Wissenschaft as

Personal Experience
By HANS JONAS

Hans Jonas was one of the major early influences on bioethics. In this recently translated personal
retrospective he sets forth his vision of a scientifically informed but technologically cautious bioethics.

T hree lectures are united here: common to all of them is the personal element,
which each originally contained for different reasons and which completely dominates the lecture that gives the col-
lection its title, “Wissenschaft as Personal Experience.” This topic, requested by the University of Heidelberg in
1986 as my contribution to its six-hundredth anniversary celebration, led me to present an autobiographical ac-
count, which I would not otherwise have done. Ten years earlier the ceremony held by the University of Marburg
to commemorate my deceased teacher and friend Rudolf Bultmann had given me the opportunity to include per-
sonal reminiscences of my own accord, together with a tribute of a more formal and theoretical nature. And when
I was awarded the German Booksellers’ Peace Prize for 1987, that enabled me to deliver a lecture whose subject
matter made room for a declaration of personal conviction. That declaration is likely to be a final one, given my
advanced age, and it is in no small part for this reason that I welcomed Suhrkamp Verlag’s suggestion to combine
these three lectures in one volume. —Hans Jonas

I
have been invited to speak to you about Wissenschaft
as personal experience.1 This is a subject I would
scarcely have chosen myself, and I even hesitated to
accept an invitation that involved speaking about my own
personal experience. For the end result of intellectual en-
deavor is actually all that should be made public, not the
inner process leading to it; what can be of more than pri-
vate interest about the latter? I think that what is expect-
ed of me in surveying my past is to glean from my own
experiences something like paradigmatic features that lie
beyond the personal sphere and thus reveal something
about contemporary thought in general. Approached for
this purpose in the evening of a long life devoted to the
study of philosophy, I shouldn’t disappoint this expecta-
Hans Jonas, “Wissenschaft as Personal Experience,” Hastings Center Report
32, no. 4 (2002): 27-35.
tion—taking into account the danger that what Niet-
zsche called “cursèd ipsissimosity” might play its tricks
upon one. I therefore
As Hans Jonas points out in this
accepted this disquiet- essay, the German word “Wis-
ing task. My hesitation senschaft” covers a wider range of
is heightened by the meaning than the English word
fact that Max Weber, “science,” usually given as its equiv-
who in 1919 gave a cel- alent. It can, for example, denote
scholarship as well as an intellectual
ebrated address entitled discipline or a field of knowledge.
“Wissenschaft als Beruf” In these pages it is translated ac-
(“Scholarship as a Vo- cording to its meaning in a given
cation”), is looking context; thus the title would read
over my shoulder, so to “Philosophy as Personal Experi-
ence” had we not decided to leave
speak. The echo of his the word in German. —Trans.
title was probably in-
tentional on the part of my hosts, but I hope it does not
leave me open to comparison with Weber’s incomparable

July-August 2002 HASTINGS CENTER REPORT 27

 example. In contrast to the more ob-
jective nature of the word “vocation”
in Weber’s address, the reference to
“personal experience” in my title
forces me to enter the subjective, au-
tobiographical sphere with all its
unique and accidental qualities. I
shall attempt here to use personal
memories as guideposts leading to re-
flections of a more general nature.
Unlike the narrower Anglo-Amer-
ican sense of the word “science,” the
German “Wissenschaft” in my title
also embraces the humanities and the
social sciences; and it must primarily
be these, including philosophy, that
my assignment encompasses. The
“wissenschaftlich” character of these
disciplines is different from that of
the exact sciences dealing with na-
ture; nowhere else has so much
thought been given to this difference
as in Germany. In Heidelberg an au-
dience scarcely needs to be reminded
that at the turn of the century Hein-
rich Rickert made a distinction be-
tween a field of inquiry whose goal is
“explanation” and one whose goal is
“understanding.” In addition, I must
mention Wilhelm Dilthey, whose
lifework focused on the concept of
experience. And then there is the
philosophical theory of hermeneu-
tics, which was not developed until
my time and whose Nestor, Hans-
Georg Gadamer, is still among us.
These are the names of philosophers,
and they point to the quite different
character of philosophy as a disci-
pline. Going beyond the specialized
individual sciences, philosophy re-
flects—as the preceding examples in-
dicate—upon their differing ap-
proaches to knowledge and their con-
ception of truth, and in the process
philosophy becomes itself a highly
developed specialty. This self-mirror-
ing of knowledge on a new level of
truth can in principle be repeated at
will in the form of ever new reflec-
tions on reflections.
As concerns “understanding,” the
cognitive approach of the humani-
ties, it is clear that “personal experi-
ence,” understood as empathy with
the object—itself the concrete em-
28 H A S T I N G S C E N T E R R E P O R T
bodiment of experience—is an indis-
soluble part of the intellectual process
from start to finish, pervading the en-
tire interpretation. How else can one
study history, for example—the his-
tory of art, literature, religion, poli-
tics, of all the past thoughts, feelings,
and actions of humankind? We must
use our imagination; what has been
experienced must be re-experienced.
