Abstract
Starting from Hans Jonas’ works, this essay researches the bases of human responsibility and its reasoning is made up of four points. 1. He was aware of how his experience had influenced his thought and he questioned what means reflecting starting from extreme situations: «The apocalyptic state of things, the threatening collapse of a world, the climatic crisis of civilization, the proximity of death, the stark nakedness to which all the issues of life were stripped, all these were ground enough to take a new look at the very foundations of our being and to review the principles by which we guide our thinking on them». 2. Faced with these situations he rediscovered the richness of the Ancients’ thought. For example, the Stoics inherited and transformed the illuminating aspects of the theory that conceived of the ‘being’ as contemplation of the whole, which had permeated Greek natural philosophy and scientific speculation. They took it on as the capacity to identify one’s own most internal principle with the principle of the whole, in a more religious sense. The discovery in the whole of what is felt to be the highest and noblest in human beings – like reason, order, and form - makes our orientation towards a super-regulating end a liberating wisdom. 3. Jonas considers that starting from XVII century the two aspects, here distinct as external and internal, remain at the core of the issue so far as the problem of freedom is concerned. Moreover, theoretical efforts now move in the direction of rendering, of discovering a conception of freedom which is logically compatible with causal determinism, while in the history of philosophy, the problem of freedom was not born in the sphere of logic. So it is necessary to rethink Modernity and how it is possible to found human freedom and responsibility nowadays.
Highlights
Starting from Hans Jonas’ works, this essay researches the bases of human responsibility and its reasoning is made up of four points
He was aware of how his experience had influenced his thought and he questioned what means reflecting starting from extreme situations: «The apocalyptic state of things, the threatening collapse of a world, the climatic crisis of civilization, the proximity of death, the stark nakedness to which all the issues of life were stripped, all these were ground enough to take a new look at the very foundations of our being and to review the principles by which we guide our thinking on them». 2
From Ancient Creed to Technological Man, entitled Technology and Responsibility: Reflections on the New Tasks of Ethics, and in the first chapter of The Imperative of Responsibility4, in German: Das Prinzip Verantwortung5, Jonas begins by dealing with ancient considerations on the unique capacities and abilities of human beings, as the famous chorus of Sophocles’ Antigone chants
Summary
In the first article of Philosophical Essay. From Ancient Creed to Technological Man, entitled Technology and Responsibility: Reflections on the New Tasks of Ethics, and in the first chapter of The Imperative of Responsibility, in German: Das Prinzip Verantwortung, Jonas begins by dealing with ancient considerations on the unique capacities and abilities of human beings, as the famous chorus of Sophocles’ Antigone chants. Jonas maintains that in this context, the Stoics’ position, which takes up the task of reconciling the idea of fate, universal determinism, with the idea of virtue as the capacity for self-determination and for freedom, is interesting All he notes: What is stressed is the oneness of the universe, and this oneness means that there is one law, one principle, of which all the particular causal connections are manifestations. Human beings are capable of conceiving the idea of the whole and of rising above the condition of a simple limited part by means of their assent to such a necessity in an attitude of synkatathesis or refusal, insofar as the Logos operates within them, as a universal principle, as in the rest of nature, and as an individual, autonomous principle. The discovery in the whole of what is felt to be the highest and noblest in human beings — in other words reason, order, and form — makes our orientation towards a super-regulating end flow forth in a liberating wisdom
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