hans jonas, the imperative of responsibility — notes
jonas’s claim in the work "the imperative of responsibility" is quite interesting because it's one of the few times an ethicist throughout history has actually viewed responsibility as a cosmic or global imperative, which is partially influenced by being a student of heidegger's. however, what is cruically different between him and heidegger can clearly be seen in something like gordon and burckhart's "hans jonas and his critics" which stresses: "heidegger is very close to gnostic motifs when he sees man as thrown into the world – as a being for whom the world remains alien and meaningless. according to heidegger, the task of man is to lead an authentic, self-determined life in anticipation of his end. however, he views death as a step into nothingness, not into eternity. " (p. 114)
as opposed to heidegger's idea that the situatedness and throwness of the human constitute an issue of having to decide what man's being-in-itself and purpose in the world actually is, jonas goes in the direction that man's nature itself is a type of proto-nature, or that his being can only be considered ethically when retrospected against a wider understanding of his actions within a sphere that determines or rather self-determines the future constituents of everything man comes across. he even replies to heidegger's point about natality with a reconstruction of arendt's response to him: "having to die is bound up with having been born: mortality is but the other side of the perennial spring of natality." (p.19)
jonas' central idea is the claim that traditional ethics is no longer good enough at helping us deal with the consequences of our use of modern technology. "unspoken, but self-evident for those (pre-modern) times, is the pervading knowledge behind it all that, for all his boundless resourcefulness, man is still small by the measure of the elements" (p.3) joans argues that older ethics mainly dealt with relations among present human beings within a limited social space, and that nature evenetually sometimes was forced to sort of teleologically swallow us back into its logic, and that it was self-sustaining, and viewed by pre-modern people as a higher and non-reachable authority: "making free with the denizens of land and sea and air, he yet leaves the encompassing nature of those elements unchanged, and their generative powers undiminished ... nature was not an object of human responsibility — she taking care of herself and, with some coaxing and worrying, also of man: not ethics, only cleverness applied to her." (p.3)
modern technology according to jonas on the other hand changes this relation because our actions can now damage the planetary conditions of life, reshape human reproduction, alter genetics, and endanger future people who cannot yet speak for themselves. jonas also refurbishes and reformulates kant’s categorical imperative for the technological age because he argues that instead of only asking whether one could will a maxim as universal law, we must ask according to him whether the effects of our actions are compatible with the continued existence of genuine human life. there is an issue here as well because there's a sense you get from reading his text that a lot of the micro-ethical bubbles are still present in contemporary life, and also that the modern world is actually unable to "create" the necessary subject that can allow itself to actually garner the necessary responsibility to see itself in the third person precisely unless this subject is an unconscious singularity of the fantasized sort as seen in artificial thinking and computationalism.
jonas' own views on this are quite peculiar, since he uses the term "cumulative self-propagation of its (the social organ's) contributing acts", or, stated: "the containment of nearness and contemporaneity is gone, swept away by the spatial spread and time span of the cause-effect trains which technological practice sets afoot, even when undertaken for proximate ends." (p.7) there is in a sense a cosmic view of activity here, since he repeatedly uses (seven times in total) the term "metabolic social body" which is supposed to stress the self-perpetuating nature of a metabolism. contrast this however with how he actually speaks about the human in the pages following the intro, through purpose, self-transcendence, control of nature, the creation of a new artificial nature and cumulative creation. unlike this "organic body", the instrumentalization of man's activity actually appears far less ethically questionable, far less agentic than even jonas himself would like to stress.
for, if it is indeed true that metabolism coincides with self-purpose "i have elsewhere attempted to show how already in the "simplest" true organism-existing by way of metabolism, ends and their status in reality and thereby self-dependent and other-dependent at once-the horizons of selfhood, world and time, under the imperious alternative of being or nonbeing, are silhouetted in a premental form." (p.74) then it is true that, contrary to the assumed "consciousness" underlining humanity's reason is in fact a meta-metabolism (the initial tenents of metabolism) that underline a cosmic drive towards a proto-historical succession of macro-engineering, the engineering of an artificial nature that actually directly corresponds to ideas of scale, machinicity and complexity.
