Hans Jonas and the Concept o f God after the Holocaust Lawrence Tröster

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1 Hans Jonas and the Concept o f God after the Holocaust Lawrence Tröster L ate in life, twentieth century Jewish philosopher Hans Jonas reflected on the seminal event which led him to reevaluate his study and training under Martin Heidegger and set him on his goal of creating a philosophical biology: An opportunity presented itself during my years as a soldier during the Second World War, when my historical research was interrupted and I was limited to thinking about that which doesn t require books and libraries because we always have it with us. Perhaps my physical exposure to danger, a situation in which the precariousness of the body s fate becomes evident and fear of its mutilation becomes paramount, was responsible for my new reflections. In any case, I became keenly aware of the ideological bias of the philosophical tradition. I saw its hidden dualism the legacy of a thousand years contradicted by the organism, whose mode of being we share with all life. Understanding this organism ontologically would close the gulf separating the psyche s understanding of itself from the teachings of physics.1 Jonas own experience in the war and its aftermath would form the basis of a significant réévaluation of the major philosophical tradition. The war would also bring home to Jonas the necessity for the réévaluation of the Western theistic tradition about God. Hans Jonas is one of the most neglected twentieth century Jewish philosophers. Inside Jewish circles, Jonas is virtually unknown.2 Outside of the Jewish community, however, Jonas is considered an important thinker on bioethics.3 His philosophical writings are among the most respected in discussions of the relationship between religion and science and his writing on environmental ethics is highly regarded.4 Jonas was also one of the most radi- 16

2 L a w re n c e T r o s t e r 1 7 cal thinkers about the implications of the Holocaust on our conception of God. This article will outline Jonas s life and the major themes of his philosophy, and examine his theology and his concept of God after the Holocaust. Jonas was born in 1903 in Mônchengladbach, Germany and in 1921 began to study at the Hochshule Fuer Die Wissenschaft des Judentums (University for the Science of Judaism) in Berlin. At the same time, he studied with Heidegger and Rudolf Bultman at the University of Marburg, receiving his doctorate under Heidegger in Jonas was one of a group of Heidegger s Jewish disciples that included Hannah Arendt, Karl Lowith, Herbert Marcuse and Emmanuel Levinas.5 In 1933, the German Association for the Blind expelled its Jewish members. Jonas was outraged that such a disability which he felt created a solidarity amongst those who had it would be so betrayed. For him it was the final straw. Jonas left Germany, traveling first to England and then to Palestine by He had already published two books, one of which was his Ph.D. thesis on gnosticism,6 but was unable to find an academic position. To support himself, he worked in publishing and teaching. Jonas had taken a personal vow that he would return to Germany only as a soldier of a conquering army. When war broke out in 1939, he joined the Jewish Brigade of the British 8th Army and specifically volunteered for the front lines. Jonas spent five years in the army, and became part of the 1943 Italian campaign in which he saw a great deal of action. During his time at the front, he wrote letters to his fiancee back in Palestine; some were love letters and others were philosophical letters, in which he began to outline his philosophy of the organism, which was the foundation of his future thought. Upon his return to Jerusalem in 1945, Jonas learned that his mother had been killed in Auschwitz in In 1948 he joined the Israeli army, serving in the War of Independence. Feeling that, because of the Arab-Israeli conflict, he would not be able to pursue his academic interests in Israel, Jonas accepted a fellowship to McGill University in Montreal in In 1951, at age 48, he finally got his first academic appointment at Carleton University in Ottawa. In 1955, Jonas was given an appointment to the graduate faculty of the New School for Social Research in New York City, where he remained until his death in In 1987 Jonas received the Peace Prize of the German Booksellers Association and in 1992 he received the Premio Nonino Prize from Italy. Jonas s major works are The Gnostic Religion (1958), The Phenomenon of Life (1963) and the Imperative of Responsibility: Ln Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age (1979). After his death, an important collection of his essays was published under the title, Morality and Mortality: A Search for the Good after Auschwitz.7 Throughout his life, Jonas saw himself primarily as a philosopher and only secondly as a Jewish philosopher. Lawrence Vogel, who edited Morality and, Mortality sees Jonas first creating a philosophical critique of the nihilism that he felt lay at the heart of

