"The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age"
    By Hans Jonas
    University of Chicago Press

    What an unusual sense of freshness! The word may seem strange applied to a book as harsh and devoid of concession to facility as "The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age," but that's exactly what stands out upon rereading the book close to 30 years after its publication in German (1979) and 17 years after its translation into French (1991). A freshness of cold steel: "Some hard thing is necessary," Hans Jonas (1903-1993) wrote, warning the reader that he would not find "the wadding of good intentions" in his book. A freshness, above all, of ideas and concepts that remain operational since they were pondered in function of a perception of the environmental crisis that scientific information has broadly confirmed since this masterwork was written.

    The good luck was exceptional: distributed in over 200,000 copies since its publication, this essay has influenced German political life, inspired international norms such as "taking future generations into account" and "the precautionary principle," and continues to constitute one of the major fundaments for intellectuals' elaboration of their thinking on ecology.

    Retrospectively, it is surprising that such a foundation was laid so early: the alarm over environmental deterioration had barely been sounded ten years before, even though there had been the 1972 publication of the Club of Rome's report "The Limits to Growth" and the first Earth Summit in Stockholm. Hans Jonas's philosophical career undoubtedly predisposed him to precociously thinking about the environmental catastrophe that "technology's monstrous progress" made credible.

    He had, along with Hannah Arendt, taken Martin Heidegger's seminars; Heidegger, in whose thought technology held an essential position. Faced with the rise of Nazism, Jonas left Germany to teach in Palestine before fighting in the global conflict as a member of the British Army. Auschwitz, where his mother perished in 1942, fed his horrified meditation on the Shoah. He then went to teach in the United States where his work took form. Alien to the Marxism that then dominated the intellectual scene, it centered on Gnostic metaphysics and religion before evolving towards a philosophical analysis of technology, with "The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology" (1966): There Jonas wondered about the duality between man metaphysically alone in the world and science that was erasing the border between the animate and the inanimate.

    His reflections on genetics, the philosophy of the organism, on the relationship between technology and nature would lead to "The Imperative of Responsibility," written and published while the environmental movement was in its infancy in a Germany barely emerging from the impasses of Leftism.

    In his work, the philosopher aims to define the norms of an ethics adapted to the new conditions created by the now-immense power of man over nature. The philosopher was surprisingly well-informed, since as of 1979 he specifically mentioned the question of growth in the greenhouse effect, underlining what the economic expansion that is its cause meant: "So the frivolous joyous human holiday of several industrial centuries will perhaps be paid for by thousands of years of transformed terrestrial life."

    New Ethical Rules

    Jonas straightaway clearly postulated his proposal: "Our thesis is that the new kinds and new dimensions of action cry out for a commensurate ethics of anticipation and responsibility (...)." The potential impacts of human activity, by threatening the species, or at least the conditions for a decent life, create a duty that earlier moralists could not imagine.

    So then, how should the rules of conduct related to that obligation be based? On a "heuristics of fear." We cannot be certain of the future, but knowing the possibilities suffices for defining new ethical rules. Jonas overturned the Cartesian principle of uncertainty: "To establish the indubitable truth, we must, according to Descartes, hold everything that in one way or another may be put into doubt as equivalent to a proven falsehood. Here, on the contrary, we must treat that which can certainly be put into doubt, as long as it is possible - once we're dealing with a possibility of a certain kind - as a certainty with respect to our decisions."

    It's all a question of adjusting the trajectory on which the industrial revolution has placed humanity. That will not be easy, Jonas admitted, talking about "the era of bitter requirements and renunciations that awaits us," evoking a "spirit of frugality alien to capitalist society" and, given planetary inequality, inviting rich countries to "renounce prosperity for the benefit of other parts of the world."

    It's not evident that that part of Jonas's message has crossed over into everyday awareness. On the other hand, the idea of responsibility for future generations has established itself. In fact, Jonas has hardly been criticized at all, except in France, where the publication of this essay in 1991 coincided with a time when, the Left in tatters, environmental politics had the wind in its sails.

    In "Le Nouvel Ordre écologique" ["The New Environmental Order"] (1992), essayist Luc Ferry reacted by insinuating that environmentalism aimed for a totalitarian regime. He attacked Hans Jonas and claimed that he issued "professions of faith in Communist regimes." In fact, Mr. Ferry's pamphlet is stuffed with so many mistakes, truncated quotations and errors of reasoning that it does not constitute a serious retort to Jonas's work. Yet, he was temporarily able to weaken the power of Jonas's thought in the eyes of the French public. Philosophers like Paul Ricoeur and Jean-Pierre Dupuy have, to the contrary, seized on and highlighted the importance of Jonas's work, which remains hardy, enduring and fertile.

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    Translation: Truthout French language editor Leslie Thatcher.