In the mid-1920s, two young Jewish students named Hans Jonas and Hannah Arendt (both to become influential philosophers in their own right) found themselves at the University of Marburg in Germany, drawn by the magnetic pull of two historic teachers.
Those teachers were Rudolf Bultman, a German Lutheran theologian and professor of the New Testament, and Martin Heidegger, a man with the gifts to be among the world’s greatest philosophers but who would later taint that potential by supporting one of the cruelest politicians in history.
As is likely already obvious, there were many uncommon tensions at play as young Hans and Hannah entered the university. Few (if any) could have fathomed the future soon to come. An excited young Jonas left a truly remarkable philosopher and mathematician, Edmund Husserl, to come and study with Heidegger, but Heidegger soon became one of the greatest disappointments of his life. Hannah and Hans had gotten themselves into a cauldron where either/or was demanded but no longer worked, where care and love were the only real powers, and could require one’s life. This was evidence of the transcendent tension so many would soon try to resolve in weaker and more temporary choices of extremity. The same sorts of choices we still struggle with today.
At the University of Marburg, Jonas and Arendt were among the only Jewish students enrolled in Bultmann’s New Testament seminar and found themselves following many of the same paths around campus. They became friends in that small university town in ways familiar to many of us who have spent time in such a place, or in any similar community of young people (whilst young). These are times with an electric quality. These are the days when you are so potent with everything but when that everything seems to understand you much better than you understand yourself.
You sometimes feel drawn to others for reasons you do not reason about, sensing something in them that will likely change your life, that you will likely never forget, even if you later drift apart.
Hans Jonas and Hannah Arendt tangled spirits as teenagers, and would remain close for the rest of their lives, staying in productive tension, making it through some very charged moments after the (then still future) violence. But starting school in Marburg in the 1920s, all that was yet to come.
They were still teenagers, still with the best of expectations, even in their teachers. They had entered a highly charged philosophical atmosphere, more charged than any of them realized, being as they were among the few to witness (together) what Jonas would later describe as Heidegger’s extraordinary early method, his performance of thinking, an unscripted performance that seemed to bring the class alive as part of it.
They were exploring tensions of mind and body, the transcendent and the secular. Jonas would later write about how mesmerizing Arendt was in those days, of how strong she was, and of how impressed he had been when she, for example, made a point at the beginning of their class with Bultmann, that he should never try and convert her to Christianity for as fascinated as she was by it, she wanted him to know that she would always be Jewish, and would never apologize for it.
At other times, Jonas describes the young Arendt as appearing shy and reserved, with astonishingly beautiful features and lonely eyes, someone exceptional and unique. Many were captivated and, as is well known, Arendt and her professor, Martin Heidegger, became lovers in the mid 1920s. Arendt was about 19 years old, and Heidegger was about 35. Jonas was the first to know when Arendt and Heidegger started their love affair. It distressed him then, but would distress him much more later.
Hannah Arendt in 1933
After all had been said and done, Jonas made no secret of how Heidegger disappointed him as a human being. As already noted, Jonas had left a philosopher named Edmund Husserl, a teacher of Heidegger and the founder of the phenomenological orientation which Heidegger was expanding, to come to be with him in Marburg. Like so many others (including Emmanuel Lévinas, who basically brought German existentialism to France), Jonas found the magnetic pull of Heidegger too much to resist.
This was all before the rise of the Nazi party (and Heidegger’s loyalty to it) but it was a haunting choice, for soon, Heidegger would take over as the rector of the University of Freiburg, the old position of Husserl, and malign his old teacher for his Jewishness. To write this today makes me almost sick, so I can only imagine what it was like for Jonas to witness. Or for Arendt, who Jonas described as a ‘defiant Jew’ but who would still express her care for Heidegger through it all. Perhaps it was this same tension that caused Jonas to break off his close friendship with Arendt for a time later, when Arendt first published her controversial Eichmann in Jerusalem. Like the stance Arendt continued to hold towards Heidegger, that piece held a space very few felt needed to be held, especially not Jonas. As Rachel Salamander writes in her foreward to Memoirs:
‘“A philosopher should not have been taken in by that Nazi business,” Jonas thought, least of all one of the “greatest philosophers of our time.” Jonas saw this betrayal as a “catastrophe for philosophy” itself. He meant not only the infamous inaugural address Heidegger delivered when he was made rector of the University of Freiburg; he also could not forgive Heidegger’s behavior toward his teacher, Husserl, whom Heidegger maligned as a Jew and forbade to enter and use the university library. Jonas emphasized the political danger posed in tumultuous times by a philosophy that “hurled” the individual fatefully into the current moment.’