For here one subject encounters an-
other subject, which no matter how
alien and far removed in historical
time, still remains human and thus
approachable by us, albeit open to
endless interpretations. But why
should this encounter take place, why
should the past be re-experienced?
Goethe answered this question with
the following words:
Those unable to give themselves
an account
of the past three thousand years
Must remain in the dark, naive,
And live from day to day.
In all that we are, we are heirs of
the past, and in its rediscovery we dis-
cover hidden aspects of ourselves.
This is inevitably a subjective process.
Here, the personal element becomes
involved and with it our place in
time: the historicity of the interpret-
ing subject means that he can never
have the last word, just as he general-
ly did not have the first one. At best
he bequeaths to posterity one more
aspect to consider, even if only as ma-
terial for argument and revision, and
he does so entirely in keeping with
his own frequently polemical motiva-
tion. The divergence of one’s own in-
terpretation from previous ones is
part of the process. We view a phe-
nomenon in a hall of mirrors of pre-
vious interpretations and via the mir-
rors’ manifold reflections. As a re-
sult—as the sophisticated scholar
well knows—we can coax forth new
aspects of a historical phenomenon
over and over again if it has been suf-
ficiently documented; again and
again it can, indeed must, be dis-
cussed anew in a never-ending con-
versation. Earlier views are for this
reason not necessarily false (although
they may be in individual cases), and
new views will at best become part of
the unfolding truth. Accordingly, a
given historical phenomenon lends
itself to endless interpretation by
virtue of the constantly new con-
frontations among interpreters, who
are themselves historically condi-
tioned subjectivities. This will go on
as long as history continues to pro-
duce new interpreters.
The humanities, including their
philosophical component, must ac-
knowledge that this subjectivity,
which is beneficial even if occasional-
ly limiting in its perspective, is an es-
sential part of their character. They
mustn’t be afraid to distinguish this
character from that of the natural sci-
ences, which deal only with objective
phenomena. Certainly in these latter
disciplines as well, devotion to the
matter at hand involves a personal el-
ement, yet neither in their method
nor their conclusions does it play a
role; basically, the individual re-
searchers are interchangeable. What
is discovered by one could have been
discovered by another once progress
in their research reaches a certain
point. Nor do the researchers need to
concern themselves with what has
been superseded. I won’t pursue this
comparison any further; it is intend-
ed only to emphasize how much
more inextricably connected the per-
sonal is to the objective in the field in
which my thinking took place. Here
the inquirers are not interchangeable.
Each one is a unique case. For this
very reason, it is permissible for a
scholar in the humanities, when
questioned, to give an account of
himself, even though what he says
may not always be reliable.
I
U sing the three stages of my intel-
lectual biography as the frame-
work for my reply, I will try to an-
swer the question presented to me.
Initially came my study of the Gnos-
ticism of late antiquity from the per-
spective of existential analysis; then
my encounter with the natural sci-
July-August 2002
 ences on my way to formulating a
philosophy of the organism; and fi-
nally my turn from theoretical to
practical philosophy—that is, to
ethics—in response to the urgent
challenge of technology that could no
longer be ignored. But first I must go
back even further.
As I recall—if I am really to be
personal—my first experience of an
intellectual discipline occurred long
before I began my formal studies at
the university. As a fifteen-year-old
Gymnasium student I was reading
Felix Dahn’s Ein Kampf um Rom (A
Struggle for Rome) when a learned
and wise uncle urged me to read Ed-
ward Gibbons’s History of the Decline
and Fall of the Roman Empire. As a re-
sult of experiencing this monumental
exatamentearly work of modern historiography,
I became aware for the first time of
e o que eu
what it means to reconstruct history
fiz... on the basis of cited sources, to de-
duce its course on a large scale by
studying an aggregate of particulars
rather than depicting this or that
episode with its heroes and villains in
a novelistic way. And at the same
time I realized that this reconstruc-
tion, in spite of sober objectivity, was
guided by a definite point of view; for
Gibbons’s work breathes the spirit of
the eighteenth century Enlighten-
ment, as demonstrated by his clear,
often ironic style and by his Voltaire-
an view of Christianity as one of the
factors responsible for Rome’s de-
cline. He could write mockingly of
Augustine (I still remember the pas-
sage) that he cast himself boldly into
the sea of grace. Here was a bracing
air far from all romanticizing. Later,
when I decided to do research my-
self—something I couldn’t have
imagined at the time—on a segment
of this same late and post-classical pe-
riod, it was from a consciously differ-
ent perspective but also one in which
the spirit of the Enlightenment was a
contributing element.
