewish theology -- always with a view to understanding morality as the root of our moral responsibility to safeguard humanity's future. A classic of phenomenology and existentialism and arguably Jonas's greatest work, The Phenomenon of Life sets forth a systematic and comprehensive philosophy -- an existential interpretation of biological facts laid out in support of Jonas's claim that mind is prefigured throughout organic existence.

At the center of this philosophy is an attack on the fundamental assumptions underlying modern philosophy since Descartes, primarily dualism. Dissenting from the dualistic view of value as a human projection onto nature, Jonas's critique affirms the classical view that being harbors the good. In a brilliant synthesis of the ancient and modern, Jonas draws upon existential philosophy to justify core insights of the classical tradition. This critique transcends the historical limits of its phenomenological methodology and existential ethical stance to take its place among the most scientifically nuanced contemporary accounts of moral nature. It lays the foundation for an ethic of responsibility grounded in an assignment by Being to protect the natural environment that has allowed us to spring from it.

Genres: Philosophy, Science, Biology, Nonfiction, Evolution, Nature, Essays

304 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1966

About the author

Hans Jonas was a German and American philosopher whose work bridged existentialism, theology, philosophy of biology, and ethics. Born in Mönchengladbach to a Jewish family, he studied philosophy and theology at Freiburg, Berlin, Heidelberg, and Marburg, earning his doctorate under Martin Heidegger with a thesis on Gnosticism, and counted Edmund Husserl and Rudolf Bultmann among his advisors. He maintained a lifelong friendship with Hannah Arendt. Jonas left Germany in 1933 due to the Nazi rise to power, moving to England, then Palestine, where he married Lore Weiner and served in the British Army’s Jewish Brigade during World War II. After briefly teaching at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he moved to North America, teaching at Carleton University and then holding the Alvin Johnson Professorship at the New School for Social Research from 1955 to 1976, later serving as Eric Voegelin Visiting Professor at the University of Munich. His major works include The Gnostic Religion, The Phenomenon of Life, and The Imperative of Responsibility, the latter formulating a moral imperative to act in ways that preserve genuine human life. Influenced by Heidegger yet critical of him, Jonas shaped bioethics, environmental philosophy, and philosophical understandings of life, technology, and human responsibility, emphasizing that ethical reflection must guide human action in a technologically complex world.

Reviews

[Alina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thoughts from my second time reading this book:

From my perspective, out of the 12 essays, only 2 of them have relevance to philosophy of mind. The rest consist in Jonas's riffing about his feelings about how humans ought to live, and in defending Christianity in the face of natural science. Let me summarize the key ideas in those 2 worthwhile chapters.

In chapter 4 "To move and to feel: on the animal soul" picking up the thread from Aristotle, Jonas starts off in his theory of mind from the point that animals are mobile, perceptive, and emotional, unlike plants; these three dimensions of existence are what, for Jonas, essentially distinguish animals from plants, and are the conceptual starting points for figuring out how consciousness works. Jonas sketches out how perception and action allow animals to be more free, and to have a sense of an individual selfhood. When one can move towards and away from things in one's environment, this makes it possible to undertake temporally extended pursuits; these may involve various steps, each of which now may demand for a particular task or purpose, involving different emotions. This change is concomitant with a psychic "distance" between one's urge, and the satisfaction of that urge. Plants, which lack the mobility of animals, cannot experience this psychic distance. Their roots are directly webbed into the soil, where nutrients come up; there is no physical distance between the plant and the things it needs to survive, and so there is also no psychic distance between need and satisfaction. Plants cannot desire.

Deferred fulfillment of an urge or want makes desire possible. Desire always comes with fear; the two are sides of the same coin. When the animal's self is individuated from its environment, and so it has distance from the goods it desires, it both desires those goods, which are not yet attained; and because they are not yet attained, there is always risk or uncertainty regarding whether the desired outcome will come about. This uncertainty is the basis of fear. So with the individuation of self comes freedom, which implies both desire and fear. This freedom also includes freedom from being conscious of and pursuing solely metabolic aims, like satisfying thirst and hunger. There are now various different aims one can take up, which might be understood as initially aims relativized to steps found in the temporally extended trajectories needed to be taken to satisfy metabolic needs; but one can imagine how these diverse aims can come to be ends in themselves, as opposed to means to metabolic ends.

The only other worthwhile chapter is 6, "Image-making and the freedom of man." There, Jonas examines the human phenomenon of fashioning images. (I took much of this exploration as a placeholder for talking about the imagination, as a mental activity that need not involve material expression; I was surprised that Jonas did not raise this extensions of his discussion). What is a visual image? It has visual likeness to some other thing that it represents. It is produced with the intention that it has this representational function. The likeness isn't complete; there are differences between it and the thing that it represents. This incompleteness, concerning the visual similarity, is expressive of intentional selection. When we make images, we will present only the features that seem most relevant or significant to us. The more visual detail that is presented need not correspond with enhancing the image's capacity to represent the thing; rather, the way in which a person making the image selects which features to present, and the exact way in which these features are rendered, modulate the image's representative capacity. (It is interesting to think of why this is the case; Richard Moran gets at this point in his paper about make-believe emotion in respond to Kendall Walton's paper. Moran talks about how rhetorical devices at large are directly responsive for conjuring imaginings that are more vivid or intense, rather than the literal realism of the artwork. He also doesn't explain why this is the case exactly. I won't explore this issue much here, but I'll mention that perhaps many rhetorical devices can be explained by a combination of appeal to cross-modal 'perception' and evolutionarily-given 'affect programs'; certain forms of stimuli will automatically trigger certain affect, given our evolved responses, and these stimuli can be understood as relating different sensory/cognitive modalities; a certain color, for example, can conjure a certain action or event type, which is more explanatorily immediate in relation to the affect that is triggered. This is all very preliminary, and it'd be fun to investigate these issues further.)