And although it was later suggested (see these dialogues) that Heidegger may have considered all this “the greatest stupidity of his life”, he never once said that to anyone publicly or on record. Heidegger never apologized, never discussed it, and that has also been immensely, painfully disappointing.
But all that was still to come. As a young student in Marburg, still enthralled with Heidegger, Hans Jonas became deeply concerned with the tensions of gnosticism and existentialism, of freedom and need. He believed existentialism could further open gnosticism in new ways, and later, he would think the secrets of gnosticism might be used to better inform existentialist ideas. (For anyone interested in either of those subjects, I highly recommend reading him, see the bibliography below and the pdf I attach of a newer piece by Paul T. Wilford on this).
The relationship of Arendt and Heidegger lasted for years. It was only at the end of the 1920s that Arendt extracted herself from it, breaking up with Heidegger for her philosophy and going to Heidelberg Universität to study with Karl Jaspers. At the end of the 1920s, Jonas followed Arendt to Jaspers and continued his own studies in Heidelberg for a time. Jaspers never went along with the Nazi program, standing in support of his wife (who was Jewish) and Husserl and many others, having his job taken by the Nazis, remaining in Germany through 1948, always standing clear about where the lines were and how they had been crossed. Jaspers knew how to care.
…lives grown out of his life, the lives
fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing
And yet, by then, things were beginning to shift. Jonas recognized was really happening and escaped to Israel in 1933, later joining the British army to fight against Hitler’s Germany for five years as part of the Jewish Brigade. Only towards the end of the war did he return to Germany itself:
‘With the British troops he had made his way to Germany through Italy and Austria. The person he sought out immediately was Karl Jaspers. Through the entire war Jaspers had remained in Heidelberg at his Jewish wife’s side. Both of them had always kept poison handy, “in case worse comes to worst.” Jonas described the reunion with great feeling. He had rung their bell during the “sacred midday rest period,” when Jaspers was not to be disturbed. Frau Jaspers opened the door and without the slightest hesitation immediately took him to her husband, whose exclamation, “It is our fault that we are still alive!” Hans Jonas repeated with a sob’ (Salamander, 2007).
His later meeting with Heidegger, however, was a terrible moment for Jonas:
“He had expected Heidegger to say something ‘by way of apology.’ Nothing came. After twenty minutes Jonas got up and left.”
Arendt finished her dissertation in Heidelberg but had to flee Nazi persecution, too, working as a refugee advocate in France for a time, then escaping to the United States in 1941. She remained close with Jaspers and Jonas but unlike Jonas, and partly also in connection with the tension that nearly broke their friendship, Arendt reconciled with Heidegger in the 1950s and maintained a complicated relationship with him for the rest of his life. Difficult in the way many find Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil difficult.
As for Jonas and Arendt, their circle of intellectual friendship stretched across decades and continents—through exile, war, loss, and the building of new lives in America, where Jonas would also eventually come to work for The New School and where he and Arendt would reconcile their differences, becoming even closer than before. As they grew older, they were each one of the few people the other still new from their teenage years.
“It is difficult to picture, for the remainder of my days, a world without Hannah Arendt. Her presence in it made a difference which one experienced ever anew.” —philosopher Hans Jonas at the funeral of Hannah Arendt
Nearly fifty years after their first meeting as kids, on December 8, 1975, Jonas stood at Riverside Memorial Chapel in New York to deliver a eulogy for his lifelong friend. Arendt had died suddenly of a heart attack four days earlier, and Jonas was overcome with shock and grief that he could no longer be with her in person. As he spoke, it seemed the tension of care and love she had long held was speaking through him when he said that he could not imagine “a world without Hannah Arendt.”