At this same time, when still in the
Gymnasium and inspired by my spe-
cial interest in Judaism, I began read-
ing the Prophets of the Old Testa-
ment, as translated (with commen-
July-August 2002
tary) by members of that Protestant
school representative of the scholar-
ship of its day. This school was
known for its historical and textual
criticism of the Bible. In Max Weber’s
address mentioned earlier, he spoke
of modern science’s “disenchanting of
the world” and its dismissal of the
miraculous. In spite of the truth of
his observation, it was my experience,
when first encountering scholarship
in the realm of religion, that placing
the Prophets in their time and world,
turning them from the flat homiletic
figures of the sacred texts into flesh-
My first philosophical reading in
those days happened to be Kant’s
Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der
Sitten, where I believed I had
rediscovered the ethos of the
Prophets, although this time in the
form of a principle of reason. Kant led
me to suspect that there are points of contact between
philosophy and religion.
and-blood characters, made them
more alive for us—closer to, not far-
ther from, the present—and left in-
tact the natural miracle: that they
could exist at all. This was my first
recognition of the fact that historical
scholarship, for all its distancing, can
also be a means of heightened appro-
priation. And my first philosophical
reading in those days happened to be,
I don’t know by what accident, Kant’s
Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sit-
ten (Fundamental Principles of the
Metaphysic of Morals), where I be-
lieved I had rediscovered the ethos of
the Prophets, although this time in
the form of a principle of reason.
Kant led me to suspect that there are
points of contact between philosophy
and religion. In terms of my own fu-
ture, this suspicion suggested to me
that the study of philosophy, to
which I was becoming increasingly
committed, at least did not exclude
the simultaneous study of religion or
religions. All of this was a prelude to
my career.
My encounter with the spirit of
scholarly research became a serious
matter when I was a university stu-
dent. Probably like everyone else, I
first “experienced” the intellectual
disciplines through the medium of
my teachers. The personal element
plays a much greater role in philoso-
phy and the other humanities than in
the exact sciences, where, if I am not
mistaken, the teacher’s personality re-
cedes behind the subject being stud-
ied (which is totally independent of it
and the same for everyone). At the
most, the teacher’s personality func-
tions as a pedagogic model for the
practice of—and thus training in—a
universally valid method. On the
other hand, historians, sociologists,
philologists, and theologians are, as
already noted, in every case noninter-
changeable individuals. This is all the
more true for philosophers, who
teach by philosophizing. You didn’t
simply pursue philosophy as a field—
you studied with Husserl, Heidegger,
Hartmann, or Jaspers, choosing your
university and courses accordingly.
You experienced the nature of the
field through your professors; it was
embodied in them. You became a
“disciple” in a very special sense, and
HASTINGS CENTER REPORT 29
 something resembling a process of
emancipation became necessary later
on if you didn’t want to remain a dis-
ciple for the rest of your life.
I had the good fortune to find
great teachers—above all Husserl,
Heidegger, and Bultmann. Each in
his own way made the study of phi-
losophy a personal experience for me.
I must limit myself here to the ex-
ample of Heidegger, who had a deci-
sive influence on me for years. I am
sometimes asked what the secret of
his effectiveness as a teacher actually
was. One may indeed speak of a se-
cret here, for students came under his
spell even before understanding him.
That at least is what happened in my
case. In my first semester, in the sum-
Hans Jonas e o mer of 1921 in Freiburg, I found my-
De Anima self in Heidegger’s proseminar on
Aristotle’s De Anima. Our confronta-
tion with the text in that seminar was
no doubt what Goethe called an Ure-
rlebnis (primal experience). Nothing
was made easy for us; Heidegger in-
sisted on the pristine sense of the sim-
plest words, undistorted by later ter-
minology, the use of which was strict-
ly forbidden. The usual philosophical
jargon was not admissible—“much
too scholarly” Heidegger would say
when students, on the basis of their
reading, introduced it into the discus-
sion. The text was young, not old;
present, not past. We were supposed
to uncover Aristotle’s original ques-
tions and pronouncements from be-
neath the layers imposed by the tradi-
tion of more than a thousand years;
we were supposed to rediscover and
ponder anew, through him, the initial
questions posed by philosophy per
se—not out of an antiquarian interest
but in order to be able to make a new
beginning ourselves. (Why Heideg-
ger considered this necessary later be-
came clear from his writings.) It was
indeed a seminar for beginners in the
most surprising sense of the word: we
were all supposed to become begin-
ners again, which the widely read
modern man certainly is not, living as
he does with his largely second- or
thirdhand knowledge. We were not
meant to become beginners ex nihilo
30 H A S T I N G S C E N T E R R E P O R T
but rather readers already influenced
by the previous major studies of his-
torical origins and of alienation from
these origins. This was the approach I
learned from Heidegger. Repeated
over the years and used with an ever
growing number of texts, it became a
permanent part of my life experience.
Just as we experienced the teacher
in his seminar, so too we experienced
the thinker in his lectures, more
specifically the thinker in actu. He
did not deliver prepared lectures the
way Husserl did; what we heard was
the process of thinking itself as it
groped its way in a halting mono-
logue to the hidden matter at hand.