3 18 C O N S E R V A T I V E J U D A I S M modern philosophy and then attempting to construct a philosophical biology based on the concept of the organism. According to Vogel, there are three stages in Jonas project: existential, metaphysical and theological.8 This project would also create a modern philosophy that is consistent with modern science.9 Jonas critique of modern philosophy is summed up in an article published in the CCAR Journal in In this article, Jonas claims that contemporary philosophy has no ethical theory because philosophy has become a camp follower of Science. He characterizes modern thought as creating new concepts of nature and humanity, as well as the fact of modern technology, which is supported by both. All three imply the negations of fundamental tenets of the philosophical as well as religious tradition 11 (by religious tradition he means the biblical/jewish tradition). This is the nihilism which he feels is at the heart of modern thought, but especially at the heart of the existentialism represented by his teacher, Heidegger. In this modern concept of nature, the universe is no longer seen as Creation but rather as a process determined by law which is inherent in it. There is no longer a divine order. Nature is also no longer good in the biblical sense. Nature is indifferent to the distinction between good and bad and the world is purposeless, with no values, goals or ends. Therefore, humanity is no longer be seen to be created in the image of God. As a result of Darwinism, humanity arose as the result of unconcerned forces. He is an accident, sanctified merely by success. 12 The modern concept of humanity is also influenced by historicism, which asserts that all human values are the product of each culture. Therefore, there are no universal or absolute truths, only relative and socially particular ethics. Another influence on the modern view of humanity is psychology, which claims that all the higher aspects of the human character are really gratifications of its base drives: The higher in man is a disguised form of the lower. 13 What is left of the human character is a strange paradox. Humanity creates its own values in the use of its power, which exalts it above any other creature or concern for the natural world while at the same time reducing it to the same level. Thus, humanity itself becomes an object of its own use and abuse. Power is now the only real value, and humanity is the sovereign judge of its own values. There is no outside or transcendent authority to check or control human power. This power is implemented through modern technology. Technology in the modern age is the product of the natural sciences, which create the view of nature and make it fit the treatment given to it. Since the natural world has no inherent value, humanity can use its technology to do anything to it. Nature becomes a mere object and humanity is the sole subject and sole will. The world then, after first having become the object of man s knowledge, becomes the object of his will, and his knowledge is put at the service of his will; and the will is, of course, a will for power over things. 14 That will, once the increased power has overtaken necessity, becomes sheer desire, which has no limit. Some ineffable quality has gone

4 L a w re n c e T r o s ter 19 out of the shape of things when manipulation invades the very sphere which has always stood as a paradigm for what man cannot interfere with. 15 However, there are moral implications to humanity s losing its sense of wonder and humility. Humanity now becomes part of the same metaphysical devaluation of the world and therefore becomes also an object of scientific knowledge and an object of its own technological power. Since humanity is now unprotected by an inviolable principle of ultimate, metaphysical integrity, it can determine the future by the present not through guidance and wisdom but by ephemeral desires and expediencies. The slow-working accidents of the natural world will be replaced by fastworking accidents of man s hasty and biased decisions, not exposed to the long test of the ages. 16 This problem is not just a theoretical issue, but can already be seen in the development of genetic engineering in which, for the first time, the engineer can engineer the engineer. 17 Jonas feels that modern philosophical ethics has no answer to these ethical dangers. In modern existentialism, for example, Jonas sees the same principles at work as in ancient gnosticism: the cosmos is not ordered for good and there is a belief in the transcendence of the acosmic self or the authentic individual in existentialist terminology, who stands above any moral law and can therefore create his own values beyond good and evil and can neither be bound nor helped by any conce-for-alp principles or rules. 