The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology by Hans Jonas

The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology Reviews

• 
  J. Aleksandr Wootton

  Extraordinary, if a little uneven, as collections of essays and lectures tend to be. In most chapters, Jonas writes in a smooth, accessible style, which is critically important for this sort of philosophy. In a few places, he does unfortunately descend into the kind of needlessly-convoluted vocabulary and sentence construction characteristic of academics who wish to obscure how little they really have to say: in other words, you can tell when Jonas "
  didn't have time to make it shorter." But it isn't for lack of something to say. Not at all.
  
  Jonas methodically debunks dualism and naturalism on the basis of biology, arguing that mind arises symbiotically with primitive multicellular life, a necessary corollary to nonadjacent sensory perception and motility, in other words, with desire. This startling clarification finds a portion of its source in Jonas' earlier work on Gnosticism, which introduced mind/body dualism into Western thought through the notion that people are immortal souls trapped in corrupted matter. Gnostic dualism has retained a firm grip on both popular and educated Western thought for centuries, mainly, Jonas says, due to Descarte.
  
  (I suspect that Gnostic ideas had introduced subtle corruptions into the metaphysics of all three major
  Abrahamic faiths centuries earlier, but perhaps these would not have survived in the absence of Descarte's influence. We see a secularized version today quite starkly in science fiction, in the concept that with the right technology, a person's essential self could be transferred out of the biological body and into a synthetic one, yet lose nothing important in translation).
  
  I'm extremely grateful for the gift of this book; it was a perfect follow-on to John Haught's
  God After Darwin, as Haught leans on Jonas for parts of his argument. Highly recommended.
• 
  Alina

  This is one of the most profound books I've read these past years. By profundity, I refer to that Jonas's ideas are radically countercultural, extremely convincing, and morally crucial to the development of modern thought and humanity's role in nature. Jonas's writing style is also incredibly beautiful, even literary, and yet does not suffer loss in clarity or philosophical rigor. If you care about having an enlightened perspective on our modern scientific era; having morality grounded in a substantial and, if I dare say, absolute way; or having your concept of the human species revolutionized in a manner that is ennobling and yet naturalistic -- please, I urge you, read this book.
  
  Let me summarize Jonas's key ideas. Jonas provides a theory of biological life, of the essential properties of it that distinguish it from inanimate matter. All living systems are driven by homeostatic processes and have the proper function of preserving their life form. They must take in energy and expel waste, for example, to survive. Jonas then provides a theory of the differences between plants, non-human animals, and humans. Plants always have direct contact with the source of their essential nutrients; their vital needs are necessarily satisfied, as long as they are living in apt conditions (e.g. their roots make direct contact with nutritious soil; leaves with sunlight; etc.).
  
  In contrast, animals do not have such endless and guaranteed supplies. They are set at a distance from objects that will satisfy vital needs. This distance is crucial. This distance allows for animals to have desires, since satisfaction not immediate, and to act on their desires. Most strikingly, this distance allows for animals to perceive a world that is separate from themselves; the subject/object dichotomy emerges. This world is populated by objects that have values relative to the animal's vital needs (e.g. some objects are attractive and others repulsive, depending on whether they will help or hinder the animal's survival). Finally, this distance allows for animals to have freedom; the satisfaction of any desire requires the animal to act, face challenges, and overcome. This amounts to a freedom that plants and non-organic matter do not have. This freedom is paradoxical, however, in that it stems from necessity; the condemnation to have desirable objects separate from oneself, and to have desires and needs to begin with.
  
  Humans are distinguished from non-human animals on one major respect. We have cognitive capacities that allow us to radically expand the distance that separates ourselves from desired objects. Particularly, we are not confined to the immediate world that surrounds us; we can represent this world in pictures and language, and such representations allow us to see objects anew, alter our desires, and regulate our behaviors. Thus, this greater distance entails greater freedom. Moreover, we can also represent ourselves, not only the world. Non-human animals are constrained to apprehending objects found in the world; in contrast, we humans can take our very attitude towards objects as our object of apprehension. This magnifies our freedom. But it also magnifies our suffering; self-awareness comes with the possibility of despair, guilt, anxiety, and so on.
  