At first I did not understand what
There awaited the permanent and essential
questions of philosophy concerning the nature of
Being and with it the Being of nature. Strange to
say, however, the question of “nature” had never
come up in my course of studies.
this matter was, but I sensed it must
be the authentic core that is the goal
of all philosophy. Something was tak-
ing place before us; something was at
work. “Thinking is happening in
him,” one was tempted to say. There
was a deeply moving element to this,
which explains the covert fame Hei-
degger enjoyed long before he en-
tered the annals of philosophy by
virtue of his epoch-making book Sein
und Zeit (Being and Time). Enough,
though, about my early heuristic ex-
perience. I do not want to speak here
about the darker side of Heidegger’s
teachings and person. This will suf-
fice for my apprentice years.
After students have sharpened
their swords, so to speak, with semi-
nar assignments over a long period,
the moment arrives, with the doctor-
al dissertation, when they come to
grips with a body of material and ex-
perience scholarship as an activity of
their own. Based on one’s course of
study, chance plays a role in the
choice of the dissertation topic. In
my case chance had it that in Mar-
burg I took Rudolf Bultmann’s New
Testament seminar. He gave me an
assignment to interpret a passage
from the Johannine Gospel, and this
drew me beyond the specific text it-
self to investigate the area of gnosis
that opened up behind it. The topic
held me captive—for many years, as
it turned out. Until that time this
topic was the domain of historians of
church and dogma, or more generally
of religious studies; however, this sub-
ject caught my interest on philosophi-
cal grounds. Why? What was it about
this wild offshoot of early Christian
and late Classical thought—and such
a completely mythologically encoded
form of thought—that attracted a
philosopher? It was the experience of
immersing myself in the texts, where
I heard voices for which my ears had
been sharpened by Heidegger’s analy-
sis of existence and also by the gener-
al intellectual climate of the time. Up
to that point research had focused on
the diverse origins of the many indi-
vidual motifs in the Gnostic
polyphony, tracing them back to Pla-
tonic, Jewish, Babylonian, Egyptian,
and Iranian traditions, which had
somehow merged syncretistically.
The question of the specific motif
that had been the organizing princi-
ple behind the syncretism and had
determined the often bold transfor-
mation of the borrowings remained
unexamined. Gnosticism was given
no credit at all for having an indepen-
dent character of its own, but this
was exactly what the “voices” I have
mentioned suggested to me. A trou-
bled existence, disquieted by its own
July-August 2002
mystery, anxious for an answer, was
announcing itself. If one listened
carefully, the syncretism became a
surface phenomenon, its invented
myths revealing a comprehensible fun-
damental experience, common to
them all, that had found objective ex-
pression there—one that had both
revealed and concealed itself. These
myths gave a speculative answer to
the problem of existence—namely,
“gnosis.” It was the experience of an
essentially otherworldly self, a self in
bondage to the world, which then
had to free itself from that bondage.
From this perspective I believed I
could decode the myths. Thus, I
found the hermeneutical task—a
kind of demythologizing—almost
bewitchingly attractive. Nothing is
more fascinating than to experience
the way disparate sources crystallize
around an exploratory interpretation,
the way the many individual details,
previously seen as separate entities,
coalesce to form a unity. This crystal-
lization process advances and lends
strength to a new point of view, the
bias of which is perhaps its inevitable
price and may be corrected by other
interpreters later on.
Assuming my interpretation was
right, was it worthwhile to do this
decoding? Was it more than an anti-
quarian curiosity? To me it did seem
philosophically significant in terms
of the history of thought as the cul-
mination, even the excessive expres-
sion, of the dualism that has led
metaphysics and religion astray since
ancient times. I found it even more
significant in existential terms as an
extreme case of crisis in the way we
understand ourselves and Being, an
extreme case of the dichotomy be-
tween human being and world, na-
ture and spirit, world and God. The
very possibility of such dichotomies
says something about the human
being, about us. And at the time of
my study of Gnosticism we had be-
come especially sensitive to this di-
chotomy as a result of the crisis in
our own relationship to the world, a
crisis that existentialism expressed
July-August 2002
philosophically in its innerworldly
way. We too knew something about
“alienation.” Our crisis recognized it-
self in an earlier one, and that ex-
plains in part the fascination to
which I succumbed.
Eventually something unexpected
occurred in my research: what I was
interpreting cast its reflection back
upon my own position as interpreter
and made me see it in a new light.
Initially I had found that the ap-
proaches I learned in the school of
Heidegger enabled me to see aspects
of Gnostic thinking that had not
been seen before. Returning from the
distant past to the scene of contem-
porary philosophy, I found that what
I had seen there now helped me to
better understand my point of depar-
ture. My confrontation with the ni-
hilism of classical times aided my un-
derstanding of modern nihilism,
which had equipped me in the first
place to discover its obscure historical
cousin in the past. Existentialism,
which had provided the means for
my historical analysis, was itself an
inextricable part of its outcome.