18 This dualism between humanity and the natural world also creates a situation where people have no reason to care about future generations or the long-term fate of the world.19 Jonas response to modern nihilism is the first to use Heidegger s own existential categories as a point of departure for undermining the modern credo that the human being is the source of all value in nature. 20 He does this by first extending Heidegger s concept of existence to include all living organisms by showing that every living creature, from the smallest microbe to humankind, shows concern for its own being by connecting to the world around them in order to stave off death and non-being. Thus, even in the simplest organism, there is a kind of inward relation to their own being. Jonas sees metabolism, the exchange of matter with the environment which all organisms must exhibit in order to survive, as the most basic expression of that organism s struggle for life. This is what Jonas calls its needful freedom. Each organism is free, in the sense that it consistendy exhibits a dynamic unity beyond the sum of its parts, and yet it is dependent on constant exchanges with its environment in order to avoid dying.21 All the polarities that humans find in themselves being/non-being, self/world, form/matter, freedom/necessity Jonas finds traces of in the most primitive organisms. With each new level of complexity in evolution there is an increase of mind which brings a new level of freedom as well as peril and the potential for pain and suffering. For example, all life requires nutrition and strives to reproduce. Animal life also has the capacities for movement and desire and a sensitivity to its environment that plants do not. But, with these

5 2 0 C O N S E R V A T I V E J U D A I S M increased capabilities, animals also have the ability to feel pain, fear and abandonment. With the advent of humanity in evolution, being now becomes reflective and must try to understand its place in the whole of which it is part. This creates the particular human anxieties of existence, unhappiness, guilt and despair.22 Jonas wants us to understand that if we look at lower life forms as not having a trace of mind, then we are accepting not a scientific fact but a metaphysical prejudice, namely mechanic or reductionist materialism, which is not a neutral description of the physical world.23 Jonas allows us to interpret the facts of biology existentially and therefore see inherent value in the natural world beyond ourselves. If we can do this, then we must ethically accept our role as the guardians and stewards of the natural world. This last point brings Jonas to the metaphysical stage in his philosophy, which is the foundation for his ethics.24 Jonas s ethics require a metaphysical foundation because he feels that an ethical response to modern nihilism must have an objective reality. This ontological grounding of ethics25 is based on the premise that the very existence of purposiveness in Being shows that being is superior to non-being.26 In addition, Jonas believes that humanity matters to Being itself as the maximal actualization of its potentiality for purposiveness. 27 If we believe this, then the future of humanity and the world matters. According to Jonas, our first imperative therefore is not to ruin... what nature has achieved in him [humankind] by the way of his using it. 28 We must be cautious in our use of the world and pursue only modest goals. In response to modern nihilism, Jonas asserts that there is purpose and meaning in the world. There is mind, freedom and value in all forms of life. The world is not a mindless machine, in which we are but cogs. Instead, we are citizens of what Aldo Leopold called the land-community. 29 Faced with this fact, we must respond ethically, to protect the whole of life and not only ourselves. However, nihilism may not be completely answered by Jonas project at this point. A final stage, a theological one, may be required. In Jonas s article in the CCAR Journal, the four tenets of the biblical/ Jewish tradition that modern nihilism denied were that: God created the universe, the universe is good, humanity is created in the divine image, and God makes known to humanity what is good. Vogel argues that Jonas s metaphysics preserves the last three in his naturalistic metaphysics, without the necessity of theology.30 And although Jonas believed that theology was not necessary to answer modern nihilism, nonetheless the first tenet, that God created the universe, which does require a theological response, still answers certain basic human spiritual needs.31 We want to know that there is a loving God who created the universe and still sustains it. And we hope that goodness is not lost or forgotten in this universe, that in some way we are inscribed in what the Jewish tradition calls the Book of Life. Only through theology can these longings be addressed. Jonas tries to create a theology which will be rational and conform with his existentialism, with his meta-