  This covers only the four chapters of the book (chapters 1, 4, 6, 7). Chapter 2, 3, 5, and 8 present historical analyses of fundamental assumptions in natural science. Jonas shows that our basic scientific concepts (e.g. energy, causation) and criteria of scientific explanation (e.g. that an explanation details causal relations between different factors) are biased by the shadow of metaphysical dualism, which began with Gnostic religions and Christianity. Those religions framed human thought to conceive of a radical difference between the soul and the material world, and our contemporary science has kicked out the soul but preserves the conception of the material world -- which was originally formulated on the basis of its contrast with the soul. So, our idea of matter and nature presupposes the idea of soul. Religious thinking has snuck into our scientific materialism.
  
  Chapters 9, 10, and 11 focuses on Jonas's view of morality and value, which follows from his theory of biological life and his critiques of modern science. All living systems have a natural function towards self-preservation. So we have an obligation to protect life. This obligation is not based in our subjective or cultural assumptions. It is rather commanded by nature itself. Here is the only part where I diverge from Jonas's position. I think his premises are insufficient to purchase that conclusion. The conclusion that can be legitimately made is that this obligation is commanded by all living systems; in other words, this obligation is grounded in not merely human practices, but in the views and needs of the various species that inhabit this world. This amended conclusion, however, is still a radical one.
• 
  Amanda

  Brilliant. Jonas belongs among the great 20th century political theorists/scientists/philosophers like Voegelin, Strauss, and Arendt. In this book, he weaves together his "existential interpretation of biological facts" with reflections on the senses, gnosticism, nihilism, ontology, ethics, dualism, Darwinism, and more.
• 
  Bob Nichols

  In this series of twelve essays, Jonas critiques a Western philosophy of mind and a Western philosophy of the organism. His main argument runs something like this: Descartes separated the human mind from its body; the mind then ascends in Western science,the body floats away to insignificance, and modern-day existentialism and nihilism is the result. There is now a "reduction of the formal essence of life to the vanishing point of a mere vital momentum without specific original content...." Nothingness springs from the denial of essence and, with nihilism, man loses a "being" that transcends "the flux of becoming."
  
  The Darwinist picture ends up in the same spot, as a "Cartesian position without its metaphycial [sic?] cargo." The organism is merely a machine in a clockwork universe, run by a "mathematical god." Random mutations are acted on by the external force of natural selection. Progress is by "elimination," which is a "negative substitute for teleology." Evolution is "advance through mischance, of ascent by accident." There's no perpetual form that transcends change. "Being is becoming." The essence of life is "just self-preservation, which is analogous to the inertial laws ruling the conduct of a particle." Something like "The will to power," Jonas concludes, "seemed the only alternative left if the original essence of man had evaporated in the transitoriness and whimsicality of the evolutionary process."
  
  This is not Jonas' vision. His philosophy of life goes back to its origins or close to it. Metabolism is the first form of that freedom that emancipated life from matter. Self-preservation was not at all random and mindless. Even at this lowest level, life "prefigures mind," Jonas argues, because there was variability in how to attain life's end. The purpose of life, the essential ends of life, are fixed, species by species. But the objects and actions related to these ends are variable and subject to choice - a degree of free choice based on what the organism faces. Within a species itself, there is variability that constitutes an "individuality" and a sense of self, "however faint its voice." With the separation from plants, animal motility began the long path toward the separation of action from purpose. Through perception, animals bridged the gap between here and there. Emotion, as desire, bridged the gap between now and then. What was wanted was over there, which is a separation of the organism from the object in space in time.
  
  "To move and to feel" is the animal soul. This is Jonas' vision of the animal organism. "Animal being is... essentially passionate being," he states. "Living things are creatures of need. Only living things have needs and act on needs. Need is based both on the necessity for the continuous self-renewal of the organism by the metabolic process, and on the organism's elementary urge thus precariously to continue itself." Need manifests itself on the level of animality as appetite, fear and "all the rest of the emotions." Need propels the animal self outward across space and time, reaching out for objects to satisfy need and fear picks up and wards off threats and danger. The other emotions are the supporting cast. Animals are not mindless, soulless or passive beings subject solely to random mutation and external pressure. Animal life takes an active role through its own mindful freedom in ensuring its own existence. It is this passion to live that is the animal's form and essence, and it is this that allows them, in some degree, to create their existence. They are existentialists with purpose. They don't have the luxury for despair. Animals are existentialists with soul.
  
