Ethics in Progress, 2024, Volume 15, Issue 2

Permanent URI for this collection

https://hdl.handle.net/10593/27975

Browse

Browsing Ethics in Progress, 2024, Volume 15, Issue 2 by Subject "Hans Jonas"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Item
    Natural Becoming: From Bad Infinity Towards an Open Dialectic? Contemporary Issues Moving From Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature
    (Wydział Filozoficzny UAM, 2024-12-21) Erle, Giorgio
    In Hegel’s Philosophy, natural time is the engine of bad infinity, presenting itself through disappearance. Nevertheless, as one proceeds towards the higher levels of the realm of exteriority, this force from abstract becomes increasingly real until it becomes part of vital processes in the organized subjectivity, such as that of the living organism that “knows” and uses this becoming as a force to its advantage, e.g., in the forms of metabolism. This effective meaning of natural becoming seems to us to have been particularly highlighted in the 20th–century in the “Philosophical Biology” of Hans Jonas, whereby even the elements of failure (e.g., in the animal’s procurement of food) are grasped as expressions of a distinctive trait of the subject, namely its capacity to bear the negative and with this to establish mediation. Even the mortal limit, which is what leads to the conclusion of the Naturphilosophie requiring the elevation to the Philosophy of Spirit in Hegel, according to Jonas, takes on, within the human awareness, a renewed ontological value that allows life to flourish again and with this makes human beings able to ask themselves what kind of world they want to hand over (also with environmental regard) to future generations. If this is the case, then a role for Naturphilosophie becomes highly topical about producing an “open dialectic” invoked many times in the philosophical paths of the 20th century.
  • Item
    The Wonders of the World and the Wonder of Man: Sophocles’ Ode to Man in Hegel, Heidegger, and Jonas
    (Wydział Filozoficzny UAM, 2024-12-21) Wilford, Paul; Anderson, Nicholas; Loebs, John
    This article brings Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Martin Heidegger, and Hans Jonas into conversation about man’s relationship to nature on the basis of their references to the “Ode to Man” from Sophocles’ Antigone. Hegel’s reference to the ode in his Naturphilosophie highlights the violence of man’s practical relation to nature even as it also points beyond all opposition to a philosophic relation that discerns man’s underlying unity with nature. By stressing that the ode’s evocation of man’s violence against nature is undergirded by the overwhelming violence that nature perpetrates upon man, Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics raises the possibility that Hegel’s “higher” relation to nature is an outgrowth of Western history’s oblivion of man’s essentially violent exposedness to being. Jonas concurs with a version of Heidegger’s concern in his Imperative of Responsibility and asserts that man’s violent mastery of nature has reached an uncanny excess that renders the ode almost quaint, but he insists above all that man must now assume the degree of responsibility that accords with his vast powers. Insofar as his exhortation to responsibility drives Jonas to a partial renewal of metaphysics, his position could be considered a retrieval of the Hegelian standpoint.