His wife Eleonore (who had been a big part of brining Arendt and Jonas back together after the break over Eichmann) remembered standing in Arendt’s sealed apartment soon after her death and feeling as if something were also sealing over in their own lives, as if this were both the beginning and end. One could not imagine a world anymore without Hannah Arendt.
I often think of Hans Jonas and Hannah Arendet (especially when I am at Universität Heidelberg, as I work in the same department that was once led by Karl Jaspers), but these past days, I have felt moved by their friendship in a new way. For the first time, those words that Jonas said at her funeral have taken on a different meaning.
What I have been thinking about is the way Arendt has continued to be here and change this world even though she is not longer alive. I have been thinking of how the ways we live our lives matter long after the living, as they continue in the living of which they were and remain part. I have also been thinking about how Arendt helped Heidegger by continuing her friendship with him (I have heard philosophers say that if Arendt could give him another chance, maybe so too can they.) And yet, I so appreciate Jonas and the way he spoke directly about Heidegger, as quoted above. I’ve been thinking of the tension between these, but also of how all those actions remain with us in this world and still influence it. As I have been considering all this, it has made me think about Jonas and his idea of ‘needful freedom’ differently.
Jonas writes about ‘needful freedom’ in The Phenomenon of Life as that tension or paradoxical condition by which any living organism needs the world to sustain it, but it is also the world needing it. It is part of that ongoing world, and responsible for the immediacy of it. We are out of control of what moves us, and responsible for how we move within it at once. We are creating and being created and those are different bounds that are also the same process.
Seemingly small moments of connection and decision and care are the threads that orient our entanglement. We are literally always, even in the smallest of ways, laying down paths for those who will come after us. Think of how much the people who made decisions in the 1930s and 1940s set up trajectories that orient many today.
Jonas writes about this through the lens of the philosophy of biology, and though there is plenty about the take Jonas offers on biology that is dated or that we may want to be skeptical of (i.e. some of his interpretations of Darwin), this philosophical notion of ‘needful freedom’ remains one important way to express how meaning and trust are not ‘extraneous to biological life’ but part of it, as it, as care, and how that tension is the very thing we are trying to get strong enough to handle here. That may be the big goal of all this after all. Who knows what happens if we get good at it, but it is pretty clear what will happen if we don’t.
And so, even though I’d suggest reading others like Phillip Ball and Richard Watson to really understand new and exciting ways of thinking of through biology itself, in so doing, it can be so helpful to keep this juxtaposition of needful freedom with us.
Hans Jonas wrote that life maintains itself in constant flux, never actually coinciding with itself. Just to give an example, one of the more popular quotes about needful freedom is as follows:
‘Dependent on their availability as materials, it is independent of their sameness as these; its own, functional identity, passingly incorporating theirs, is of a different order. In a word, the organic form stands in a dialectical relation of needful freedom to matter.’
One can imagine how there is a dualism to that dialectic that we could rather view now through a kaleidoscopic lens, and yet, the tension expressed is those turns and dimensions.
In ways I am still trying to clearly articulate, I am coming to understand care and precarity (the very existence of our precariousness) as what we really mean by being embodied. That body is itself needful freedom, existence as the tension of becoming, that vulnerability creating potential; precariousness generates the very possibility of care, which in many ways is the actual and only real definition we can have for what it is to be in any form, anywhere.
In one of the reviews I link to below, philosopher Ezequiel Di Paolo, reading Jonas carefully, notes that metabolism creates a center of concern, an entity with genuine interest in the outcome of its commerce with the world. Even the simplest living system divides what matters from what doesn’t, introducing its own normativity. This is not assigned value but generated value, emerging from the organism’s need to persist through (and as) constant exchange. In other words, interactions between organism and environment are tinged with value because metabolic activity makes relevance possible. I am beginning to read this as what we really mean as anything we assess by phenotype.
This is radical in its strength, which is also its tenderness, because it means the actual power in all this living is care. Jonas seems to move in this direction, as he refuses both the disembodied perspective that would reduce life to mechanism and the idealism that ignores the body’s brute materiality. Instead, we get “inside knowledge” and access to life’s meaning through our own organismic tensions as them in different dimensions. As living organisms, we continually rebuild, engage and exchange. Being alive means being exposed to the world’s tremendous power, and to its brittleness and pain. Philosophy is necessary to help us deal with this.
