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Evolution and the meaning of being: Heidegger, Jonas and Nihilism

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Abstract

Hans Jonas accuses Heidegger of “never bring[ing] his question about Being into correlation with the testimony of our physical and biological evolution.” Neither the early nor later Heidegger has a “philosophy of nature,” Jonas charges, because Naturphilosophie demands a new concept of matter, a monistic account of cosmogony and evolution, and the grounding of ethical responsibility for future generations in an ontological “first principle.” Jonas’s ontological rethinking of Darwinism allows him to overcome the nihilism that a mechanistic interpretation of evolution forces upon us: a nihilism allegedly shared by Heidegger. I imagine a Heideggerian response to Jonas, and ask whether the dream of recovering a synthesis between cosmogony and moral insight has been irrecoverably shattered by modern natural science.

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Notes

  1. Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2001), 232.

  2. Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life, 53.

  3. Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life, 1 and 81.

  4. Hans Jonas, Mortality and Morality: A Search for the Good after Auschwitz (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1996), 173.

  5. Jonas, Mortality and Morality (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1996), 101.

  6. Jonas, Mortality and Morality, 48.

  7. Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life, 44–45.

  8. Jonas, Mortality and Morality, 76.

  9. Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life, 233-4.

  10. With characteristic panache, Stephen Jay Gould tells us that Darwinism destroys “the false hopes” of traditional metaphysics by subjecting them to “a cold bath”:

    Darwin’s mechanism – natural selection – can only generate local adaptation to environments that change in a directionless way through time, thus imparting no goal or progressive victor to life’s history. (In Darwin’s system, an internal parasite, so anatomically degenerate that it has become little more than a bag of ingestive and reproductive tissue within the body of its host, may be just as well adapted and may enjoy just as much prospect of future success, as the most complex mammalian carnivore - wily, fleet, and adept - living free on the savannas.) Moreover, although organisms may be well designed, and ecosystems harmonious, these broader features of life arise only as consequences of the unconscious struggles of individual organisms for personal reproductive success, and not as direct results of any natural principle operating overtly for such “higher” goods… By taking the Darwinian ‘cold bath’ and staring reality in the face, we can finally abandon the cardinal false hope of the ages – that factual nature can specify the meaning of our life by validating our inherent superiority, or by proving that evolution exists to generate us as the summit of life’s purpose. In principle, the factual state of the universe cannot teach us how we should live or what our lives should mean – for these ethical questions of value and meaning belong to such different realms of human life as religion, philosophy and humanistic study.

    (Gould’s Introduction to Carl Zimmer, Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea, (New York: Harper Perennial, 2001) xxxv–xxxvi.)

  11. Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life, 53.

  12. Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life, 283.

  13. Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life, 53.

  14. Jonas, Mortality and Morality, 169.

  15. Jonas, Mortality and Morality, 62–63.

  16. Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life, 102.

  17. Jonas, Mortality and Morality, 85.

  18. Jonas, Mortality and Morality, 73.

  19. Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life, 2.

  20. Jonas, Mortality and Morality, 52.

  21. Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life, 233.

  22. Jonas, Mortality and Morality, 52.

  23. Jonas, Mortality and Morality, 171.

  24. Jonas, Mortality and Morality, 173.

  25. Scodel, Harvey. “An Interview with Hans Jonas.” Social Research 70, 2 (2003), 356.

  26. Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life, 81.

  27. Jonas, Mortality and Morality, 173.

  28. Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 50.

  29. Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility, 80.

  30. Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life, 283.

  31. Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life, 284.

  32. Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility, 130.

  33. Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility, 37.

  34. Jonas, Mortality and Morality, 106.

  35. Jonas, Mortality and Morality, 101.

  36. Jonas, Mortality and Morality, 102.

  37. Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life, 215.

  38. Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life, 257.

  39. Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life, 258.

  40. Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life, 256.

  41. Jonas, Mortality and Morality, 48–49.

  42. Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life, 234.

  43. Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life, 253.

  44. Scodel, “Interview,” 345.

  45. Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility, 71.

  46. “The need of Reason,” echoing Kant’s insistence on the unavoidability of metaphysical speculation, is the term I heard Jonas use in 1991 at a conference in his honor at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

  47. Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility, 48.

  48. Jonas, Mortality and Morality, 190.

  49. Jonas, Mortality and Morality, 181.

  50. Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility, 48.

  51. I owe this formulation to my beloved teacher, Mitchell Miller, formerly of Vassar College.

  52. For the clearest explanation of Heidegger’s idea of “the Fourfold” that I have read, see Chapter 10, “Building and Dwelling” in Karsten Harries, The Ethical Function of Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997). For Harries’ own account of the nihilism of modern science and how a Heideggerian perspective answers it, see Chapters 16 and 17 in Infinity and Perspective (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001). For a succinct overview of Harries’ position, see "Space, Place, and Ethos: Reflections on the Ethical Function of Architecture," artibus et historiae, no. 8, Harries 1984, pp. 159–165.

  53. For Heidegger’s elaboration upon this line from a late Holderlin poem, see the essays in Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Harper and Row, 1971).

    Joseph Fell speaks of our earthly home as a “groundless ground” in his excellent book, Heidegger and Sartre: An Essay on Being and Place (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979).

    Heidegger calls attention to the familiar world as ‘wondrous’ and ‘holy’ when it is no longer devalued by reference to a transcendent ground or quest for such. This, to be sure, has to be accomplished by pointing to another ground that has been hidden; but this ‘groundless ground’ is nothing other than the event and place of disclosure of phenomena themselves, i.e., the familiar world… The later Heidegger seeks to free philosophy and culture from its [traditional] metaphysical and teleological quest, which cannot affirm the phenomenal world in and for itself but only insofar as it subserves human ends [by way of a supposedly absolute ground]… (404–405)

    Later in the text, Fell explains why Heidegger’s awakening us to this “groundless ground” amounts to “a fundamental ethics”:

    The history of metaphysics terminates in nihilism… The quest for absolute, nonrelative, unconditioned value, like the quest for absolute truth, is displacement from the conditions under which there is and can be value. Value resides neither primarily in man nor primarily in nature, but in their precedent union… What has primary value is the intelligible world itself: the ungroundable ‘gift’ of an illuminated region or ‘clearing’ standing out from a surrounding darkness… [Authentic] love is love of mortal fate, love of the earth.” (423)

  54. Remi Brague, The Wisdom of the World: The Human Experience of the Universe in Western Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 216.

  55. Charles Taylor, “Disenchantment-Reenchantment,” Ch. 12 in Dilemmas and Connections: Selected Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), p. 294.

  56. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 377.

  57. Ibid., p. 380.

  58. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 347.

  59. For a down-to-earth articulation of these concepts, see Heidegger’s “Memorial Address” in Discourse on Thinking (New York: Harper and Row, 1966).

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Acknowledgements

My special thanks to Eric Pommier and audiences he attracted to attend a Jonas symposium at Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile in Santiago and a conference commemorating the 20th anniversary of Jonas’s death, “L’Éthique a L’Épreuve de la Technique dans la Pensee de Hans Jonas” at the Sorbonne in Paris. Also, gratitude for the feedback of my colleague, Melvyn Woody.

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    Lawrence Vogel

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Vogel, L. Evolution and the meaning of being: Heidegger, Jonas and Nihilism. Cont Philos Rev 51, 65–79 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-017-9411-y

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