6 L a w re n c e T r ö s t e r 21 physics and with science as he understands it. In the process of creating that theology, Jonas has to confront Auschwitz. In 1987 Jonas published an essay called The Concept of God after Auschwitz: A Jewish Voice, which was a revision of his earlier essay on immortality.32 He considered this article to be a piece of speculative theology, by which he meant that although we cannot prove the existence of God, working on a concept of God is a form of understanding even if not a form of knowledge.33 When we begin to consider the concept of God, Jonas says, we are immediately confronted with Auschwitz. He believes that nothing in previous ideas of theodicy is of any use in dealing with the Holocaust. At Auschwitz, not fidelity or infidelity, belief or unbelief, not guilt or punishment, not trial, witness and messianic hope, nay, not even strength or weakness, heroism or cowardice, defiance or submission had a place there. 34 The victims of the Holocaust did not die because of their faith, as traditional martyrs did, yet because of their membership in the ancient people of the covenant, they were singled out for murder. So Jonas asks, What God could let it happen? This question, according to Jonas, is more difficult for a Jew than a Christian since, for the Christian, the world is largely of the devil and always an object of suspicion. But, for a Jew, Auschwitz calls into question the central belief in a God of history who makes the world a locus of divine creation, justice and redemption. So, Jonas says, unless one is willing to give up the idea of God, the Lord of history... will have to go by the board. 35 Jonas then repeats a myth that he created for his article on immortality. In this myth,... the ground of being, or the divine, chose to give itself over to the chance and risk and endless variety of becoming. And wholly so: entering into the adventure of space and time, the deity held nothing back of itself: no uncommitted or unimpaired part removed to direct, correct, and ultimately guarantee the devious working-out of its destiny in creation. 36 There are three critical characteristics of the God of this myth that Jonas then explicidy elaborates. First of all, while God is still a Creator, God is a suffering God. Jonas rejects any connection with the Christian idea of divine suffering, insisting that the suffering of God can be biblically justified. Here the divine suffering is the pain that God feels alongside of the pain of God s creations, as well as God s disappointments with humanity. As William Kaufman put it, in his discussion of Jonas s concept of God, Creation is tragic. 37 Secondly, God is a becoming God. It is a God emerging in time instead of possessing a completed being that remains identical with itself throughout eternity. 38 The becoming God is affected and altered by the events occurring in the universe. If God has any relation to Creation, then God must in some way become different through the process of the emerging universe. Lasdy, God is a caring God. Whatever the primordial condition of the Godhead, he ceased to be self-contained once he let himself in for the existence of a world by creating such a world or letting it come to be. This does not mean that God intervenes in history in the traditional sense. After

7 22 C O N S E R V A T I V E J U D A I S M Auschwitz, that must go by the board. Instead, God has left human creations with the responsibility of acting for the sake of the universe. Therefore, God has made his care dependent on them. This implies that God is also an endangered God, a God who runs a risk. 39 The implication of these characteristics of God is that this is not an omnipotent God,... for the sake of our image of God and our whole relation to the divine, for the sake of any viable theology, we cannot uphold the time-honored (medieval) doctrine of absolute, unlimited divine power. 