Hans Jonas’s image theory

ABSTRACT

This essay explores Jonas’s multifaceted and rich enquiries into the notion of image. In particular, it argues that reflecting on the “image” helps Jonas clarify the unique condition of human existence, where the twine of thought and being reveals a paradoxical (and yet crucial) relationship between time and eternity, change and permanence, immanence and transcendence. The employ of the interpretative device provided by the image enables a nuanced understanding of the human complexity which goes beyond the partial and reductive descriptions of relativistic immanentism, on the one hand, and immutable transcendence, on the other. By commenting upon its anthropological, aesthetic, and ethical significance, we propose that the study of Jonas’s thoughts on the image not only offers valuable insights into the philosophical understanding of such a fascinating object, but also sheds a new and interesting light on the unity of his oeuvre.

KEYWORDS:

• Hans Jonas
• image
• homo pictor
• likeness
• image of the human being
• ethics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 As is argued in the following pages, the notion of image in Jonas’s philosophy is complex and multilayered. We prefer not to anticipate a definition or a summary at this point, but to let the multifarious nuances of the concept emerge through the discussion.

2 Jonas, “Edmund Husserl and the Ontological Question”, 7.

3 Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life, 184.

4 Ibid., 185. Enquiring into Jonas’s philosophical use of the traditional expression of the human being as “imago Dei” would exceed the scope of this article. For a recent study on this issue, see Settimo, “Hans Jonas’s Reflections on the Human Soul”.

5 Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility, 20.

6 Ibid.

7 It would be interesting to extend this enquiry also to Jonas’s Gnosisforschung, where the image plays a primary role (see e.g. Jonas, Gnosis und spätantiker Geist, Part 1, 1–91, 140–251; Jonas, Gnosis und spätantiker Geist, Part 2.1, 1–23; Frogneux, “Présentation”; Fossa, “Existentialism, Nihilism – and Gnosticism?”). However, in the present contribution we limit our enquiry to the relationship between Jonas’s philosophical biology and his ethics of responsibility.

8 Jonas uses the expressions “image of man” (e.g. Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life, 185–6; Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility, x, 20, 26, 201) and “idea of man”, respectively (e.g. Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility, 43–4; Jonas, Philosophical Essays, 240; Jonas, Technik, Medizin und Ethik, 292). In this paper, we use the more adequate expressions “image of the human being” and “idea of the human being” to refer to them.

9 See Dewitte, “Préservation de l’humanité et image de l’homme”; Kersten, “Image-making and the Nature of Imagination”; Frogneux, “L’imposture du moi idéal”; Wiesing, Artificial Presence; Schirra and Sachs-Hombach, “Homo Pictor and the Linguistic Turn”; Halawa, “Editorial”; Ulama, “Von Bildfreiheit und Geschichtsverlust”; Morris, Hans Jonas’s Ethic of Responsibility, 80–4, 178–82; Rubio, “Hans Jonas como teórico de la imagen”; Rubio, “Homo Pictor”; Fossa, “Vision, Image and Symbol”; Nielsen-Sikora, “Werkzeug, Bild und Grab”; Franzini Tibaldeo, “The Philosophical-Anthropological and Ethical Meaning”; Franzini Tibaldeo, “Bild”; Coyne, Hans Jonas, 87–93, 130–1; Settimo, “Hans Jonas’s Reflections”; Frogneux, “Le détachement de l’image”; Bobsin Duarte, “Símbolos, imagens, imaginação e memória”. These publications mainly focus on the biological-philosophical phase of Jonas’s thinking without carrying out a detailed enquiry into the relationship between Jonas’s biological philosophy, anthropology, and ethics in the light of the fil rouge of the image – as we endeavour to do here.

10 Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life, 80.

11 Ibid., 81.

12 Ibid.

13 Ibid., 83.

14 Jonas, Philosophical Essays, 196, 204.

15 Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life, 83.

16 Ibid.

17 Jonas, Philosophical Essays, 197.

18 Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life, 84.

19 Ibid.

20 Ibid., 80.

21 Ibid., 83, 106.

22 Jonas, Philosophical Essays, 204.

23 Ibid.

24 Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life, 158.

25 Jonas, Mortality and Morality, 79.

26 Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life, 170.

27 Ibid., 178.

28 Ibid., 136; see also 184.

29 Jonas, Mortality and Morality, 79.

30 Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life, 158.

31 Jonas, Mortality and Morality, 78–9.

32 Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life, 184.

33 Ibid., 185.

34 Jonas, Mortality and Morality, 79.

35 Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life, 159–65.

36 Ibid., 159.

37 Ibid., 160.

38 Jonas, Organismus und Freiheit, 284.

39 Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life, 161.

40 Ibid., 162.

41 Ibid.

42 Ibid., 163.

43 Ibid.

44 Ibid.

45 See also Fossa, “Vision, Image and Symbol”. The image’s disengagement from the usual availability of the world and the capacity of the image’s visibility to achieve an “autonomous form of being” (Fiedler, Über den Ursprung der künstlerischen Tätigkeit, 191) were core aspects of Konrad Fiedler’s (1841–1895) well-known aesthetics, which Jonas almost certainly knew, due to his personal interest in art and to the fact that, while attending three academic semesters at the University of Berlin in 1921–1923, he studied history of art among other subjects (Jonas, Memoirs, 19–21).

46 Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life, 164.

47 Ibid., 135–56.

48 Ibid., 165.

49 Ibid., 152.

50 Ibid., 167.

51 Ibid., 170; see also Wiesing, The Visibility of the Image.

52 Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life, 172–3.

53 Ibid., 184–5.

54 Ibid., 185.

55 Jonas, Mortality and Morality, 83.

56 Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life, 185.