  If Jonas had stopped his argument here he would have left his reader with a substantially new vision for humanity, one that is continuous with the rest of animal life, despite the differences in mental capacity. But in his transition essay, Jonas says "we have passed the borderline between the physical and the mental sphere" and this is where "biology cedes the field to a philosophy of man." With evolution's progressive freedom ending in the human mind, the connection between purpose and action is severed. With our mental freedom, we wander around without soul. We are anchorless and we wonder about the meaning of existence. It's no wonder that there is existential despair. It's no wonder we can get a Sartre who makes stuff up to fill this nothingness.
  
  The latter series of essays are dense and it's not clear to me where Jonas himself ends up about all of this. Yet the answers are all there in the first half of this book. In our biology lies our essence. It's built on self-preservation, but it is not "merely" self-preservation. Freedom, right, justice and other philosophical themes are embedded in that notion, as well as our social and tribal nature, and our fear of death and religious impulses. And we also have a capacity for beauty and for wandering into the distant corners of the cosmos. These are by-products - the sweetest layer of freedom - of a mind that was designed to help us survive.
• 
  xDEAD ENDx

  Super brilliant and thought-provoking but kind of falls short with some of the premises related to a distinction between human and non-human animals (self-reflection, etc.). Also seems a little (appropriately) reactionary against Heidegger's betrayal. The essay on gnosticism, nihilism, and existentialism is a pinnacle.
• 
  Campbell Rider

  heidegger says somewhere that only humans really *die*, since animals just perish. Jonas takes him to task on this point: he argues that the fundamental purpose of all organisms is to maintain themselves in the face of mortality. They have an immanent purposiveness of form that emerges from their natural metabolic processes. Animals, plants and bacteria all constantly exchange their matter with their external environment and are never the same from one moment to the next, and it's the organism's constant activity of self-replenishing that sustains its identity. Jonas isn't a spooky mystic, and he doesn't deny that biology adequately explains how life functions and came to be. what he does deny is the capacity for the physical sciences to comprehend the "ontological surprise" of life—the significance of the fact that inert chemical processes give rise to organic forms that behave teleologically, resist death, and move and feel. epic
• 
  Thomas

  Now that is philosophy! Difficult, poetical, groundbreaking and manages to take the reader beneath axiomatic assumptions. Countercultural yet convincing, without being overly dramatic.
  
  This is a collection of essays, not a systematic overview of an all-encompassing philosophical outlook. The most important essay to me is the first one, as it managed to completely change my perspective on a very deep dualism: idealism versus materialism - mind vis a vis matter - and the interaction between them. Jonas argues that this dualism, crystallized in the Cartesian cogito ergo sum, which categorically and absolutely separates mind and matter (substance dualism), has a neat and traceable history which prefigures it.
  
  It goes along the lines of: in the oldern days, man's being in the world was non-abstract, non-philosophical, there was not a theoretical model for his existence. It was rather simply given to him, and there was axiomatic assumptions embedded in him which he was unable to challenge by thought. Phenomenologically speaking, the world - existence as such - was something that was alive, all of it: “When man first began to interpret the nature of things - and this he did when he began to be man - life was to him everywhere, and being the same as being alive … Soul flooded the whole of existence and encountered itself in all things.” Philosophically speaking, our early existence was characterized by what Jonas calls a "panvitalistic monism". Existence was identical with life, the negation of life - death - was unthinkable.
  
  Then, over the ages, and fully coming to light in Christianity, man started to realize that he had a non-mundane self, an interiority. Thus, once this was realized, there was a transmigration of the life essence from all that is, into the human soul. Mans interiority was seen as special, and slowly but surely, life itself was extracted from existence and was eventually seen as something unique to man alone. Thus, in Cartesian dualism, everything external to man, plants, nature and so forth, is seen as mechanistic, without life - deterministic, strictly following the laws of res extensa - physicality. As the domain of the mechanistic grew and expanded, eventually incorporating everything else within it, the human soul stood in radical contrast to this mechanisation. Only then, after the turn from panvitalism, through the discovery of the self and thereby into a panmechanism, does the modern dualism between idealism and materialism appear. The fundamental duality is the axiomatic assumption / perception of existence being alive or not. Once fundamental existence is seen as non-living, does the Cartesian substance duality arise as a consequence.
  
  The upshot is, that the seemingly impossible dichotomy between mind and matter, which manifests itself in so many different shapes and forms, slowly starts to dissolve. This is, to me, the pinnacle of philosophy. Problems are not meant to be solved, a paradox is there to show us that the question we're asking is in fact the problem. Thus, every question along the line of: "how does mind and matter interact?" (this also includes things such as panpsychism, which is firstly a reduction to atomistic physicalism, which then mind is projected into, causing all sorts of combination problems..), starts to lose their meaning.
  