In precariousness, we find ourselves threaded into (and as) relations we never chose but cannot refuse. As we get older, those relations (these precariousnesses) are with ourselves, with our own bodies, as well as with every body we encounter or that comes into our life. These bodies are so precious because they are so precarious, and when we forget the latter, we take the former for granted.
How amazing it is we get to be in contact and know that we are; every touch matters, every way we are with with one another, no matter how much gear we may be wearing, we are setting forth our own potentials for life in how we treat the life in front of us. It is extremely potent, and challenging, but strength is being able to hold that as it trembles, especially when that trembling is our own anger: we feel this because we care.
What makes both Jonas’s philosophy (and Arendt’s life) radical is their capacity to hold paradox without resolution. Jonas insists that life is simultaneously free from matter and constitutively dependent on it. The organism never coincides with what holds it yet cannot exist without it.* Our vulnerability is our capacity for mattering.
Our needful freedom is what allows us to care and be cared for across the metabolic boundaries of individual lives, participating in something that maintains itself through constant exchange, where fragility is not the opposite of strength, and where we are making new ways together over lifetimes that open ways for the lives that come after us. That is why, today, Hannah Arendt is more present in the world than ever. She has become part of how humanity thinks about itself. And the needful freedom of Hans Jonas will likely become more so, too.
Care is the way we come to understand that our continuation is the tension of holding what cannot be reconciled.
Holding paradox opens everything, and will close nothing.
That is why it is so difficult.
Actors playing Hannah and Hans in a film version, Hannah Arendt
Calibration: The navigational approach understands all we mean by mind to be only assessible via body, orientation, and landscape. In this understanding, the body is understood through care itself, as this is the base of how we orient. Just as metabolism creates concern through its precarious relation to matter, navigation (whether geographical, emotional, mental, etc.) is about some sort of precarious relation to possibility space. Cognitive spaces are dynamic mappings where similar concepts cluster and dissimilar ones separate through our messy, ongoing engagement. So that what is entropic is (from another perspective) what nourishes.
On a side note, there are also more direct connections to my own way-makings, as I do my research with the Universität Heidelberg, in the same department where Hannah Arendt once studied, and work with Thomas Fuchs, who holds the Karl Jaspers Professorship for Philosophy and Psychiatry.
Posting each Wednesday (or as close as possible) about everyday examples of way-making, the navigational approach to mind, holding paradox or something relative to Love & Philosophy. All posts are free for the first three weeks, then go to paid, except for guest posts or poems; those should never be paywalled (if they ever are, it’s by accident, so please tell me immediately).
Full poem:
Frederick Douglass
When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful
and terrible thing, needful to man as air,
usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all,
when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole,
reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more
than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians:
this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro
beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world
where none is lonely, none hunted, alien,
this man, superb in love and logic, this man
shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues’ rhetoric,
not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone,
but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives
fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing.
More resources:
Hans Jonas
If you listen to Love & Philosophy, you will likely remember Jonas coming up in conversations (or in references to conversations) and likely from papers or the review of The Phenomenon of Life by philosopher Ezequiel Di Paolo (pdf is below), who Mirko had a wonderful conversation with for Love and Philosophy.
Dipaolo Jonas
59.8KB ∙ PDF file
Those who listen to the show and even to the hippocampal love (neuroscience) discussions will also be interested to hear that Hans Jonas also spent some time at McGill University (what is it about that place!) and that he had a tense but productive realtionship with Alfred Schütz, a phenomenologist in the Husserlian tradition that Lucius Outlaw and I discussed in a previous conversation. Jonas is also known for being one of the few and first to confront Heidegger about his choices in a famous speech from 1964. A lot of this has to do with themes of Gnosticism & Existentialism that many of you may find especially interesting. Here is the beginning of a recent paper about it from Paul T. Wilford and the full paper attached afterward.
