Taking a cue from Philo we may ask: If the adoption of the "seeing" approach from Greek philosophy was a misfortune for theology, does the repudiation or overcoming of that approach in a contemporary philosophy provide a conceptual means for theology to reform itself, to become more adequate to its task? Can it thus lead to a new alliance between theology and philosophy after, e.g., the medieval one with Aristotelianism has broken down? The question assumes that some use of philosophy, (...) i.e., of the elucidation of the nature of reality by secular thought, and of the nature of thinking about reality in secular thought, is desirable and even necessary for theology. This assumption must be granted, since theology, as the logos about things divine, is by definition the discursive, in some sense scientific, elucidation of the contents of faith and thus, for one thing, comes under the rules and norms of elucidation and discourse as such; and since the contents of faith comprise the dealings of God with the world and with man, the elucidation of the mundane and human side of this polarity must be informed by a knowledge of what world and man are, and philosophy is supposed to provide such knowledge. It would then follow that that philosophy is most adequate to theology which is most adequate to being, i.e., which is most nearly true—by the criteria of philosophy itself, i.e., by the criteria of secular reason. But since for a decision on this the theologians cannot wait for the consensus of philosophers, nor even necessarily trust its authority, they may be guided in their choice by the appeal of affinity, the lessons of past experience with philosophical liaisons, the present needs of their discipline, and by appraising which philosophy is most helpful to the discharge of theology's task, or least dangerous to its own trust, to its own genuineness, least seductive, least alienating—by any or all of these considerations, but as little as possible by fashion. On all these counts the theologian would do well to exercise a great deal of caution and mistrust. Especially in the face of tempting similarity: what theology needs in this relationship is the otherness of philosophy, not its similarity. On this I need not elaborate before a theological audience. However, the experiment of relationship itself is inescapable, and the one choice closed is abstention. Thus, the openness to contemporary thought shown by theology in the present experiment—as it was shown at all times—is to be welcomed. (shrink)

This volume offers a retrospective of Jonas's life and works by bringing together historians of modern Germany, Judaica scholars, philosophers, bioethicists, ...

Dr. Udo Lenzig ist Schulreferent im Kirchenkreis Julich.

A classic of phenomenology and existentialism and arguably Jonas's greatest work, The Phenomenon of Life sets forth a systematic and comprehensive philosophy -- ...

Hans Jonas bénéficie de la reconnaissance de ses pairs comme de la notoriété auprès d'un large public. L'auteur du " Principe responsabilité " est aussi un spécialiste de la religion gnostique, un philosophe de la vie analysant la dynamique de l'organisme et de l'esprit. La notion de liberté est un fil conducteur herméneutique pour exposer une pensée éclectique mais unitaire et originale.

I show how Hans Jonas, one of Heidegger's most distinguished Jewish students, traces his mentor's susceptibility to Nazism to a moral nihilism at the heart of Heidegger's teaching in "Being and Time". I then demonstrate how Jonas's own "existential interpretation of the biological facts" and metaphysical grounding of "an imperative of responsibility" provide one of the most systematic and challenging rejoinders to the moral failings of Heidegger's thought.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 64.4 (2003) 619-637 [Access article in PDF] Overcoming Gnosticism:Hans Jonas, Hans Blumenberg, and the Legitimacy of the Natural World Benjamin Lazier University of Chicago In 1984, about a decade before his own murder, the Romanian scholar of religion Ioan Culianu complained of a more widespread, if decidedly less grisly form of assault. 1 The gnostics, he declared in a moment of high jocularity, (...) had "taken hold of the whole world, and we were not aware of it. It is a mixed feeling of anxiety and admiration, since I cannot refrain myself from thinking that these alien body-snatchers have done a remarkable job indeed." 2Though offered in jest, Culianu's designation "alien body-snatchers" quite accurately sums up what has remained since 1934 the leading view of gnosticism as a delimited, identifiable phenomenon. In that year appeared the first monumental volume of Gnosis und spätantiker Geist (Gnosis and the Spirit of Late Antiquity) composed by the young Jewish philosopher Hans Jonas as a dissertation under Martin Heidegger and the theologian Rudolf Bultmann. Over the next sixty years Jonas returned again and again to the movement as he defined it. Above all, gnosticism had as its guiding principle the notion of das Fremde. The term includes in its linguistic domain not only "the alien," by which it is most usually translated, but its cognates as well: the strange, the foreign, the other, the unknown, the uncanny, and the like. This sense of alienation is wildly overdetermined in gnostic theology: man is alienated from himself, from a fully transcendent God, and most powerfully from the material, [End Page 619] sensuous universe in which he lives, created as it was by an evil, malicious demiurge. Such anti-cosmism could license both ascetic retreat from the world as well as an antinomian descent into the worldly abyss, with the intent to defeat it from within. The locution "body-snatcher" now acquires relevance, for gnostic theology made impossible any positive appraisal of the physical body, or of the physical world at all for that matter. As the political philosopher Leo Strauss put it in a letter to Jonas, gnosticism may well have been the most radical rebellion in Western history against the Greek notion of physis.In stylized terms Jonas's philosophical career represents what I would like to call gnosticism's "third overcoming." Such terms signal an allegiance to the work of the German philosopher Hans Blumenberg. But they signal a departure as well. In Legitimität der Neuzeit (Legitimacy of the Modern Age, 1966), Blumenberg undertook what must count among the most ambitious revisions of Western intellectual history ever ventured. Against a rash of attacks on the modern age as an ill-concealed, secularized derivative of an earlier Christian era, he stepped up in its defense. He linked the emergence of the modern age—defined preeminently by man's need for self-assertion, to act in the world—to a "second overcoming" of gnosticism at the end of the Middle Ages. The gnostic spirit he found revived by the nominalism and theological voluntarism of late-medieval scholastic theology, a loose confluence of thought centripetally bound by the black hole of the deus absconditus or hidden god. Whereas gnosticism's first overcoming was Augustine's work and but a partial success, its second, and for Blumenberg "final" overcoming was the work of an ethos of human self-assertion best instantiated by the scientific program of Francis Bacon.To argue for its third overcoming in the late 1920s and '30s is therefore to take leave of Blumenberg's account, if also to extend it. The condition for the possibility of this argument, of course, is that gnosticism had in fact returned. Gnosticism, or at the very least a host of phenomena going by the name and generally understood as such, did indeed return, and with a vengeance—on the occult scene, in philosophy, in theology of all persuasions, even in natural-scientific discourse. This period also witnessed the return of the... (shrink)