What did it mean that its categories
were applicable to this particular ma-
terial? Did it indicate that those cate-
gories were universally valid for every
form of human existence? Or were
they valid merely for this form of ex-
istence? Was there perhaps something
like a concealed affinity here? This
question reversed the direction of my
interpretation: the success of an “exis-
tentialist” reading of Gnosticism in-
vited a quasi-Gnostic reading of exis-
tentialism and with it of the modern
mind as well. It was my long involve-
ment with dualism that was of partic-
ular benefit to me in re-examining
the German field of the philosophy
of consciousness in which I had been
trained. With its adherence to the
Cartesian separation of mind and na-
ture, it was a field that suffered from
a marked worldlessness.
II
N ow I come to the second phase
of my intellectual career, which,
after a hiatus caused by emigrations
and military service and by moving
to another continent, turned from re-
search in intellectual history to more
systematic considerations. For be-
hind the study of history, which I
had never intended to pursue in the
long run, there awaited the perma-
nent and essential questions of phi-
losophy concerning the nature of
Being and with it the Being of nature.
Strange to say, however, the question
of “nature” had never come up in my
course of studies, and the new Anglo-
American intellectual environment
helped me to become aware of this
gap and to begin an attempt to close
it. From time to time when I was still
in Germany, doubts would arise in
my mind about the adequacy of the
prevailing philosophical themes
being dealt with. Heidegger had
talked about existence as care, but he
did so from an exclusively intellectual
perspective. There was no mention of
the primary physical reason for hav-
ing to care, which is our corporeality,
by which we—ourselves a part of na-
ture, needy and vulnerable—are in-
dissolubly connected to our natural
environment, most basically through
metabolism, the prerequisite of all
life. Human beings must eat. This
natural law of the body is as cardinal
as the mortality accompanying it.
But in Being and Time the body had
been omitted and nature shunted
aside as something merely present.
Phenomenology too, in Husserl’s
sense, could, to be sure, treat the
theme of the phenomenon of indi-
vidual corporeality and, for example,
describe the feeling of hunger. But
hunger’s objective meaning—namely,
that the human animal requires
nourishment and in certain quanti-
ties (of which the Marxists of course
reminded us )—lay outside of phe-
nomenology’s subjective field of vi-
sion. Biology and, more basically,
physics teach us about such matters,
HASTINGS CENTER REPORT 31
 but we had been told nothing about
these disciplines. None of our philos-
ophy professors urged us to acquaint
ourselves with new developments in
the natural sciences. They were
viewed, if at all, not in terms of their
content but only in terms of their
method, as a question of epistemolo-
gy. Furthermore, natural philosophy
had long ceased to be a respectable
philosophical discipline.
But isn’t what the natural sciences
bring to light relevant for the concept
of Being, which is, after all, philoso-
phy’s concern? Isn’t it relevant also for
the theory of our own being, which
in spite of its transcendence remains
part of the whole—genealogically ac-
cording to the theory of evolution,
ontologically by virtue of our body?
My feeling was that the idealistic
point of view, whether transcendental
or existential, was not sufficient, but I
had to wait to explore this question
until I had the opportunity to devote
myself to it seriously.
An opportunity presented itself
during my years as a soldier in the
Second World War when my histori-
cal research was interrupted and I
was limited to thinking about that
which doesn’t require books and li-
braries because we always have it
within us. Perhaps my physical expo-
sure to danger, a situation in which
the precariousness of the body’s fate
becomes evident and fear of its muti-
lation becomes paramount, was re-
sponsible for my new reflections. In
any case, I became keenly aware of
the ideological bias of the philosoph-
ical tradition. I saw its hidden dual-
ism—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.
I now saw my goal to be a philosophy
of organic matter or a philosophical
biology. This became my postwar
pursuit.
For this purpose, a knowledge of
the science of biology, both its dis-
coveries and its methodology, was
32 H A S T I N G S C E N T E R R E P O R T
necessary. In order to gain this
knowledge I became a student once
again. In spite of all the fascination
the subject held for me, my experi-
ence of this science unavoidably re-
mained secondhand, for someone
who doesn’t himself work in a field
but only looks at its findings natural-
ly remains a layman. In “Scholarship
as a Vocation” Max Weber speaks
with memorable eloquence about the
destiny of the specialist: Whoever
does not “possess the ability to put on
blinders, so to speak, and become
passionately convinced that the fate
of his soul depends upon his making
this particular conjecture correctly
about this passage in this manuscript
should definitely stay away from
scholarship. Never will he gain a feel-
ing for what can be called the ‘experi-
ence’ of scholarship.” To be sure,
what is meant here is the voluntary
use of blinders that scholars (in
Weber’s example, philologists) put on
for the sake of their work but can re-
move again when they have finished
and have added their findings to the
fund of general knowledge. And out-
siders who take the trouble can un-
derstand the conclusions drawn as
well as the path leading to them. In
other words, specialization in the hu-
manities does not exclude communi-
cation and is still compatible with a
unity of culture. As everyone knows,
this is not the case with the natural
sciences today; what takes place at
the forefront of knowledge has be-
come an esoteric secret for the initiat-
ed and a mystery for everyone else.