Jonas thinks the capacity for an image to represent something is based in the audience's capacity to recognize the intention of the person who made the image. Some degree of visual similitude between image and thing in the world is key for this recognition, but then there are many symbolic and cultural conventions that can allow for 'communication' between image-maker and audience; there's a shared 'lexicon' regarding what sort of visual gesture is supposed to be expression of what sort of intention.

Jonas points out how any image or representation itself is "unsubstantial" and so cannot endanger us, or unleash any real consequences upon us. This implies that we will apprehend the thing, when represented in the image, as not connected to the past, present, or future. It appears in a timeless form. (I think that that the thing qua represented by an image cannot harm us, and is timeless, is suggestive of further facts about our experience in relation to it; we are freed up from having to attend to all the issues that'd be entailed if it were apprehended as part of reality, for example.) This timeless quality implies that one image can represent an indefinite number of objects, just as one object can be represented across an indefinite number of images.

Jonas points out that we can always choose to deviate from accurately representing the object, when we make an image. He talks about this as our capacity to "transcend actual reality"; this is a lovely and evocative phrase, I think.

Jonas examines our "experience of truth," in light of his discussion of images and representations. Without explanation, he assumes his points about visual representation hold for linguistic representation (while I don't think he is wrong in the conclusions he draws here, it would've been nice if he walked us through the differences and places of continuity between the two kinds of representation; Sartre does this very nicely in The Imaginary). The notion of truth becomes relevant only once we have an unanticipated experience of error or uncertainty. Jonas analyzes this in terms of that "freedom" is a precondition for experiencing truth; our freedom here is a matter of being able to change how we behold a representation, from the initial state of the representation as transparently giving us reality, to the later state of that it is erroneous or uncertain.

Jonas thinks that the most basic cases of falsehood are perceptual error and lying. (This is a fascinating suggestion; perceptual error and lying are very different types of error, and if they are indeed the ontogenetic basis of our various adult ways of understanding what it means for something to be false, analyzing each case, and how they might relate, could be helpful. Jonas does not go into any depth on this matter.)

So Jonas claims that Heidegger is wrong to think that truth is fundamentally a matter of un-concealing or disclosing; rather, according to Jonas, it is a matter of un-deceiving yourself. It is delusion, rather than opaqueness or ignorance, which is the first obstacle towards truth. (I think the two thinkers are simply talking about different notions of truth. There is a matter of truth v. falsity, and then there's a matter of clarifying or deepening one's understanding. It might be interesting to investigate whether one is primary over the other, and how the two relate, but I will not do that here. Preliminarily, perhaps Heidegger's sense of truth is indeed primary; only when we find ourselves in a contradiction, once we explore and disclose something further, do we then posit falsity, which makes way for truth defined in Jonas's sense.)

Now, I will ramble a bit about thoughts I had while reading these chapters. I was most fascinated by implications Jonas's claims about visual images has for making sense of the imagination or thought. I wonder whether make-believing is developmentally prior or subsequent to imagining at large. Probably the latter. It makes sense that in earnest attempts to represent something, we can make mistakes, or see that others in our community mis-apprehends which object it represents. This may inspire purposive misrepresentation, which is just make-believe. There is delight in this, insofar as we’re led to think one thing but it’s surprised. The context of dealing with representations takes advantage of our primitive affect of surprise and interest, and since it’s a safe context, i.e., it is not part of real life where things are at stake, we can respond with taking pleasure, with laughing.

I was interested in Jonas's claims regarding the incompleteness of any visual image. Always there are details of the real object omitted. In the case of the imagination, as opposed to material images, perhaps any imaging, even the most automatic or spontaneous ones, can serve as a filter onto manifest reality. Our implicit or unconsciously activated interests/desires come to cast their shadows, make themselves visible, via how exactly the object or state of affairs is represented, or which of their features constitute them in our imagining, to speak a bit metaphorically. This would be a nice implication; it would shows moreover how our sense of reality is indeed dynamic, how emotion regulation may happen, and what freedom may look like. We can play around with which of our interests are activated, when we imagine, and this allows for a genuine randomness, from the chaos of emergence, which is nevertheless consciously governed by our agency, of which any of our interests is part.