40 He advances two arguments for the rejection of divine omnipotence. First of all, from a purely logical perspective, omnipotence is self-contradictory, since absolute power implies that there can be no other object on which to exercise its power. The existence of such an other itself implies limitation. An omnipotent God, therefore, could only exist in solitude with nothing on which to act.41 Secondly, and most importandy for Jonas, there is a theological argument against divine omnipotence: absolute power can only exist in God at the expense of absolute goodness unless God is completely inscrutable. Only a completely unintelligible God can be said to be absolutely good and absolutely powerful, yet tolerate the world as it is. 42 Jonas chooses a conception of God who is good and intelligible and therefore rule out omnipotence. He believes that the hidden God is not Jewish and that after Auschwitz, goodness can be maintained only at the cost of relinquishing power. Therefore God was silent at Auschwitz not because God chose not to intervene but because God could not intervene. Rejecting a Manichean dualism to explain the origin of evil, Jonas locates evil today in the deliberate acts of human beings.43 Thus, God s limitation is a self-limitation done at the moment of Creation. Here Jonas connects his idea of divinity with the Kabbalistic doctrine of tzimtzum, the contraction of the divine for the purpose of creation. For Jonas, however, the contraction is total:... the Infinite ceded his power to the finite and thereby wholly delivered his cause into its hands. 44 What is then left of the relation of Creation to its Creator? Jonas believes that, Having given himself whole to the becoming world, God has no more to give: it is man s now to give to him. 45 In a later essay, Jonas stepped somewhat back from this idea and suggested that God continues to act in relation to the universe.46 God does not do this through direct supernatural actions that contradict the laws of the natural world, but rather through the inspiration of certain individuals. Just as our freedom to act in the world is scientifically compatible with causality, then we can accept a kind of divine causality that comes into our inner self that does not conflict with the human free will.47 In a later essay where Jonas analyzes the implications of modern cosmology for his philosophy and theology, Jonas returns to the theme of God s need for our help. He quotes the diaries of Etty Hillesum, a young woman from the Netherlands who was killed at Auschwitz. In her diaries, published forty years after her death, she wrote:... and if God does not continue to

8 L a w re n c e T r ö s t e r 23 help me, then I must help God... I will help you O God... you cannot help us but that we must help you, and in so doing we ultimately help ourselves. 48 Jonas was inspired by her words and he considered them a witness to the truth of his theology. There have been several good analyses of Jonas s thought and influence.49 In Catholic theologian John Haught s book, God After Darwin,5 Jonas s philosophy is compared with that of Alfred North Whitehead and other process thinkers. Haught sees in Jonas s concept of God a similarity to the idea of what Christian theologians called a kenotic model of divinity.51 Haught, however, believes that Jonas theodicy is incomplete because it leaves out a sufficient basis for a theological hope in the redemption of the humanity and the universe. He would add the idea of the promise of the natural world to Jonas s idea of the potential of the natural world for mind and inwardness. In this way, an eschatology could be added to Jonas theodicy which would also link it more firmly to an authentically biblical/jewish faith.52 Jonas stands as a significant Jewish thinker of the twentieth century, who displayed the unwavering moral integrity that was the hallmark of his life and work. 53 His concept of God after the Holocaust, grounded in a serious and consistent philosophical foundation, will continue to challenge our conventional theological beliefs. NOTES 1. Wissenschaft as Personal Experience, Hastings Center Report, 32, N o. 4 (July-August 2002): pp This article was originally published in German in Jonas s public break with H eidegger occurred at a conference at Drew University in Madison, N ew Jersey on April 9, The conference was about the relevance o f H eidegger s thought to Protestant theology. H eidegger was supposed to address the conference but could not do so because o f his health. Jonas was asked to replace him, and delivered an attack on H eidegger s thought and how it was central to H eidegger s Nazism. When he finished speaking, Jonas was given a standing ovation. Concerning the speech see Ricard Wolin, Heidegger s Children (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), pp Eventually the speech was included as a chapter in Jonas s The Phenomenon of Life (pp ), called H eidegger and T heology. See below for bibliographical information. 2. Exceptions are William Kaufman, The Evolving God in Jewish Process Theology (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1997), pp ; Sandra B. Lubarsky and David Ray Griffin, Jewish Theology and Process Thought (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996), pp. 15, ; Martin D. YafFe, Judaism and Environmental Ethics (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2001), pp , After Jonas s death in 1993, the Hastings Center published a special issue o f the Hastings Center Report, 2 5, N o. 7, called The Legacy o f Hans Jonas. It included articles on Jonas s philosophy, bioethics, environmental ethics and political influence. 