  Some time is needed for the new questions to form, but the synthesis, or the dissolvement of the question, allows the reader to go one step deeper, or further back, in his assumptions, and thing about the relationship between panvitalism and panmechanism instead of materialism versus idealism. The question of the living once again returns and regains its status of being of utmost importance, and a philosophical biology takes the place of a philosophical physics, which is the operative paradigm for most of us today.
  
  If any of this is of interest, please read the book, or at least some of the essays, you will not regret it.
• 
  The_J

  Towards a Philosophical Biology. 50 years too late? Freedom requiring organic. Deep complexities, and much to ponder, including how much if any has been overcome in the decades since these talks were given.
• 
  samantha

  Hans Jonas' elegantly written and, I would say, spiritually moving argument against Descartes' dualism and the worldview of a purely mathematical and mechanical universe. I can't seem to get away from thinking about this book and will be re-reading it soon!
• 
  Matt Payne

  This is one of the best books I’ve read, certainly one of my favorite philosophy books.
  
  The book primarily explores the paradox of how deterministic material reality shouldn’t need to be experienced. This is not framed as a “hard question of consciousness,” because such framing assumes materialism as the true grounds, and consciousness as a problem which needs to be somehow solved using material laws. Instead Jonas traces the emergence of the elements our being back to organic roots. Everything we know can be seen as a function of life. He doesn’t go very much deeper than that, no true animism or hylozoism or pansychism, but instead takes single-celled organisms as the starting point. And he builds a solid phenomenology from that.
  
  According to Jonas, the ancients believed that everything was life, then we entered into a dualist era where we separated the mechanical cosmos from the divine beyond (a divinity which is also present in our souls and our experience), and that now we’ve entered into an age of materialism where life and consciousness are seen as a puzzle to be solved, or simply explained away. He chooses to embrace the paradox instead. That’s why I love this book. He does an absolutely beautiful job in outlining that paradox.
  
  That portion of the book is an absolute classic, a must-read, and woefully underappreciated. But the final portion of the book is speculative and a bit more scattered, though still extremely valuable. He launches into that final portion like this: He claims that phenomenology and existentialism help us to grasp the world, but that existentialism is fundamentally nihilistic, and beyond that realm we have only mythology as symbolism. I agree with this, or at least I like the idea a lot. Then he goes on to speculate his own mythology and a mystical moral responsibility which somehow connects life to the divine or the eternal image of god, which is our responsibility. He’s very (understandably) troubled by the evil and suffering in the world and he’s trying to make sense of that. Look up his biography to see how the forces of evil touched his life. But in the end I think he focused on an ethics that’s somehow based on his speculative mythology rather than truly on the phenomenon of life.
  
  The real conclusion isn’t found in the particular speculative mythology that he lays out near the end. It’s in his stating the fact that we need to keep developing our own mythologies which embrace the paradox that the book outlines. If his particular mythology doesn’t totally resonate with me, I still appreciate that he kicked off the speculative mythology project by offering his own. I take it as a call to develop more of these mythologies. None of them will be “right.” Many of them will be valuable.
  
  Anyway, I loved the book and I’ll be reading his collection of essays next, followed by his book about the ethics of technology.
• 
  Brian

  A thoughtful consideration on what is life. The collection of essays delves into various concepts of life and reviews how different philosophers viewed life. Jonas raises serious ethical questions, but sometimes is to abstruse to make much sense. Some of the essays show their age. His agonizing over the philosophy of Heidegger and his contemplation of gnosticism left me cold. These were subjects important to him once, many years ago, but I have a difficult time seeing their relevance today. Other essays—particularly the ones on the value of knowledge and epistemology—are timeless. I want to do a more focused reading on his work on the ethics of technology and nature, but that will take some time and searching.
• 
  Mo'ona KR

  This book is for you if you are given to abstract thinking, have a strong vocabulary base, and are not afraid to stretch your mind. As for me, it was a required reading and it felt torturous! Life is complicated enough as it is; don't need philosophy to reiterate that!
• 
  Christine

  A difficult read, but it was very thought-provoking.
• 
  Hunter Keane

  I was required to read this book for school. Jonas addresses a lot of truth in his book, but his abstract and drawn out writing style was too much for me.