I also like to think about spontaneous thought and imagining as not capturing reality for its visual dimension, but for its affective/emotional dimension. Jonas only focuses on only visual representation. Pure affect is hugely generic or underdetermined. So if thought and imagination transact with "affective contours" of the objects they represent, as opposed to their visual contours, this makes way for ever more creativity and freedom. Affect, as more underdetermined than vision, can bring forth to mind a more wide range of objects and states of affairs to be associated with that which is focally represented in imagination or thought. This range of objects will then set constraints for further adjustments or saliency-measures for perceptions and thoughts alike.

To extend this line of thought, of shifting representation's basis from its visual dimension to its affective dimension—it's interesting to think about how when we imagine an object, there are now many different ‘significances’ it object can have, relative to our many different interests and tasks. These significances are not distinctive of any sensory faculty, but correspond to our overall embodied being, with projects and cares. So in imagination, objects can be represented for different meanings, just as in visual drawing, an object can be represented for different visual aspects.

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Thoughts from my first time reading this book:

This is one of the most profound books I've read these past years. By profundity, I refer to that Jonas's ideas are radically countercultural, extremely convincing, and morally crucial to the development of modern thought and humanity's role in nature. Jonas's writing style is also incredibly beautiful, even literary, and yet does not suffer loss in clarity or philosophical rigor. If you care about having an enlightened perspective on our modern scientific era; having morality grounded in a substantial and, if I dare say, absolute way; or having your concept of the human species revolutionized in a manner that is ennobling and yet naturalistic -- please, I urge you, read this book.

Let me summarize Jonas's key ideas. Jonas provides a theory of biological life, of the essential properties of it that distinguish it from inanimate matter. All living systems are driven by homeostatic processes and have the proper function of preserving their life form. They must take in energy and expel waste, for example, to survive. Jonas then provides a theory of the differences between plants, non-human animals, and humans. Plants always have direct contact with the source of their essential nutrients; their vital needs are necessarily satisfied, as long as they are living in apt conditions (e.g. their roots make direct contact with nutritious soil; leaves with sunlight; etc.).

In contrast, animals do not have such endless and guaranteed supplies. They are set at a distance from objects that will satisfy vital needs. This distance is crucial. This distance allows for animals to have desires, since satisfaction not immediate, and to act on their desires. Most strikingly, this distance allows for animals to perceive a world that is separate from themselves; the subject/object dichotomy emerges. This world is populated by objects that have values relative to the animal's vital needs (e.g. some objects are attractive and others repulsive, depending on whether they will help or hinder the animal's survival). Finally, this distance allows for animals to have freedom; the satisfaction of any desire requires the animal to act, face challenges, and overcome. This amounts to a freedom that plants and non-organic matter do not have. This freedom is paradoxical, however, in that it stems from necessity; the condemnation to have desirable objects separate from oneself, and to have desires and needs to begin with.

Humans are distinguished from non-human animals on one major respect. We have cognitive capacities that allow us to radically expand the distance that separates ourselves from desired objects. Particularly, we are not confined to the immediate world that surrounds us; we can represent this world in pictures and language, and such representations allow us to see objects anew, alter our desires, and regulate our behaviors. Thus, this greater distance entails greater freedom. Moreover, we can also represent ourselves, not only the world. Non-human animals are constrained to apprehending objects found in the world; in contrast, we humans can take our very attitude towards objects as our object of apprehension. This magnifies our freedom. But it also magnifies our suffering; self-awareness comes with the possibility of despair, guilt, anxiety, and so on.

This covers only the four chapters of the book (chapters 1, 4, 6, 7). Chapter 2, 3, 5, and 8 present historical analyses of fundamental assumptions in natural science. Jonas shows that our basic scientific concepts (e.g. energy, causation) and criteria of scientific explanation (e.g. that an explanation details causal relations between different factors) are biased by the shadow of metaphysical dualism, which began with Gnostic religions and Christianity. Those religions framed human thought to conceive of a radical difference between the soul and the material world, and our contemporary science has kicked out the soul but preserves the conception of the material world -- which was originally formulated on the basis of its contrast with the soul. So, our idea of matter and nature presupposes the idea of soul. Religious thinking has snuck into our scientific materialism.

Chapters 9, 10, and 11 focuses on Jonas's view of morality and value, which follows from his theory of biological life and his critiques of modern science. All living systems have a natural function towards self-preservation. So we have an obligation to protect life. This obligation is not based in our subjective or cultural assumptions. It is rather commanded by nature itself. Here is the only part where I diverge from Jonas's position. I think his premises are insufficient to purchase that conclusion. The conclusion that can be legitimately made is that this obligation is commanded by all living systems; in other words, this obligation is grounded in not merely human practices, but in the views and needs of the various species that inhabit this world. This amended conclusion, however, is still a radical one.

[J.Aleksandr Wootton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Extraordinary, if a little uneven, as collections of essays and lectures tend to be. In most chapters, Jonas writes in a smooth, accessible style, which is critically important for this sort of philosophy. In a few places, he does unfortunately descend into the kind of needlessly-convoluted vocabulary and sentence construction characteristic of academics who wish to obscure how little they really have to say: in other words, you can tell when Jonas "didn't have time to make it shorter." But it isn't for lack of something to say. Not at all.