4. Jonas has had a considerable influence on the Green Party in Germany. See also YafFe, Judaism and Environmental Ethics. 5. According to Wolin (Heidegger s Children, p. 104), Jonas was the most Jewishly connected o f the group. W olin s book does not include Levinas as one o f H eidegger s Jewish students, but Lawrence Vogel (see bibliographical note below) does. 6. This was eventually translated into English as The Gnostic Religion in 1958 (see bibliographical note below). 7. The Gnostic Religion (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963, 2 nd edition); The Phenomenon of Life:

9 2 4 C O N S E R V A T I V E J U D A I S M Toward a Philosophical Biology (Chicago: University o f Chicago Press, 1982, 2 nd edition); The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age (Chicago: University o f Chicago Press, 1984); Mortality and Morality: A Search for the Good after Auschwitz, edited and introduced by Lawrence Vogel (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1996). V ogel includes a bibliography o f Jonas s works in English and German. 8. This project had already been laid out by Jonas in an epilogue in the 2 nd edition o f The Gnostic Religion called Gnosticism, Nihilism and Existentialism. This revised version o f an article published in 1952 was also included in The Phenomenon of Life, pp For a full discussion o f the relationship o f science and religion and the impact o f materialism and reductionism, see Ian G. Barbour, Religion and Science: Historical and Contemporary Issues (San Francisco: HarperCollins Publishers, 1997). 10. Reprinted in Yaffe, Jewish Environmental Ethics, pp , and titled Contem porary Problems in Ethics from a Jewish Perspective. 11. Yaffe, p Ibid, p Ibid, p Ibid, p Ibid, p Ibid, p The phrase is taken from Leon Kass, Toward a More N atural Science: Biology and Human Affairs (N ew York: The Free Press, 1985), p. 18. Kass is a leading bioethicist and a student and disciple o f Jonas. See his appreciation o f Jonas in the special issue o f the Hastings Center Report, pp Yaffe, p This criticism o f existentialism as nihilism is at the heart o f Jonas s assertion that Heidegger s philosophy led to his Nazism. See Wolin, pp , See V ogel s introduction to Mortality and Morality, p. 9 (from here on, referred to as V ogel s introduction ). 20. Vogel s introduction, p Mortality and Morality, p. 66f. 22. Ibid, pp , , and Phenomenon of Life, p V ogel s introduction, p. 11. See also Barbour, Religion and Science, pp , pp This is the main theme o f The Imperative of Responsibility. See also Yaffe, pp Mortality and Morality, pp The Imperative of Responsibility, p Vogel s introduction, p The Imperative of Responsibility, p. 129f. 29. Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (New York: Ballantine Books, 1970), p. 240f. 30. V ogel s introduction, p V ogel s introduction, p N ow printed in Mortality and Morality, pp This version is a translation o f a lecture given in Germany in It was a revised version o f his The Concept o f God After Auschwitz, published in: Out of the Whirlwind: A Reader of Holocaust Literature, edited by Albert H. Friedlander (N ew York: U nion o f American Hebrew Congregations), pp ^ :7 6. This incorporated material from an earlier essay, Immortality and the Modern Temper, published originally in 1962 but also included in the Phenomenon of Life and in Mortality and Morality, pp Mortality and Morality, p Ibid, p Ibid, p Ibid, p Kaufman, The Evolving God in Jewish Process Theology, p Mortality and Morality, p Ibid, p. 138.

10 L a w re n c e T r ö s t e r Ibid, p Ibid, p See also Charles Hartshorne, Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes (Albany: SUNY Press, 1984). 42. Mortality and Morality, p Ibid, p Ibid, p Ibid, p Ibid, p. 154f, Is Faith Still Possible?: Memories o f R udolf Bultmann and Reflections on the Philosophical Aspects o f His Work. 47. Ibid, p. 156f. 48. Ibid, p See the Hastings Center Report special issue; W olin, V ogel s introduction, Kaufman and Yaffe. 50. John F. Haught, God After Darwin: A Theology of Evolution (Boulder: Westview Press, 2000), pp Haught, pp The term com es from the Greek kenosis which is found in the N ew Testament in chapter 2 o f Paul s letter to the Philippians. See Haught, pp and Barbour, Science and Religion, pp Haught, p W olin, p Lawrence Troster is the rabbi of Congregation Beth Israel of Northern Valley in Bergenfield, New Jersey. He is also on the executive board of the Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life (COEJL) and a member of the editorial board of Conservative Judaism.