Neither the ways of thinking nor
their conclusions, with the accompa-
nying technical terminology, are in-
tellectually accessible to outsiders,
who cannot adequately understand
either the knowledge gained or its
method of attainment. Thus, the
overwhelming majority of our con-
temporaries, including the educated,
find themselves condemned to wear-
ing blinders permanently, especially
with regard to basic scientific premis-
es on the one hand and on the other
to their technological impact, which
determines the lives of us all. The
unity of our intellectual culture has
been split asunder.
If there were no way to bridge this
split, I would have found it impossi-
ble to continue with my philosophi-
cal work in the direction I now found
necessary. But there are ways. One
bridge built for the nonspecialist is
the new category of literature about
the natural and physical sciences,
which appeared in response to this
situation—serving as a real interme-
diary between specialist and lay-
man—and which even leading scien-
tists are not above producing. The
new insights into the foundations of
nature and the changed picture of it
they have brought about could not
enter the general consciousness with-
out this sort of mediation. With its
help and with sufficient effort one
can, more or less, gain an idea of
what is taking place in current re-
search, of what is coming to light
there. As a result, one can feel a prop-
er sense of awe in the face of the won-
ders of reality and also become aware
of the gaps that will inevitably remain
in our knowledge. It is only an ap-
proximate idea, to be sure, but one
that can suffice for the needs of the
philosopher and for what he is really
concerned about. After all, in this age
of specialization philosophy must
often draw on indirect knowledge if
it is not to shrink into the specialized
study of a limited area that it claims
for itself. If philosophy remains true,
as it should, to its inherent integra-
tive purpose, which must cover many
individual fields of knowledge, then
it is obligated by the nature of its vo-
cation to take the constant risk in-
volved in nonspecialization. An at-
tempt to philosophize about nature
today (unless it is undertaken by a re-
searcher in the sciences) involves an
extreme risk, and I gratefully ac-
knowledge what I have learned from
the kind of literature just referred to.
In addition, I was fortunate to have
close associations with representatives
of the exact sciences in America, my
new home; in the second half of my
life I learned more from them than I
July-August 2002
did from my American contemporaries
in philosophy.
Within the realm of the natural sci-
ences, the distances to be bridged by
outsiders vary with the individual disci-
plines. In biology, with its subject mat-
ter so basically familiar and close to us,
it was my good fortune as a philosopher
that the distance was less than that of
theoretical physics, which deals with the
thoroughly abstract domain of quanta
and elementary particles. By means of
the literature I have described, biology
revealed to me the wonders of life, its
evolution, its abundance of forms,
modes of functioning, stratification of
stages: in short, the whole adventure of
organic being—balanced between being
The natural sciences have their eminently practical
side in the form of technology, which increasingly
shapes the lives of us all, whether we reflect upon the
situation or not. But we must reflect upon it in order
to keep it from becoming a fate we have
unthinkingly brought upon ourselves.
and nonbeing, vulnerable, endlessly in-
ventive—in the midst of inorganic na-
ture. With all this before my eyes and
continually learning more and more
about the subject, I could now tackle
my philosophical project.
As I have outlined above, this project
involved, among other things, overcom-
ing the dualism that I had long recog-
nized as a seductive error. My ontologi-
cal interpretation of the organism was
intended to correct this error and to
represent a contribution to a general
concept of Being. In organic being’s es-
sential unity of “inner” and “outer,”
subjectivity and objectivity, free self and
causally determined thing, the gulf be-
tween matter and mind closed for me.
As part of the Cartesian legacy this gulf
had forced modern thought into the ei-
ther-or impasse of materialism on the
one hand and idealism on the other—
each incomplete when taken by itself.
July-August 2002
The evidence provided by the organism
gave the lie to both positions.
To my surprise and delight I found
that in the milieu of Anglo-Saxon phi-
losophy I was not alone with this ap-
proach. I discovered the work of Alfred
North Whitehead, whose name I had
never even heard in my seven years of
studying philosophy at German univer-
sities. (I know this is no longer the case
today.) His powerful ontological trea-
tise, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cos-
mology, develops—with unparalleled
radicalism and altogether new basic
concepts (resulting from his intimate
knowledge of modern physics)—a con-
cept of Being that strives to overcome
its traditional bifurcation by conceiving
of all Being, down to its simplest ele-
ments, in organic categories and as en-
dowed with attributes of inwardness.
For various reasons I could not go along
with him on his highly speculative path
(reminiscent of Leibniz and Spinoza). I
did draw courage from his great exam-
ple, but in keeping with my initial intu-
ition (and in more Aristotelian fashion)
I continued to focus on the actual bio-
logical organism and the summit it
reaches in the human being. The guid-
ing principle of my interpretation be-
came the concept of freedom, which I
believed I detected in its early stages in
the process of metabolism and saw ex-
pand in the evolution of animals to
higher physical and psychic stages,
reaching its pinnacle in the human
being. Here the hazardous venture of
freedom, upon which nature embarked
with the advent of life and its frailty, be-
comes a matter of responsibility for
human subjects. This introduces the di-
mension of the ethical, which extends
beyond the concept of Being to that of
obligation while remaining based on
the former.
