Hans Jonas: The Green Philosopher
The name Hans Jonas seems to have been almost completely forgotten now, but deserves to be rediscovered and celebrated. He was the thinker behind the first European green political movements in the mid-to-late 20th century, and today his thinking is more relevant than ever, and even has new ways to teach and inspire us all in the current 21st century climate and nature crises.
As a German Jew and a pupil of Martin Heidegger (perhaps the most influential philosopher of the 20th Century), Jonas, along with some of his now more famous contemporaries (including Hannah Arendt and Emmanuel Levinas), suffered the multiple catastrophes of witnessing the appalling Nazi atrocities, being forced to flee into exile, and seeing the thinker he most admired “think his way into” joining the Nazi Party.
Unlike his contemporaries, who reasonably and rightly dedicated themselves to addressing the strictly human issues arising from the unprecedented horror of the holocaust, Jonas presciently saw that the moral challenges facing humanity after WW2 were even broader, deeper and graver, and arose out of our newly-developed powers to destroy everybody and everything. Even more presciently, he saw that the most critical issue was not the “preventable with sufficient care” danger of nuclear self-destruction, but the much-more-inevitable, but much-harder-to-control, destruction that comes as a bi-product of the human “successes” of the exponential growth spirals of human technical-innovation, population growth, and resource consumption.
Up until Jonas, the whole history of Western ethical thinking had basically concerned itself with how humans treat each other within societies. Important as this is, focusing solely on this can lead to the significant problem of leaving all those beings and things considered to be outside “human society” as completely “beyond the pale” – i.e. unworthy of any kind of care or consideration whatsoever. At various times in history, this has catastrophically been seen as including not only non-human animals, but also women and slaves, Jews and gypsies, and immigrants: first you “other” the other, then you dehumanise them, then “anything goes”.
One exception to this mode of thinking had been the 19th Century utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who famously included sentient animals within the circle of those due “moral consideration” (“The question is not ‘Can they reason?’, nor ‘Can they talk?’, but ‘Can they suffer?’”), who in turn inspired Peter Singer’s “Animal Liberation” philosophy and its associated animal rights movements. But here again can lie a problem – first you question whether they actually can suffer (e.g. fish), then you treat them however you like. And what about ecosystems? Do rivers “suffer”, and therefore can they really have any “rights” in anything but a poetic or metaphoric sense?
Hans Jonas introduced five radically new insights, all of which are still very relevant today:
Ethical thinking needs to evolve with the times and prevailing circumstances. The game-changing realisations that we are directly related to all other creatures, and also that we now have the power of extinction over all of creation, means that we need to think morally about much more than just human-to-human or even human-to-individual-animal relations.
Based on this learning, we need to adopt a “precautionary principle” – if in any reasonable doubt as to the possible harmful consequences of an action, DON’T DO IT. For example, fishes have nervous systems and brains – so the chances that they can suffer are far from nil, therefore don’t mistreat them. Jonas also said that the bigger the potential impact, the more precautionary we must be (with obvious implications for the appropriate reactions to what climate science is telling us is likely to transpire).
All organisms “have a good” – they strive to survive and thrive (philosophically known as “conatus essendi” – the innate striving or tendency of every thing - particularly living beings - to persist in its own being and to continue existing), and in this sense all organisms have a right to be allowed to pursue this good.
“With great power comes great responsibility” (was Spiderman influenced by Jonas? 😉) - and so humans uniquely have almost unlimited responsibilities (Levinas called this “infinite responsibility – our responsibilities have no bounds as such – we are responsible for all things that are impacted by the reach of our power and activities, and for understanding what we are responsible for and why …).
What really makes humans “human” and “unique” is not sentience, or reason, or language, but our unique capacity to recognise our (moral) responsibilities and our potential to live up to them.
In short, Jonas saw how and why we are morally responsible for the wellbeing of all of nature, and for ensuring that we do not do anything which might endanger its future survival and ability to thrive, in a way that was, and unfortunately still is, way ahead of the thinking of the time.