Modernity’s Alienation from Nature and Reason’s Gnostic Temptation: Hans Jonas’s Critique of Heidegger’s Existentialism
by Paul T. Wilford, Boston College
Hans Jonas’s The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for a Technological Age (1984) is the culmination of a career spent investigating the ontological implications of the distinction between animate and inanimate being and the ethical implications of this most basic ontological distinction. Delineating the unique features of our world-historical moment, Jonas offers a penetrating analysis of the significance of our tremendous technological power both to despoil the natural environment and to alter human nature through bioengineering. By illuminating the unprecedented existential challenges facing us as a species in our technological age, Jonas’s work offers a timely diagnosis of our present apprehensions and a prescription for addressing the challenges of our age.
Jonas Wilford
1.54MB ∙ PDF file
For more about Jonas, here is the beginning of a forward to his Memoirs and a link where you can read the rest. Jonas is truly one of the most important, interesting and till now unknown (in the US at least) philosophers of his time, though he was and still is very famous in Germany.
If only Heidegger could have been half as strong as Arendt. But he stayed silent. If one looks at the letters he and Arendt exchanged, which go through her breaking up with him and their later discussion after the war, one finds much more than I can express here, however, but there are many books to read about this if you are interested.
Foreword by Rachel Salamander
One thing is clear: this is the book the good Lord had in mind when he made you. —Hannah Arendt, upon reading a chapter in The Imperative of Responsibility
“When Hans Jonas’s book The Imperative of Responsibility appeared in Germany in the fall of 1979, even his publisher, Siegfried Unseld, had no way of knowing that he was bringing out a work of philosophy that would become something of a best seller. Probably no twentieth-century work by an academic philosopher has enjoyed such rapid and wide dissemination in the German-speaking countries as this “attempt at formulating an ethics for technological civilization.”
No one was more surprised by this success than Hans Jonas himself. In the 1930s he had published a significant study of gnosticism in late antiquity, yet he was known only to readers with a particular interest in that subject. Now in postwar West Germany Jonas achieved a fame enjoyed by none of the other German-Jewish philosophers of his generation who had fed Hitler to countries in the West—including such eminent philosophers as Günther Anders, Hannah Arendt, Max Horkheimer, Alfred Schütz, and Leo Strauss. Jonas became a media celebrity, the star attraction at every conference on the world’s prospects. Interviewers clamored for time with him, and during the 1980s no Catholic or Protestant academy worth its salt would plan a program that did not include him as a participant.
Seldom has a book appeared at such a propitious moment. Jonas’s topic resonated with the spirit of the times, which, afer the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth and the oil crisis of the early 1970s, was attuned to the environment. Postwar optimism had given way to skepticism toward progress and an unblinking awareness of the dangers posed by constant expansion in the scientifc and technical realm. Te project of modernism—liberation of human beings through ever-increasing control over nature, that utopia of all avant-garde thinking since the beginning of the modern era—had lost its power to persuade. Hans Jonas countered the new fatalism with his defense of the normality of human life…”
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References
related primary works
on gnosticism
Jonas, Hans. Gnosis und spätantiker Geist, Volumes 1-2. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1934-1954.
Jonas, Hans. The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity. 1st ed. 1958; 2nd enlarged ed. 1963; 3rd ed. 2001. Boston: Beacon Press.
on philosophy of biology
Jonas, Hans. The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology. New York: Harper & Row, 1966. Reprinted: Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001.
Jonas, Hans. Organism and Freedom (manuscript, published in the critical edition).
on ethics and technology
Jonas, Hans. Das Prinzip Verantwortung: Versuch einer Ethik für die technologische Zivilisation. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979.
Jonas, Hans. The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of Ethics for the Technological Age. Translated by Hans Jonas and David Herr. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.
Jonas, Hans. Technik, Medizin und Ethik: Zur Praxis des Prinzips Verantwortung. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985.
Collections and other work by Jonas
Jonas, Hans. Philosophical Essays: From Ancient Creed to Technological Man. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974.
Jonas, Hans. On Faith, Reason and Responsibility. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1978.
Jonas, Hans. Mortality and Morality: A Search for the Good after Auschwitz. Edited by Lawrence Vogel. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1996.