57 Jonas, Mortality and Morality, 83.

58 See also Jonas, Philosophical Essays, 246.

59 See, for instance, Damasio, Descartes’ Error.

60 Jonas, Mortality and Morality, 79, 82; see also Cassirer, An Essay on Man.

61 Jonas, Philosophical Essays, 252,

62 Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life, 152.

63 Ibid., 171–2; Jonas, Memoirs, 233.

64 Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life, 172.

65 Ibid., 162.

66 It is worth noting that this very relationship between permanence and change is the specific focus of another influential work by Jonas, i.e. the essay “Change and Permanence” (Jonas, Philosophical Essays, 237–60). Here, the very possibility of understanding historical change relies on a “transhistoric element” (Jonas, Philosophical Essays, 242), which transcends change and, yet, is connected to it. Due to space constraints, a discussion of this essay – which evidently belongs to the same enquiry we are developing in these pages – must be postponed.

67 Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life, 165.

68 Ibid., 146.

69 Ibid., 167, 170, 185–6.

70 Of particular importance is the following, which refers to sight but holds for the image too: “The evidence of sight does not falsify reality when supplemented by that of underlying strata of experience, notably of motility and touch: when arrogantly rejecting it sight becomes barren of truth” (Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life, 149).

71 Ibid., 185.

72 “Den Regeln des Anstands, den Normen der Sittlichkeit entsprechen, sich schicken” (https://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/gehoeren).

73 “Der Mensch gestaltet, erfährt und beurteilt sein eigenes inneres Sein und äußeres Tun nach einem Bild davon, was sich für den Menschen gehört” (Jonas, Organismus und Freiheit, 320).

74 Hints of this “metaphysical speculation” can be found in key passages of Jonas’s works – e.g. Jonas, Mortality and Morality, 165–97; Jonas, Memoirs, 226, 291; Jonas, Organismus und Freiheit, 159–60. We cannot develop this further here.

75 Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life, 186.

76 Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility, x; Jonas, Das Prinzip Verantwortung, 15–17. We refer to both the original German version of the book (Jonas, Das Prinzip Verantwortung) and the English translation (Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility), carried out by Jonas himself with David Herr, since there are some important differences, as happens with the Vorwort/Preface we are referring to.

77 Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility, 43–4; Jonas, Philosophical Essays, 240; Jonas, Technik, Medizin und Ethik, 292.

78 E.g. Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility, 32–4.

79 Ibid., 125.

80 Ibid., 125–6.

81 Ibid., 20.

82 In its hermeneutic use, this element recalls what Jonas develops in the already-mentioned essay on “Change and Permanence” (Jonas, Philosophical Essays, 237–60).

83 Jonas, “Towards a Philosophy of Technology”, 41.

84 Ibid.

85 Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility, 9.

86 Jonas, Philosophical Essays, 166.

87 Ibid., 165.

88 Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility, 21.

89 Jonas, “Technik, Freiheit, und Pflicht”, 10.

90 Jonas, Philosophical Essays, 146.

91 Ibid., 141.

92 Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility, 126.

93 Ibid., 43.

94 Ibid.

95 This key point has drawn the attention of recent scholarship – e.g. Morris, Hans Jonas’s Ethic of Responsibility,178–82, who does not seem to distinguish the anthropological image from IHB, thus inclining towards a certain pre-eminence of change over the permanence of a true image or idea of the human being; Coyne, Hans Jonas, 130–1, 139, 191, who instead underlines the difference between IHB and the true “idea of Man”; Franzini Tibaldeo and Frogneux, “The Dialectical Dynamic”, 507, who try to show the compatibility of historical change and the permanence of a formally true character in human existence.

96 Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life, 233. On this, see also Fossa, “Existentialism, Nihilism – and Gnosticism?”

97 On this, see also the famous essay The Concept of God After Auschwitz (in Jonas, Mortality and Morality, 131–43), on which more cannot be said here.

98 Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility, 83.

99 Jonas, Das Prinzip Verantwortung, 420.

100 To be precise, the dialectic of likeness seems to involve at least three elements: (A) individual agents and their own anthropological image; (B) the public image – or images – which represents the Zeitgeist or the dominating conception(s) about human existence and position in the world (as, e.g. the Gnostic logos of Gnosis und Spätantiker Geist or the Weltanschauung proper of the technological age); and, finally, (C) IHB, representing its integrity. The dialectic of likeness entails all three components in its dynamic. In this essay we have focused especially on the relation between the formal level and the historical level. To the latter entirely belong both individual and public images. Further enquiries into the interplay between these two contingent images are for now to be postponed.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Fabio Fossa

Fabio Fossa is a Postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Mechanical Engineering of the Politecnico di Milano (Milan, Italy). His main research areas include applied ethics, philosophy of technology, robot and AI ethics, and the philosophy of Hans Jonas. His current research deals with the philosophy of artificial agency and the ethics of driving automation. He is a member of the research group META – Social Sciences and Humanities for Science and Technologies and Editor-in-Chief of the Italian journal InCircolo – Rivista di filosofia e culture.

Roberto Franzini Tibaldeo

Roberto Franzini Tibaldeo (Ph.D. in Science of Culture, Modena 2005, and Ph.D. in Philosophy, Torino 2011) is Professor of philosophy at the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Paraná (Curitiba, Brazil). From 2015 to 2018 he served as F.R.S.-F.N.R.S. Postdoctoral researcher at the Université catholique de Louvain (Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium), and from 2010 to 2015 he was Research fellow in Political Philosophy at the Scuola Universitaria Superiore Sant’Anna (Pisa, Italy). Research interests: continental philosophy (esp. Hans Jonas), ethics and politics of responsibility, philosophy for children/communities (p4c), landscape studies.