Jonas methodically debunks dualism and naturalism on the basis of biology, arguing that mind arises symbiotically with primitive multicellular life, a necessary corollary to nonadjacent sensory perception and motility, in other words, with desire. This startling clarification finds a portion of its source in Jonas' earlier work on Gnosticism, which introduced mind/body dualism into Western thought through the notion that people are immortal souls trapped in corrupted matter. Gnostic dualism has retained a firm grip on both popular and educated Western thought for centuries, mainly, Jonas says, due to Descarte.

(I suspect that Gnostic ideas had introduced subtle corruptions into the metaphysics of all three major Abrahamic faiths centuries earlier, but perhaps these would not have survived in the absence of Descarte's influence. We see a secularized version today quite starkly in science fiction, in the concept that with the right technology, a person's essential self could be transferred out of the biological body and into a synthetic one, yet lose nothing important in translation).

I'm extremely grateful for the gift of this book; it was a perfect follow-on to John Haught's God After Darwin, as Haught leans on Jonas for parts of his argument. Highly recommended.

[Ashjay · Rating 5 out of 5]

I stumbled upon this book at a very opportune moment in my life. In my drive towards understanding the nature of reality I had been recently engrossed in certain problems of a philosophical nature that had to do with the inadequacy of the metaphysical presuppositions of the scientific worldview in doing justice to the phenomenon of life and mind. I always suspected that our scientific models would gain much if the current scientific paradigm engaged in a critical re examination of its own foundations. This would not only help it reframe the phenomenon of life in terms more suited to its own concrete factuality but also help circumscribe the domain of applicability of principles like reductionism, extrinsic causality, the persistence of identity in the notion of substance and wholes taken as being no more than sums of their parts, all notions which, while being demonstrably effective in the analysis of non-living nature as such, inevitably hit against the outer limit of their pragmatic usefulness when confronted with the phenomenon of life. I approached this book keeping in view three primary problems which directly pertained to these lines of thought, namely:

1. The Mind-Body Problem and it's contemporary reframing as The Hard Problem of Consciousness
2. The nature of causality in light of the devastating critique of Hume and the insufficiency of Kant's transcendental solution.
3. The inadequacy of mechanistic models in Biology and the machine metaphor in general.

This book not only contains a highly original discussion of the aforementioned problems but also brought to light certain connections between them that I had only vaguely perceived beforehand. It went on to reveal their inner unity in the same prevalent but deficient worldview which came about as a result of misfired attempts to understand the nature of being qua being and the ontological priority of death over life that reigns in our current historical epoch in the form of materialistic monism. The book helped me understand the necessity for Whitehead to posit the role of 'causal efficacy' in contrast to 'presentational immediacy' as the more original and prior mode of perception that fades out of view in the dominant mode of perception, e.g vision in which the object presents itself to a passive subject in a form entirely divorced from its causal nexus. This causal nexus can be directly felt in the proprioceptive feelings of the living body, whose significance was entirely missed by Hume and whose wider application to nature at large is unthinkable for science as it stands now as it would be an instance of the sin of anthropomorphism. The book highlights the nature of the practise of science as pushing anti-anthropomorphism to its ultimate limit in which man and the scientific observer himself comes to be viewed from this perspective thereby nullifying the validity of his own reasoning as a thinking subject by a performative contradiction in a form of reductio ad absurdum.

Another feature of the book is it's exemplification of these philosophical problems not as isolated conceptual curiosities but as moments in a historical process that reminds one of Hegel's dialectics. Instead of the naive view of science progressing by a gradual accumulation of its qualities in a linear fashion, the complex reality of an oscillatory movement in which knowledge struggles to articulate the nature of being via a process close to:
A. Discovering a tention within a pre existing monism with attempts at concealment in order to preserve the original unity.
B. The tention erupting into a polarity which can no longer be suppressed. Attempts to eliminate the polarity by a reduction of one side to the other.
C. A dualism in which the polarity is acknowledged but cleanly separated into two parallel domains.
D. A synthesis that respects the original tention and yet results into a higher unity.

Hans Jonas explains how the various attempts at understanding the nature of being, despite being seemingly contingent products of prolific geniuses at critical junctures in history, still can be viewed as moments of a grand historical dialectic, thus revealing the imminent necessity of their contingent eruption in time.

The rigour and depth of the book in the treatment of its subject matter is matched only in its broad scope that ranges from discussions of the aforementioned problems to a treatment of gnosticism and it's relation with contemporary nihilism and existentialism. This is fitting for a book that re examines the nature of being and man not in terms of the tyranny of abstraction but in the concrete corporeality of man qua man. It affirms the intuition that an analysis of man can only be adequate if it gives voice to his being-in-the-world instead of falling prey to a deficient abstract system that suffers from Whitehead's fallacy of misplaced concreteness.

That being said I disagree with Jonas's contentions with Whitehead's philosophical scheme. Michael Levin's work has shown that postulating the properties of life as universal to 'being' as such with the difference being of degree rather than kind is a valid postulate that is not in conflict with empirical findings, assuming that you take the principle of least action in physics as an exemplar of its minimal yet fundamental incidence in nature.