Jonas, Hans. Memoirs. Edited by Christian Wiese. Translated by Krishna Winston. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2008, 2021.
some articles and essays
Jonas, Hans. “Immortality and the Modern Temper: The Ingersoll Lecture, 1961.” Cambridge: Harvard Divinity School, 1962. Included in The Phenomenon of Life.
Jonas, Hans. “Heidegger and Theology.” 1964. Included in The Phenomenon of Life.
Jonas, Hans. “The Secret Books of the Egyptian Gnostics.” The Journal of Religion 42, no. 4 (October 1962): 262-273.
Jonas, Hans. “Ethical Aspects of Experimentation with Human Subjects.” Boston: American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1969.
Jonas, Hans. “Myth and Mysticism: A Study of Objectification and Interiorization in Religious Thought.” The Journal of Religion 49, no. 4 (October 1969): 315-329.
Jonas, Hans. “Technology and Responsibility: Reflections on the New Tasks of Ethics.” Social Research 15 (Spring 1973).
Jonas, Hans. “Freedom of Scientific Inquiry and the Public Interest.” The Hastings Center Report 6, no. 4 (August 1976).
Jonas, Hans. “Hannah Arendt: 1906–1975.” Social Research: An International Quarterly 43, no. 1 (Spring 1976): 3-5. [Eulogy delivered at Hannah Arendt’s funeral service at Riverside Memorial Chapel, New York City, December 8, 1975.]
secondary sources
monographs
Levy, David J. Hans Jonas: The Integrity of Thinking. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002.
Wiese, Christian. The Life and Thought of Hans Jonas: Jewish Dimensions. Translated by Jeffrey Grossman and Christian Wiese. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2007.
Coyne, Lewis. Hans Jonas: Life, Technology and the Horizons of Responsibility. London: Bloomsbury, 2021.
edited volumes with connected work
Spicker, Stuart F., ed. Organism, Medicine, and Metaphysics: Essays in Honor of Hans Jonas on His 75th Birthday, May 10, 1978. Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1978. Includes bibliography of Jonas’s works.
Tirosh-Samuelson, Hava, and Christian Wiese, eds. The Legacy of Hans Jonas: Judaism and the Phenomenon of Life. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2008. Paperback 2010. Major interdisciplinary collection with 22 chapters.
Becchi, Paolo, and Roberto Franzini Tibaldeo, eds. Human Dignity of the Vulnerable in the Age of Rights. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2016.
some related book chapters
Wolin, Richard. “Hans Jonas: The Philosopher of Life.” Chapter 5 in Heidegger’s Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse, 101-133. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. Paperback 2015.
Vogel, Lawrence. “Hans Jonas’s Exodus: from German Existentialism to Post-Holocaust Theology.” Introduction to Hans Jonas, Mortality and Morality: A Search for the Good after Auschwitz, 1-40. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1996.
Hauskeller, Michael. “The Ontological Ethics of Hans Jonas.” In Human Dignity of the Vulnerable in the Age of Rights, edited by Paolo Becchi and Roberto Franzini Tibaldeo, 39-58. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9870-9_3
Protevi, John. “Mind in Life, Mind in Process: Toward a New Transcendental Aesthetic and a New Question of Panpsychism.” Chapter 9 in Life, War, Earth: Deleuze and the Sciences, 155-177. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. https://doi.org/10.5749/minnesota/9780816681013.003.0011
journal ariticles and other academic works
Vogel, Lawrence. “Jewish Philosophies after Heidegger: Imagining a Dialogue Between Jonas and Levinas.” The Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 23 (2001): 119-146.
Wiese, Christian. “For a Time I was Privileged to Enjoy his Friendship…: The Ambivalent Relationship between Hans Jonas and Gershom Scholem.” The Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 49, no. 1 (2004): 25-58.
Di Paolo, Ezequiel A. “Autopoiesis, Adaptivity, Teleology, Agency.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 4 (2005): 429-452. [Discusses Jonas’s work on metabolism and teleology extensively.]
Di Paolo, Ezequiel A. “The Phenomenon of Life, by Hans Jonas.” Book review. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 36, no. 3 (2005): 340-342.
Lawee, Eric. “Hans Jonas and Classical Jewish Sources: New Dimensions.” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 23, no. 1 (2015): 75-125.