III
L et me now recount how I came to
the third and final task of my philo-
sophical career: the question of ethics.
Thus far in this autobiographical ac-
count the relationship between philoso-
phy and the natural sciences has been
posited as a theoretical one in which
philosophical theory draws on both the
content and method of scientific theory.
The natural sciences, however, have
their eminently practical side in the
form of technology, which increasingly
shapes the lives of us all, whether we re-
flect upon the situation or not. But we
must reflect upon it in order to keep it
from becoming a fate we have unthink-
ingly brought upon ourselves. I, along
with many others, became increasingly
aware that such a fate had become a
threat on a worldwide scale. This aware-
ness finally forced me to turn from the-
oretical to practical reason—that is, to
ethics, which became the central interest
and theme of the last stage of my intel-
lectual journey. It was no longer the joy
of acquiring knowledge but fear of the
future, fear for humanity, that primarily
motivated my thought. My thinking it-
self represented an act of responsibility,
a concept I then attempted to work out
and communicate in philosophical
terms. In conclusion, I would like to say
something additional about this subjec-
tive experience peculiar to practical phi-
losophy: namely, that working on a the-
ory is already part of the practice it pre-
scribes—in other words, that one obeys
the theory’s own imperative as soon as
one catches sight of it. Such was my
final personal experience in the course
of my intellectual career.
All knowledge, or what takes itself
for such, aims at communication, at
adding what it believes to be its own
truth to the grand dialogue from which
it has proceeded. Here it tries its luck
and experiences its fate. Such a dialogue
requires the labor of articulation, which
although serving to clarify the thinker’s
HASTINGS CENTER REPORT 33
 own thought, always in the last
analysis strives toward communica-
tion. A vital element of all theory,
communication must be regarded as
part of knowledge’s collective course.
The thinker’s self-esteem naturally
contributes to encouraging this atti-
tude. But the content of a theory it-
self—its intellectual content—as
long as it is purely theoretical, is neu-
tral regarding communication: it per-
mits itself, so to speak, to be made
manifest and public but does not re-
quire this. The individual thinker is
consequently free to heed the content
of his theory or to disregard it.
Yet in the case of practical philos-
ophy or ethics, which concerns the
Good and its opposite in human af-
fairs, there is an additional feature
that makes the relationship between
a theory’s content and its articulation
a very special one: articulation is in-
strumental in bringing about what
the theory has demonstrated to be
the Good or that which ought to be
accomplished. Articulation is the be-
ginning of an action and thus does
not serve only to advance the theory,
as is generally the case with public
presentation of knowledge, but also
to deal with the issues it raises. These
issues demand attention and impose
a duty on the thinker—not primarily
as issues that have already been recog-
nized but as something he must dis-
cover for himself. A theory becomes
practical when it is worked out, en-
abling the imperative it contains to
seek a hearing and a place in reality.
Surpassing the demands of intellectu-
al curiosity, the demands made by a
theory’s content assign the thinker
his role: namely, to become active,
through contemplation, in helping to
work on the task it sets.
This is a familiar phenomenon. As
I have stated, I discovered in myself
this aspect of thinking that perceives
itself as a form of action when I was
searching for an answer to contem-
porary technology’s increasingly ob-
vious threat to the future of humani-
ty—indeed, to the future of all life.
Because technology is a human in-
34 H A S T I N G S C E N T E R R E P O R T
vention, not cosmic fate, it presents
an ethical challenge that must be met
with an ethical theory. Ethics had
been on my agenda for a long time as
the natural last stage in a philosophy
of the organism, a philosophy that of
itself leads to ethical considerations
because it must face the phenome-
non of human freedom. There is a
difference, however, between ap-
proaching ethics with a systematizing
motive in mind and being forcibly
confronted with it by the shock of re-
ality. When we hear the word “shock”
in this context, it is natural to think
first of the technology that produced
nuclear weapons. But what made
ethics my preoccupation for the rest
of my life was not so much the dan-
ger of a sudden atomic holocaust—
which, after all, can be avoided;
rather, it was the cumulative effect of
the daily and seemingly unavoidable
applications of technology as a whole,
even in its most peaceful forms. In
the face of the latter danger, the sim-
ple “No” that we can say to the hor-
rendous prospect of a nuclear holo-
caust is useless; technology becomes a
permanent problem for ethical
thought—permanent even if we
should succeed, through good luck
and good sense, in preventing un-
speakable catastrophe, as we hope we
will. Nuclear weapons can ultimately
be abolished (by agreement), but we
cannot remove the total technologi-
cal threat we have brought about, just
as we cannot do away with technolo-
gy itself, since it has become indis-
pensable for our survival. As a result,
the prevention of its disastrous effects
represents a continuing task for
moral theory.