Finally, by analysing the psychological undercurrents that held sway in the era in which gnosticism sprung up in history, Jonas digs deep underneath the surface mythology of the gnostics and reveals how it sprang from their worldview of alienation from the cosmos. Something being repeated in the modern era after the loss of the horizon of transcendence that was lamented by Nietzsche. It shows how the improper relations of part to whole in which there is a tyrannical supremacy of one side over the other gives way to an ontology of power in which domination can be overcome either by passive resignation to fate as in spinozism / stoicism or rebellious yet frightened self assertion as in existentialism, Heideggerian being-towards-death or gnosticism.

Reading this book was nothing short of an intellectual tour de force. As everything began to fall into place I experienced what can only be described like an aesthetic experience of consummated rational contemplation. To fully appreciate the subtle points of the arguments of this book one should be familiar with basic philosophy but I would recommend it highly to anyone sufficiently curious.

[Thomas Lønn Hammer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Now that is philosophy! Difficult, poetical, groundbreaking and manages to take the reader beneath axiomatic assumptions. Countercultural yet convincing, without being overly dramatic.

This is a collection of essays, not a systematic overview of an all-encompassing philosophical outlook. The most important essay to me is the first one, as it managed to completely change my perspective on a very deep dualism: idealism versus materialism - mind vis a vis matter - and the interaction between them. Jonas argues that this dualism, crystallized in the Cartesian cogito ergo sum, which categorically and absolutely separates mind and matter (substance dualism), has a neat and traceable history which prefigures it.

It goes along the lines of: in the oldern days, man's being in the world was non-abstract, non-philosophical, there was not a theoretical model for his existence. It was rather simply given to him, and there was axiomatic assumptions embedded in him which he was unable to challenge by thought. Phenomenologically speaking, the world - existence as such - was something that was alive, all of it: “When man first began to interpret the nature of things - and this he did when he began to be man - life was to him everywhere, and being the same as being alive … Soul flooded the whole of existence and encountered itself in all things.” Philosophically speaking, our early existence was characterized by what Jonas calls a "panvitalistic monism". Existence was identical with life, the negation of life - death - was unthinkable.

Then, over the ages, and fully coming to light in Christianity, man started to realize that he had a non-mundane self, an interiority. Thus, once this was realized, there was a transmigration of the life essence from all that is, into the human soul. Mans interiority was seen as special, and slowly but surely, life itself was extracted from existence and was eventually seen as something unique to man alone. Thus, in Cartesian dualism, everything external to man, plants, nature and so forth, is seen as mechanistic, without life - deterministic, strictly following the laws of res extensa - physicality. As the domain of the mechanistic grew and expanded, eventually incorporating everything else within it, the human soul stood in radical contrast to this mechanisation. Only then, after the turn from panvitalism, through the discovery of the self and thereby into a panmechanism, does the modern dualism between idealism and materialism appear. The fundamental duality is the axiomatic assumption / perception of existence being alive or not. Once fundamental existence is seen as non-living, does the Cartesian substance duality arise as a consequence.

The upshot is, that the seemingly impossible dichotomy between mind and matter, which manifests itself in so many different shapes and forms, slowly starts to dissolve. This is, to me, the pinnacle of philosophy. Problems are not meant to be solved, a paradox is there to show us that the question we're asking is in fact the problem. Thus, every question along the line of: "how does mind and matter interact?" (this also includes things such as panpsychism, which is firstly a reduction to atomistic physicalism, which then mind is projected into, causing all sorts of combination problems..), starts to lose their meaning.

Some time is needed for the new questions to form, but the synthesis, or the dissolvement of the question, allows the reader to go one step deeper, or further back, in his assumptions, and thing about the relationship between panvitalism and panmechanism instead of materialism versus idealism. The question of the living once again returns and regains its status of being of utmost importance, and a philosophical biology takes the place of a philosophical physics, which is the operative paradigm for most of us today.

If any of this is of interest, please read the book, or at least some of the essays, you will not regret it.

[Amanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant. Jonas belongs among the great 20th century political theorists/scientists/philosophers like Voegelin, Strauss, and Arendt. In this book, he weaves together his "existential interpretation of biological facts" with reflections on the senses, gnosticism, nihilism, ontology, ethics, dualism, Darwinism, and more.

[J.D. Steens · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this series of twelve essays, Jonas critiques a Western philosophy of mind and a Western philosophy of the organism. His main argument runs something like this: Descartes separated the human mind from its body; the mind then ascends in Western science,the body floats away to insignificance, and modern-day existentialism and nihilism is the result. There is now a "reduction of the formal essence of life to the vanishing point of a mere vital momentum without specific original content...." Nothingness springs from the denial of essence and, with nihilism, man loses a "being" that transcends "the flux of becoming."

The Darwinist picture ends up in the same spot, as a "Cartesian position without its metaphycial [sic?] cargo." The organism is merely a machine in a clockwork universe, run by a "mathematical god." Random mutations are acted on by the external force of natural selection. Progress is by "elimination," which is a "negative substitute for teleology." Evolution is "advance through mischance, of ascent by accident." There's no perpetual form that transcends change. "Being is becoming." The essence of life is "just self-preservation, which is analogous to the inertial laws ruling the conduct of a particle." Something like "The will to power," Jonas concludes, "seemed the only alternative left if the original essence of man had evaporated in the transitoriness and whimsicality of the evolutionary process."