Fossa, Fabio. “Nihilism, Existentialism, – and Gnosticism? Reassessing the role of the gnostic religion in Hans Jonas’s thought.” Philosophy and Social Criticism 46, no. 1 (2020): 64-90.
Settimo, Luca. “Hans Jonas’s reflections on the human soul and the notion of imago Dei: an explanation of their role in ethics and some possible historical influences on their development.” History of European Ideas 49, no. 5 (2023): 870-884.
works by Arendt about Jonas
Arendt, Hannah. “Acting, Knowing, Thinking: Gleanings from Hannah Arendt’s Philosophical Work.” Social Research: An International Quarterly 44 (1977). Includes comments on Jonas’s work.
Arendt, Hannah. The Life of the Mind, vol. 1. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977. See pages 15, 62 for references to Jonas.
Arendt, Hannah, and Hans Jonas. Exchange/dialogue transcribed in Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World, edited by Melvyn Hill. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979. Includes a 1972 conference discussion between Arendt and Jonas on technology and ultimate values.
Bultmann related to Jonas
Books
Bultmann, Rudolf. Das Evangelium des Johannes. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1941. English translation: The Gospel of John: A Commentary, translated by G. R. Beasley-Murray. Philadelphia: Westminster John Knox Press, 1971.
Bultmann, Rudolf. Theologie des Neuen Testaments. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1948–1953. English translation: Theology of the New Testament, 2 vols. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1951, 1955.
Bultmann, Rudolf. Das Urchristentum im Rahmen der antiken Religionen. Zürich: Artemis, 1949. English translation: Primitive Christianity in Its Contemporary Setting, translated by R. H. Fuller. New York: Meridian Books, 1956; reprinted Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975. Includes extensive discussion of Gnosticism.
Bultmann, Rudolf. Kerygma und Mythos: Ein theologisches Gespräch, 5 volumes. English selections in Kerygma and Myth: A Theological Debate, edited by H. W. Bartsch. London: SPCK, 1953.
Essays and Other Works
Bultmann, Rudolf. Preface to Hans Jonas, Gnosis und spätantiker Geist, vol. 1. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1934.
Bultmann, Rudolf. “Neues Testament und Mythologie: Das Problem der Entmythologisierung der neutestamentlichen Verkündigung.” 1941 lecture. English translation: “New Testament and Mythology: The Mythological Element in the Message of the New Testament and the Problem of Its Re-interpretation.”
Bultmann, Rudolf. Evaluation of Jonas’s 1928 dissertation on Gnosticism (previously unpublished, included in the Bultmann-Jonas correspondence).
Correspondence
Bultmann, Rudolf, and Hans Jonas. Rudolf Bultmann, Hans Jonas: Briefwechsel 1928–1976 [Correspondence 1928–1976]. Edited with introduction. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Contains nearly fifty years of letters between Bultmann and Jonas, plus appendices with Heidegger’s and Bultmann’s evaluations of Jonas’s dissertation.
additional notes
Critical Edition: An eleven-volume critical edition of Jonas’s collected works (Kritische Gesamtausgabe) has been published in German, bringing additional lecture courses and manuscripts to light.
Ezequiel Di Paolo’s Engagement with Jonas: Di Paolo’s work extensively engages with Jonas’s The Phenomenon of Life, particularly Jonas’s arguments about metabolism as the basis of intrinsic teleology, the organism’s “needful freedom,” and the grounding of values in organismic activity. Di Paolo builds on Jonas’s insights in developing the enactive approach to cognition and his theory of adaptivity and sense-making.
Jonas’s Eulogy for Hannah Arendt: On December 8, 1975, four days after Hannah Arendt’s death, Hans Jonas delivered a eulogy at her funeral service at Riverside Memorial Chapel in New York City. The eulogy was published in Social Research: An International Quarterly 43, no. 1 (Spring 1976): 3-5, and appears as Appendix C in Christian Wiese’s The Life and Thought of Hans Jonas: Jewish Dimensions (Brandeis University Press, 2007).
Phillip Ball: How Life Works
And a related conversation with Richard Watson
*My love of Hegel is in this same sort of expression of movement which can never directly be said (as all Hegel’s books illustrate in their very existence.)