you could imagine then that consciousness is the larger world's equivalent of the smaller words quantum state, or that the future macro-world that humans build as "cells" of a wider socio-technical organism itself could produce a new primary property that should underline an actually new functional nature rather than what jonas simply stresses as "the gap between the ability to foretell and the power to act creates a novel moral problem.", (p.8) a problem of foretelling which arises only precisely if you understand jonas' claim as a claim on the way in which evolution can be interpreted precisely through the older, already discarded understanding of the responsibility of throwness, or the "local and contemporaneous" context under which humans acted ethically, which requires the human agent to have a responsibility towards his own self-determination but not towards the determination of the nature he sits surrounded by.
it is precisely by collapsing the newly technologically created artifical nature and the role of responsibility within a natural order, that jonas is able to locate intra-responsibility as an agentic quality rather than a structural feature of the artifical nature. as jonas claims: "the difference between the artificial and the natural has vanished, the natural is swallowed up in the sphere of the artificial, and at the same time the total artifact (the works of man that have become "the world" and" as such envelop their makers) generates a "nature" of its own". (p.10) this nature for jonas is allowed to behave self-responsibly partially because of his understanding of homo faber, or in other words, his locating of novelty (the swallowing of older logical realities) in the artifical rather than his locating of scalar modality in the temporal, the real consequence of modernity. "homo faber is turning upon himself and gets ready to make over the maker of all the rest." (p.18) doesn't work once you understand how little "homo" and "faber" actually have cosmically to do with one another that isn't also the product of an existing bio-cosmic skilltree.
"if the realm of making has invaded the space of essential action, then morality must invade the realm of making, from which it has formerly stayed aloof, and must do so in the form of public policy." however, he is also correct, or more specifically, hilariously enough, accidentally exposes the ethical issue precisely when he stresses that the ethical question in the context of ontogenesis themselves behave as if ethics is already aligned with whatever structural feature arises out of basic human progressive technoconstructivism.
in many ways, the agency of the human, or rather that conscious property which can self-define its own metabolic drive the way a bacteria or cell cant, only has the precise unique property of being able to defeat its own ability to model itself, or to prevent its own growth or continuous evolving self-preservation, a paradoxically anti-metabolic idea. or, in potentially more complex complications, the very narrative of a self-perpetuation may not necessarily necessitate forms of organic presentation in smaller and less intelligent life forms, which would locate the agentic question precisely in this "public policy" jonas stresses.
whatever the case may be, he does make a fair point when he argues "technological power has turned what used and ought to be tentative, perhaps enlightening plays of speculative reason into competing blueprints for projects." (p. 17) however, he doesn't actually believe that responsibility becomes more powerful or important as the ethical questions narrows down. rather, his proposal for a policy comes from the exact ability to understand exactly the modern ethical paradox, the indetermination of man's actual possibility for ethical acting, or his ability to have stakes in his own self-determination: "now we shiver in the nakedness of a nihilism in which near-omnipotence is paired with near-emptiness, greatest capacity with knowing least for what ends to use it." (p.23)
his inability to seperate the concept of the artifice present in nature from the concept of the artifice present in the artificial (technological nature in the homo faber) creates the false illusion that the genetic make-up of man's future self-determination actually exists as his own latent agential or self-determined self-responsibility. take a look: "this most ambitious dream of homofaber, summed up in the phrase that man will take his own evolution in hand, with the aim of not just preserving the integrity of the species but of modifying it by improvements of his own design. whether we have the right to do it, whether we are qualified for that creative role, is the most serious question that can be posed to man finding himself suddenly in possession of such fateful powers. who will be the image-makers, by what standards, and on the basis of what knowledge?" (p.21) jonas gets caught up in his own trap, unable to understand that it's precisely this make-up of a man-above-himself that allows man to desert his own ethical questions rather than to raise them.