This is not Jonas' vision. His philosophy of life goes back to its origins or close to it. Metabolism is the first form of that freedom that emancipated life from matter. Self-preservation was not at all random and mindless. Even at this lowest level, life "prefigures mind," Jonas argues, because there was variability in how to attain life's end. The purpose of life, the essential ends of life, are fixed, species by species. But the objects and actions related to these ends are variable and subject to choice - a degree of free choice based on what the organism faces. Within a species itself, there is variability that constitutes an "individuality" and a sense of self, "however faint its voice." With the separation from plants, animal motility began the long path toward the separation of action from purpose. Through perception, animals bridged the gap between here and there. Emotion, as desire, bridged the gap between now and then. What was wanted was over there, which is a separation of the organism from the object in space in time.

"To move and to feel" is the animal soul. This is Jonas' vision of the animal organism. "Animal being is... essentially passionate being," he states. "Living things are creatures of need. Only living things have needs and act on needs. Need is based both on the necessity for the continuous self-renewal of the organism by the metabolic process, and on the organism's elementary urge thus precariously to continue itself." Need manifests itself on the level of animality as appetite, fear and "all the rest of the emotions." Need propels the animal self outward across space and time, reaching out for objects to satisfy need and fear picks up and wards off threats and danger. The other emotions are the supporting cast. Animals are not mindless, soulless or passive beings subject solely to random mutation and external pressure. Animal life takes an active role through its own mindful freedom in ensuring its own existence. It is this passion to live that is the animal's form and essence, and it is this that allows them, in some degree, to create their existence. They are existentialists with purpose. They don't have the luxury for despair. Animals are existentialists with soul.

If Jonas had stopped his argument here he would have left his reader with a substantially new vision for humanity, one that is continuous with the rest of animal life, despite the differences in mental capacity. But in his transition essay, Jonas says "we have passed the borderline between the physical and the mental sphere" and this is where "biology cedes the field to a philosophy of man." With evolution's progressive freedom ending in the human mind, the connection between purpose and action is severed. With our mental freedom, we wander around without soul. We are anchorless and we wonder about the meaning of existence. It's no wonder that there is existential despair. It's no wonder we can get a Sartre who makes stuff up to fill this nothingness.

The latter series of essays are dense and it's not clear to me where Jonas himself ends up about all of this. Yet the answers are all there in the first half of this book. In our biology lies our essence. It's built on self-preservation, but it is not "merely" self-preservation. Freedom, right, justice and other philosophical themes are embedded in that notion, as well as our social and tribal nature, and our fear of death and religious impulses. And we also have a capacity for beauty and for wandering into the distant corners of the cosmos. These are by-products - the sweetest layer of freedom - of a mind that was designed to help us survive.

[xDEAD ENDx · Rating 4 out of 5]

Super brilliant and thought-provoking but kind of falls short with some of the premises related to a distinction between human and non-human animals (self-reflection, etc.). Also seems a little (appropriately) reactionary against Heidegger's betrayal. The essay on gnosticism, nihilism, and existentialism is a pinnacle.

[Stian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Probably one of the most thought-provoking and stimulating philosophy books I can remember reading, despite a few duds near the end. The experience was also enhanced by reading it alongside two fellow PhD students, and we had a lot of fun discussing the book together. Jonas is ridiculously erudite and rather intimidating, but reading it with someone really helps to unravel the yarns of his thought.

One of the things that strikes me the most is how incredibly ahead of his time Jonas was in grounding his philosophy of life in basic metabolic activity, and building a philosophical framework out of it based on activity and what is essentially a kind of process-philosophy, all culminating in an ethical system (that is somewhat, or actually very, underdeveloped in this book) for the modern, technological age. The influence on philosophical movements like enactivism and embodied cognition - spearheaded by the likes of Evan Thompson, Alva Noë, and Shaun Gallagher - is very obvious. There are also, to me at least, many affinities here with Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of the body.

And frankly it's quite nice to read a philosophical work that does not - like Plato, for instance - treat the body as some kind of sin. The famous example being, of course, Plato's allegory of the chariot: the charioteer, logical and wise; the noble horse, obediently following the charioteer; and then the dark horse, a stumbling fool led by our basest desires and appetites. Or to quote Marcus Aurelius quoting Epictetus: you are but a little soul carrying around a corpse. No wonder Jonas writes that our ""having", that is, being, bodies" has been "perennially disowned and slandered in the history of epistemology" (p. 82).

