Morals and Metaphysics

It took me much longer than I'd expected but I just finished The Phenomenon of Life by Hans Jonas this weekend. Jonas was a student of Heidegger who broke with his teacher over Heidegger's embrace of Nazism though the biographical material in the book suggests he later forgave the older man and did continue to take Heidegger seriously as a thinker. Jonas was Jewish so it's not entirely surprising that he would have had some issues here. He apparently left Germany some time after the rise of Hitler and fought with the Jewish Brigade under British leadership out of Palestine during World War II. He later fought for Israeli independence in 1947-48 and then, in the fifties, emigrated to the United States where he settled in to teach and do philosophy, most prominently at the New School for Social Research. As his educational background suggests, he was drawn to phenomenology and existentialism and this book reflects that.

I picked it up some years ago out of an interest both in existentialism and moral philosophy since the blurb on the book's back cover suggests it's an ethical inquiry of a sort. However, I never got into it until quite recently when I picked it up again in order to learn about and consider another philosophical tradition's approach to Ethics. But I fear the book was a little disappointing. It consists of a series of essays Jonas wrote in the 1950s and early sixties and the first half of the volume is actually quite good. The problem is that the second part fails to sustain the quality of insight and reasoning of the first.

In the first part, Jonas offers insightful analyses of the nature of life and its relation to non-life in the universe, some of his ideas, such as the notion that life is not merely a serendipitous occurrence in a non-living universe but a natural occurrence, being particularly suggestive. While life did not have to arise, Jonas points out, under certain conditions it is the natural next step in the process that is matter he argues. And as life goes so goes mind, for mind -- or consciousness, sentience, awareness -- he seats firmly in the continuum of life. Given this, he proposes that the level of sentience we attain, i.e., the condition of cognitive functioning, of intelligence, must be seen to naturally arise from the sentient itself. None of this is entirely new but Jonas offers some interesting ways of understanding this phenomenon of life in a universe of non-life. Where is the ethical in all this though, for sentient beings which also have sapience* may be quite inured to ethical concerns?

This brings us to the essays in the second half of the book which are somewhat less satisfying. After a series of essays addressing the role of life within non-life and the levels of life itself and man's special capacities as grounded in the living modality in which he stands, Jonas ends the first section with a transitional essay he entitles "From Philosophy of the Organism to the Philosophy of Man." That piece ends with a refocusing on the thought systems of human beings as part of human history. . .

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Metaphysics, Idealism and Moral Goodness

A correspondent of mine, from India, has been interested in Wittgenstein for quite a while. Recently some of his comments have brought me to the realization that it is the mystical in Wittgenstein (seen in the Tractatus and, later, in the indirect way Wittgenstein attacks traditional philosophical issues in the Philosophical Investigations) that most appeals to him. Perhaps he is not entirely wrong for surely he is in good company. Nevertheless, on this he and I are not quite on the same wavelength. After reading my piece here on Anscombe's take on Wittgenstein's treatment of the mental, he sent me an e-mail which I won't reproduce here since he chose not to post it for public consumption. Nevertheless, he had some interesting things to say on how he sees Western philosophy fitting in with that of the East, particularly with traditional Indian thought. Along the way he raised some issues concerning Anscombe's moral view. After responding this morning, it occurred to me that what I had to say ought to be said by me more publicly. So without divulging my correspondent's name or his words (since doing so must be his choice not mine!) I will just reproduce my response to him here . . .

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