jonas may think that this criticism underdetermines the very ethical question posed by what has earlier been called "consciousness" or better phrased "the key determinant feature of mankinds exteriorized responsibility", however, this very same responsibility is also indeterminate in so far as the ethical question that actually stems as a result of asking this question actually preceeds any possible answer, or in other ways, remains likely unconstructed within its own possibility (which means that at the level of the self-posited ethical image, it contains an essential arbitrarinesss)
it remains also unclear, what jonas means by "we have to add to the first observation - that the speed of technologically fed developments does not leave itself the time for self-correction -the further observation that in whatever time is left the corrections will become more and more difficult and the freedom to make them more and more restricted." this freedom to make the corrections on top of a self-perpetuating system is clear, however, the self-perpetuation in and of itself cannot actually relate to a functionalization of its paradigm, since the freedom to make the act is itself a part of the illusion produced by the pre-modern understanding of self-contained, self-limiting yet determining ethical responsibility. jonas responds " experience has taught us that developments set in motion by technological acts with short-term aims tend to make themselves independent"
there are two responses jonas already leverages against the artificialization of the artifice and cosmic metabolization of the space between perpetuation and determination. the former is about the heuristics of fear, and the latter about the wager. the fear argument is quoted in full: "because this is the way we are made: the perception of the malum is infinitely easier to us than the perception of the bonum; it is more direct, more compelling, less given to differences of opinion or taste, and, most of all, obtruding itself without our looking for it. an evil forces its perception on us by its mere presence, whereas the beneficial can be present unobtrusively and remain unperceived, unless we reflect on it... we know much sooner what we do not want than what we want. therefore, moral philosophy must consult our fears prior to our wishes to learn what we really cherish." (p.27)"
despite the fact there is no actionable principle in an ought that behaves speculatively rather than constructively, and besides the fact that jonas own weakside is that responsibility for technological use requires a mediated responsibility that our own self-determination is supposed to unlock negatively through fear, besides the fact that this technologically mediated self-determination is itself based partially on constructing the limits to its own perceived understanding of its agenthood, and the critique crashes against the solution and vice versa, there is an even better line of criticism that falls along the fear axis.
hans criticism itself is actually one big heuristic involved in the question of moral access rather than ontological access: "the perceived possibility can now take the place of the actual occasion; and reflection on the possible, fully unfolded in the imagination, gives access to new moral truth." if this is the case, and it is, given he's far more involved in how access is mediated by a newly-convinced moral truth, the question of leaving the future possibility open through a fear actually has no other stakes other than a mediation that slows the progress of possible action, simply due to the self-conflation between ontogenesis and ontoethics.
the ontoethics present in the question of the best possible limit between perpetuation and determination is itself the question of "how best to worry about something" rather than "how much determination this worrying actually produces if it is taken up as a stake". it is undoubtedly true, and in fact, jonas exposes one key aspect of the unintended operational background behind the heideggerian line of thinking, and that's that essentialism on a metaphysical level as a concept itself is stingy and brittle and unmistakably easy to sidestep. however, this essentialism itself often times confuses itself with a mystical forceful under-determination, especially when the drive to preserve becomes a drive to preserve the drive to preserve, or a meta-preservationalism. the question isn't about the conservasion of a line of thinking, but of the ability to stress a conservation, which isn't even phenomenologically the same operation anyways.
the wager counter-argument jonas would produce then follows as a direct attachment to this idea. the problem is quoted as follows: "never must the existence or the essence of man as a whole be made a stake in the hazards of action. it follows directly that bare possibilities of the designated order are to be regarded as unacceptable risks which no opposing possibilities can render more acceptable. the rule that even imperfect palliatives are to be preferred to a promising radical cure from which the patient may die is valid for the life of mankind though not always for the individual patient." (p.37)".
as you can very well see, the "essence of man" starts to be directly conflated with the possibility of an opening of possibility, or rather, that the idea of a wager of an essence depends on an operation incapable of comprehending the wager. this is a massive transcendentalization of essence, partially because the heideggerian canon can even to a degree be seen as actually, genuinely falsely equivocating a transcendent aspect within a non-transcendent essence. they can be seen in fact to weaponize, as if they were weaponizing, the very "ontological behavior" of the possibility-space itself, as arguing somehow that metaphysically essences are in fact brittle in so far as concepts outside of their field of operation can actually cause them to become "extinct" in the overarching becoming that differentiation or multiplicity forces on top of essences.