My favorite essay was probably 'The Practical Uses of Theory', which inevitably drew my mind back to my reading earlier this year of Jason Hickel and Kohei Saito on degrowth. There are a few passages here that are worth quoting at length, I think, because they really speak to me about the spirit of today, in our alienation from nature, the way we seem to think that the solution to our existential problems and, as Charles Taylor may have put it, our modern malaise, somehow, is more stuff, more things like these ridiculous AI chatbots we now venerate. An obsession with control, where the question of who is master and who is slave is unclear to me:

Control, by making ever more things available for more kinds of uses, enmeshes the user's life in ever more dependencies on external objects. There is no other way of exercising the power than by making oneself available to the use of the things as they become available. Where use is forgone the power must lapse, but there is no limit to the extension of either. And so one master is exchanged for another. (p. 193)

And he goes on a little while later:

There are those who cheer the surge that sweeps them along and disdain to question "whither?"; who hail change for its own sake, the endless forward thrust of life into the ever new, unknown, the dynamism as such. Yet, surely, for change to be valuable it is relevant what entity changes (if not toward what), and this underlying whatness must in some way be definable as that nature of "man as man" which qualifies the endless consummation of its possibilities in change as a worthwhile enterprise. Some image then is implied in the affirmation of change itself. But, if an image, then a norm, and if a norm, then also the freedom of negation, not only the surrender of affirmation; and this freedom itself transcends the flux and points to another sort of theory. (p. 208)

This "another sort of theory" is, in a nutshell, philosophy for the Good - or perhaps what Slavoj Zizek means with his slogan of "Don't Act. Just Think", in a sense. In any case, Jonas concludes this wonderful essay:

But if ever we entrust or resign ourselves wholly to the self-corrective mechanics of the interplay of science and technology, we shall have lost the battle for man. For science, with its application governed solely by its own logic, does not really leave the meaning of happiness open: it has prejudged the issue, in spite of its own value-freedom. The automatism of its use - insofar as this use carries beyond the recurrent meeting of the recurrent emergency created by itself - has set the goal of happiness in principle: indulgence in the use of things. Between the two poles of emergency and indulgence, of resourcefulness and hedonism, set up by the ever-expanding power over things, the direction of all effort and thereby the issue of the good tends to be predecided. But we must not let that issue be decided by default. (p. 209)

I also loved the chapter on 'Gnosticism, Existentialism, and Nihilism' - I learnt a lot, and had never thought about the similarities between Gnosticism and these modern ideas before. The chapter on Heidegger and Theology can be skipped with good conscience, I think. The final essay before the conclusion is also not particularly engaging and I struggled to make proper sense of it. But in general the book is a welcome intervention against reductionist and mechanical explanations of life and organisms, and it's a refreshing and engaging read besides.

[Campbell Rider]

heidegger says somewhere that only humans really *die*, since animals just perish. Jonas takes him to task on this point: he argues that the fundamental purpose of all organisms is to maintain themselves in the face of mortality. They have an immanent purposiveness of form that emerges from their natural metabolic processes. Animals, plants and bacteria all constantly exchange their matter with their external environment and are never the same from one moment to the next, and it's the organism's constant activity of self-replenishing that sustains its identity. Jonas isn't a spooky mystic, and he doesn't deny that biology adequately explains how life functions and came to be. what he does deny is the capacity for the physical sciences to comprehend the "ontological surprise" of life—the significance of the fact that inert chemical processes give rise to organic forms that behave teleologically, resist death, and move and feel. epic

[The_J · Rating 4 out of 5]

Towards a Philosophical Biology. 50 years too late? Freedom requiring organic. Deep complexities, and much to ponder, including how much if any has been overcome in the decades since these talks were given.

[Carl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jonas attempts to create an "existential biology" which adopts the existential analysis of subjectivity created by Heidegger, but reads subjectivity as a fundamental feature of all living things.

I find this somewhat difficult to accept fully -- I can accept gorillas, fish, and spiders as subjects in some attenuated sense, but can't do so for mosses and fungi, as Jonas requires. Jonas wants to be both a Darwinian and an Aristotelian, and this puts irresolvable tensions on his characterization of what life does.

On the other hand, Jonas is exactly right to argue that "life" does need a distinct ontological category, and that the neglect of "life" in the Cartesian dichotomy of "matter" and "mind" is an important element in the historical trajectory that leads to modern nihilism.

Jonas also does a nice job of arguing how the phenomenology of life provides an ontological grounding for ethics without theologizing. (Though Jonas is a deeply religious thinker, his theology does not enter into the ontological grounding of ethics.)

So while I can't fully endorse everything Jonas does, it's an important step in the right direction!

[Shane · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jonas changed that ways that I think and feel about life and living organisms. This number here opens your eyes to a new perspective on creatures that metabolize. If you think Continental philosophy is for guys with ugly mustaches -- give this one a try. His arguments against Descartes are awesome, to the max.

[samantha · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hans Jonas' elegantly written and, I would say, spiritually moving argument against Descartes' dualism and the worldview of a purely mathematical and mechanical universe. I can't seem to get away from thinking about this book and will be re-reading it soon!

[p4nsu · Rating 5 out of 5]

**The Phenomenon of Life**

I think about metabolism differently after reading this and I'm not sure I can go back. Jonas's argument is that the living organism isn't a complicated version of a machine, it's a fundamentally different kind of thing — a thing that maintains its own identity through constant material exchange with the world, that is always dying and always replacing itself, that exists only as an ongoing performance of existing. The flame is his analogy and it's the right one, a flame is materially different at every moment and formally continuous across all of them, except an organism does this against the current rather than with it, which is what makes life a genuine ontological novelty rather than just a more complex arrangement of matter.