In any case, the shock I referred to
forced me to measure the enormity
of our power in terms of its possible
consequences and made the concept
of responsibility the central concern of
ethics for me. I realized that at the
same time the foremost duty this re-
sponsibility imposed on me was to
work out the concept itself and show
its crucial importance. For it was now
a matter of a new sort of responsibil-
ity such as no earlier ethics had ever
envisaged. Never before have we been
forced to take as much responsibility,
quantitatively and qualitatively, as we
must today. Our knowledge and our
power were too limited in the past
for us to take the distant future into
account, let alone to be aware of the
impact we could have on the entire
earth. It is only modern technology
with the unprecedented range of its
feats in space and time that has
opened up these new horizons. In ad-
dition to recognizing the new magni-
tude of our power we must also bear
in mind the entirely new kinds of
power that extend our responsibility,
also in qualitative ways, to levels we
never knew before and therefore
never considered in ethical terms. All
this poses new tasks for moral reason-
ing, one of which is to think about
our responsibility in new ways. The
attempt to do so is an aspect of the
duty of responsibility itself.
What I have described here is how
my thinking developed and how my
pursuit of philosophy became per-
sonal experience in my later years.
IV
M y experience has inevitably
been accompanied by doubts
concerning the power or impotence,
effectiveness or uselessness, of
“knowledge” of this sort. Can it be
successful against the enormous dy-
namism of the anonymous powers
driving technology’s progress, against
the triumphant advance of that other
kind of knowledge, represented by
the natural sciences, that nourishes
it? I do not know; no one knows.
There are grounds for skepticism, but
we have no right to be fatalistic, for
such a view would be a self-fulfilling
prophecy. Knowledge must never
write off its own chances. It must
perform its duty in the face of every
uncertainty.
It is characteristic for our time
that “fear and trembling” have be-
come part of our experience of
knowledge, overshadowing its inher-
July-August 2002
ent joyousness. When this knowledge
is transmitted, the fear should be
communicated along with it so that
thought becomes a spur to action.
But fear must be on guard against it-
self: our worry over the fate of hu-
manity must not arouse hostility to-
ward the source of its endanger-
ment—that is, toward science and
technology. Rather, fear must inspire
caution in the use of our power, not
the renunciation of it. For only in
league with science and technology,
which are part of the human endeav-
or, can moral reasoning be of any use
in this endeavor. There is no unique
formula for how to proceed here;
there are many paths we must vigi-
lantly continue to explore and com-
pare, now and in the future. At best,
through constant repetition we can
become practiced in our search. This
is what we must hope for. In any case,
it is our intellectual duty to be vigi-
lant.
Now that I have reached the end
of my account, the obvious remains
to be said: I have experienced frustra-
tions in the pursuit of my intellectu-
al work. What I have attempted to
describe here is the changing intent of
my thought as its themes changed; ac-
complishment is another matter. And
if we include what this condensed
July-August 2002
version has omitted—the aborted at-
tempts, the detours, the abandon-
ment of the old task in each transition
to a new one—then the portrayal of
my progress becomes less orderly and
direct than I have presented it here.
Nevertheless, if I am to look back
over the road I have taken in its en-
tirety and sum up what motivated my
desire for knowledge and how the
knowledge I gained turned into expe-
rience, I would point to three areas:
first of all, what is past, which de-
serves to be made present in knowl-
edge; then, what has always been pre-
sent, life with its enduring nature,
which wants to be understood from
within itself; and finally, the future in
the light of our caring about it, as
something filled with threats to be
averted, something that is threatened
and must be protected. Care, howev-
er, presupposes that its object is worth
caring about, and all I had come to
understand about what was past and
present came together in my belief
that life and humankind—this great
adventure of Being, now in jeop-
ardy—are worthwhile, are worth my
effort and even torment, including
the price of mortality that must be
paid in return for the constant rejuve-
nation in the lives of the newborn. A
belief like this must be able to say
“No” to much that we are doing
today, but the belief itself is an em-
bracing “Yes.” It is this “Yes,” translat-
ed into care for the future, that is ex-
pressed by “the Imperative of Respon-
sibility.”2 My belief in the imperative
to which I have here confessed repre-
sents, if you will, the summation of
all my intellectual experience. That, at
least, is the way it appears to me.
Translators’ Acknowledgment
We are grateful to Lawrence Vogel,
professor of philosophy at Connecticut
College and editor of Hans Jonas, Mor-
tality and Morality: A Search for the
Good after Auschwitz (Evanston, Ill:
Northwestern University, 1996), who
read our translation and made many
valuable suggestions. —Hunter Han-
num and Hildegarde Hannum
Editor’s Acknowledgment
This essay was originally published as
Wissenschaft als persönliches Erlebnis
(Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and
Ruprecht, 1987). An earlier version of
this translation appeared in the New
School University’s Graduate Faculty
Philosophy Journal 23, no. 1 (2001).
References
1. The title of a lecture delivered October
15, 1986, on the occasion of the six-hun-
HASTINGS CENTER REPORT 35