A non-complex response to Hans Jonas, “Biological Foundations of Individuality”, in Philosophical Essays: From Ancient Creed to Technological Man (Prentice Hall, 1974), pp. 187-207.
Image: David Clode, Unsplash
It was once religion which told us that we are all sinners, because of original sin. It is now the ecology of our planet which pronounces us all to be sinners because of the excessive exploits of human inventiveness. It was once religion which threatened us with a last judgement at the end of days. It is now our tortured planet which predicts the arrival of such a day without any heavenly intervention. The latest revelation – from no Mount Sinai, from no Mount of the Sermon, from no Bo – is the outcry of mute things themselves that we must heed by curbing our powers over creation, lest we perish together on a wasteland of what was creation.
Hans Jonas (1996), from “The Outcry of Mute Things”, pp. 201-202.
Whatever you think of what you’re about to read, the above quotation should be enough to show you that Hans Jonas is someone worth knowing more about.
Jonas was one of Heidegger’s students. He fled Germany in 1933 and vowed not to return until he did so as part of a conquering army. This he did in the later years of the war, returning to Germany in the Jewish Brigade of the British Army. Following that war, when he served in the Israeli military, his wife would send him books on biology to read in the field. He blended phenomenology, ethics, biology, and his religious tradition. There are strong existential and Spinozan flavours in his work, which is an incredible, intricate mashup.
In the essay, “Biological Foundations of Individuality”, Jonas asks what it is to be an individual. This is not a sexy question. In Heidegger’s Children, Richard Wolin describes Jonas’ thought as “unfashionable, even anachronistic” (2001, p. 113). Yet what Jonas did with this question of individuality is now de rigueur.
Jonas argues that the modern, Cartesian way of thinking about the world sets up the individual as a perceiving subject, and everything out there as material extension, objects for subjects to perceive. This creates a gap between the individual subject and everything else. Individuality is separation. To have self is to be cut off from the natural world.
Some years ago I completed a creative project on the problem of other people in this phenomenology. Other people are objects who are always potential subjects who may turn me into an object. It is a locked-in battle for subjectivity.
Toward the end of the project I tried to find a way out of this relational quicksand. I turned first to Martin Buber’s I/Thou, to take the violence out of the relationship. Then I moved on to Object Oriented Ontology, alien phenomenology, and posthumanism, all of which push beyond the subject-object dichotomy. In creative writing, there is a recent trend to ‘write from the object’. In literature and literary theory, there is an ongoing recovery of writers and poets who did write from objects. Francis Ponge, the poet of things, is experiencing a heyday. Here is a link to his 1952 poem “La Grenouille/The Frog”. Remaining on the theme of the non-human animal, a Derridean anecdote is one of the foundational texts of zoopoetics. Derrida steps out of the shower, naked and wet, and sees his cat looking at him.
Since so long ago, can we say that the animal has been looking at us?
What animal? The other.
I often ask myself, just to see, who I am—and who I am (following) at the moment when, caught naked, in silence, by the gaze of an animal, for example, the eyes of a cat, I have trouble, yes, a bad time overcoming my embarrassment.
Whence this malaise?
I have trouble repressing a reflex of shame. Trouble keeping silent within me a protest against the indecency. Against the impropriety that can come of finding oneself naked, one’s sex exposed, stark naked before a cat that looks at you without moving, just to see. The impropriety of a certain animal nude before the other animal, from that point on one might call it a kind of animalséance: the single, incomparable and original experience of the impropriety that would come from appearing in truth naked, in front of the insistent gaze of the animal, a benevolent or pitiless gaze, surprised or cognizant . . .
Especially, I should make clear, if the cat observes me frontally naked, face to face, and if I am naked faced with the cat’s eyes looking at me from head to toe, as it were just to see, not hesitating to concentrate its vision—in order to see, with a view to seeing—in the direction of my sex. To see, without going to see, without touching yet, and without biting, although that threat remains on its lips or on the tip of the tongue . . .
I must immediately make it clear, the cat I am talking about is a real cat, truly, believe me, a little cat. It isn’t the figure of a cat. It doesn’t silently enter the bedroom as an allegory for all the cats on the earth, the felines that traverse our myths and religions, literature and fables.
Jacques Derrida (2008), The Animal That Therefore I Am, pp. 3-4, 6.
Objected Oriented Ontology, alien phenomenology, posthumanism, zoopoetics, animal studies, writing from things – these are Hans Jonas-style projects. I am surprised he is not present as a core theorist in these modern intellectual and artistic movements. Jonas might have been unfashionable at the time, but he is now Back In Fashion. Or he could be if more people read him.
Jonas’ project was to figure out where plants and animals fit within phenomenology. His suggestion is creative, and challenging.
All organisms, Jonas argues, whether plants, animals, or humans, possess individuality. They possess more or less of it, but all have some. All living things are a self; they all display subjectivity. Metabolism is the marker of being. If it metabolises, it is an individual. Metabolism is required for being. If it does not metabolise, according to Jonas, it is not an individual. He presents gradients of being based on attributes which grow out from or are attached to metabolism. These include functional centralisation, as in the nuclear organisation of a cell, sentience, understood as perception, and motility.
This biological phenomenology brings humankind back into relationship with the natural world. The individual human is not separated from plants and animals by its individuality; it is separated from plants and animals only by its biological complexity. The plant is integrated into its environment, the animal less so, and the human less than that. It seems to me that Jonas is unable to fully resolve the problem of separation birthed by Cartesian dualism. To have a person-self is to be at once part of the natural world, and to remain apart from most of it, even if only through biological complexity.
Among the rules of warfare in Devarim 20 we find the rhetorical question, כִּי הָאָדָם עֵץ הַשָּׂדֶה? For is a tree of the field a person? Through Jonas we could say yes, a person is a type of tree. But for Jonas, who did not remove anthropocentrism and hierarchy from his taxonomy of individuality, a person is still the best tree in the forest.
References
Derrida, Jacques. The Animal That Therefore I Am. Fordham University Press, 2008.
Jonas, Hans. Philosophical Essays: From Ancient Creed to Technological Man. Prentice Hall, 1974.
Jonas, Hans. Mortality and Morality: A Search for Good After Auschwitz, edited by Lawrence Vogel. Northwestern University Press, 1996.
Wolin, Richard. Heidegger’s Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse. Princeton University Press, 2001.