The freedom argument is the one that landed hardest for me. Metabolism is the first form of freedom because the organism is the first thing that can fail — it has a stake in its own continuation, it can succeed or not succeed at remaining itself, which means it has something like interest before it has anything like consciousness. Jonas traces this upward through motility, perception, feeling, imagination, thought, each level a further elaboration of the same basic structure, the same neediness, the same precariousness that appeared first in the simplest metabolizing cell. Mind isn't a late addition to a fundamentally mindless universe. It's what the universe was already doing in cruder form from the moment something first maintained itself against entropy.

What Jonas is arguing against is the Cartesian settlement that modern biology inherited without noticing — the assumption that the real world is the world of extension and mechanism, that life is an anomaly requiring special explanation, that subjectivity appears somehow late and mysteriously in a process that was objective all the way down. He reverses the whole picture. Subjectivity, or at least its precursor, is there in the first organism. The question isn't how mind emerged from matter but why we ever thought matter was mindless to begin with.

The Gnostic Religion is the necessary companion and reading them in sequence reveals something Jonas probably didn't intend — the Gnostic universe, where matter is a prison created by an ignorant god and the divine spark inside the human is alien to the natural world, is the exact inversion of The Phenomenon of Life, where nature is the condition of freedom and the organism is continuous with everything that follows it up through mind and spirit. Jonas spent his career writing the anti-Gnostic position without ever quite framing it that way. The two books together are a complete philosophical position stated from opposite ends.

Underread in a way that's genuinely strange given the ambition and the rigor — this should sit alongside Merleau-Ponty and The Embodied Mind in any serious engagement with what life actually is, and mostly it doesn't because Jonas is claimed by bioethics people for the later work on responsibility and the original ontological project gets left behind. The later work is fine. This is irreplaceable.

5/5.

[Matt Payne · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the best books I’ve read, certainly one of my favorite philosophy books.

The book primarily explores the paradox of how deterministic material reality shouldn’t need to be experienced. This is not framed as a “hard question of consciousness,” because such framing assumes materialism as the true grounds, and consciousness as a problem which needs to be somehow solved using material laws. Instead Jonas traces the emergence of the elements our being back to organic roots. Everything we know can be seen as a function of life. He doesn’t go very much deeper than that, no true animism or hylozoism or pansychism, but instead takes single-celled organisms as the starting point. And he builds a solid phenomenology from that.

According to Jonas, the ancients believed that everything was life, then we entered into a dualist era where we separated the mechanical cosmos from the divine beyond (a divinity which is also present in our souls and our experience), and that now we’ve entered into an age of materialism where life and consciousness are seen as a puzzle to be solved, or simply explained away. He chooses to embrace the paradox instead. That’s why I love this book. He does an absolutely beautiful job in outlining that paradox.

That portion of the book is an absolute classic, a must-read, and woefully underappreciated. But the final portion of the book is speculative and a bit more scattered, though still extremely valuable. He launches into that final portion like this: He claims that phenomenology and existentialism help us to grasp the world, but that existentialism is fundamentally nihilistic, and beyond that realm we have only mythology as symbolism. I agree with this, or at least I like the idea a lot. Then he goes on to speculate his own mythology and a mystical moral responsibility which somehow connects life to the divine or the eternal image of god, which is our responsibility. He’s very (understandably) troubled by the evil and suffering in the world and he’s trying to make sense of that. Look up his biography to see how the forces of evil touched his life. But in the end I think he focused on an ethics that’s somehow based on his speculative mythology rather than truly on the phenomenon of life.

The real conclusion isn’t found in the particular speculative mythology that he lays out near the end. It’s in his stating the fact that we need to keep developing our own mythologies which embrace the paradox that the book outlines. If his particular mythology doesn’t totally resonate with me, I still appreciate that he kicked off the speculative mythology project by offering his own. I take it as a call to develop more of these mythologies. None of them will be “right.” Many of them will be valuable.

Anyway, I loved the book and I’ll be reading his collection of essays next, followed by his book about the ethics of technology.

[Brian · Rating 3 out of 5]

A thoughtful consideration on what is life. The collection of essays delves into various concepts of life and reviews how different philosophers viewed life. Jonas raises serious ethical questions, but sometimes is to abstruse to make much sense. Some of the essays show their age. His agonizing over the philosophy of Heidegger and his contemplation of gnosticism left me cold. These were subjects important to him once, many years ago, but I have a difficult time seeing their relevance today. Other essays—particularly the ones on the value of knowledge and epistemology—are timeless. I want to do a more focused reading on his work on the ethics of technology and nature, but that will take some time and searching.

[Eva]

Its so hard to understand and it is on purpose. Trying to make his ideas more profound by writing intelligible about them. Only read half of it. What he is actually saying is interesting, maybe not revolutionary, but interesting.
Do not spark joy.

[Mo'ona KR · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is for you if you are given to abstract thinking, have a strong vocabulary base, and are not afraid to stretch your mind. As for me, it was a required reading and it felt torturous! Life is complicated enough as it is; don't need philosophy to reiterate that!

[Christine · Rating 2 out of 5]

A difficult read, but it was very thought-provoking.

[jojo · Rating 5 out of 5]

this might be the greatest book ever written.