if essences are frail and the danger arises when phenomenology isn't allowed to speculate enough, then the very preservation of these essences actually detaches them from the subject of preservation. the essentialists are then worried about losing the locus behind the determination of their concept rather than the determination of the very history they seek to challenge, given that they are intentionally limiting their own empirical activities partially by arguing that the scientific paradigm itself fundamentally instrumentalizes the very subject of contestation that they find themselves to be challenging the paradigm behind.
what's even more ironic is that then on top of this frame if you read their own statements back to them, its precisely that they end up sounding like idiots, in the sense that they are the very subjects which cynically begin to question their own motives, their own understanding of the stakes: "no consent to their nonexistence or dehumanization is obtainable from the humanity of the future, nor can it be assumed; and were it nevertheless imputed to them, it would have to be rejected. for there is an unconditional duty for mankind to exist, and it must not be confounded with the conditional duty of each and every man to exist." (p.37)".
the conditional duty of each and every man, the confoundation of a self-espoused duty, the exact pre-modern civilizational device of duty under line of fire, is that same one jonas seemingly is trying to apply to the question of the fate of mankind as creator. that same drive actually counter-instrumentalizes instrumentalization, or rather, creates an invisible canvas around which a society which is itself experimenting with determination is forced to un-determine itself against, only to discover the act of determination laden within the question rather than the answer of determination - which in and of itself can be seen as a spook.
jonas is extraordinarily candid about the deferral he creates between ontology and the heuristics we have just argued. more specifically, he himself barely features any ontology exactly when he needs to patch up his earlier understanding of artifice with his later understanding of the wager. he essentially admits at the end of chapter 2 that the principle of responsibility "was throughout our preceding discourse tacitly assumed, but nowhere proved," and then when he does reach for ontology in chapter 3, he pivots almost immediately into teleology via ends and organisms rather than giving the argument a stable ground for the ought.
he does argue one mechanism in chapter two section five, he tries to derive an ought-to-be from the mere predicability of value, aka the claim that "the susceptibility to value discrimination as such, if it obtains at all, would constitute the decisive distinction" that according to jonas makes being preferable to nothingness. however, "the capacity for value is itself a value" is again very much based on his own positioning within the argument rather than as an intrinsic aspiration that the ontology he himself is arguing against somehow necessitates for or against this very line of thinking.
the next mechanism that appears in this line of thinking only appears far later in chapter four, in the the "purposiveness as good-in-itself" section, where he argues that while any particular purpose can be questioned, the capacity for having purposes at all is self-validating — it's an ontological axiom that purposiveness is "infinitely superior to any purposelessness of being." the problem actually hilariously enough is that he immediately acknowledges this is an axiom that "can give no further account of itself.", which ruins the actual crutch he needs to depend on to move past the cosmological/metabolistic critique espoused earlier, and that's that the movement from is to ought in the heideggerian critique actually does require a posited mechanism of positive constructivity that directly urges a speculative necessitation of the purposiveness behind human society over its self-constructed determination. this very axiomatization actually makes it basically impossible to separate, as stated earlier, its solution from the very problem it presents.
he finishes the chapter with a section that begins with "to conclude these very incomplete reflections on a theory of responsibility we return once more to the timeless archetype of all responsibility, the parental for the child.". in this section, he makes the distinction between a formal vs. a substantive responsibility, which he holds as the entire distinctional ground of the very problem he presents. "child..rearing thus has a definite substantive goal-the independence of the individual, which essentially includes his'capacity for responsibility-and with reaching it (or its imputability) also a definite termination in time." (p.108)
the issue with this example, and the far later example he makes of a state-man's inability but necessity to distinguish between abstract problems and concrete matters (p. 133) is more about the way in which responsibility appebut ars transcendentality rather than the supposed contents of how this responsibility is to look like. of course, this allows jonas to slip away from an ontogenetical determination, since he can in fact endlessly defer his own duty to posit the explanatory apparatus necessary to critique the scientific apparatus, if only he were to posit how responsibility actually determines the ought, not apriori, but nonetheless, substantively. this very "substantiation" for him is the "origin of substantiation" rather than its confirmation. a substantiation can have a more substantive character in its brittle possibility of self-realization, yet this very speculative mode is incapable of making the separation between what it's supposed to preserve, why it's supposed to preserve self-preservation, and most importantly, how the preservation of substantive speculation is actually supposed to aid determination in any particular way.