Overcoming “Gnosticism”

One of the surprising features of twentieth-century European intellectual history is the reappearance of “Gnosticism” as an operative category for discussing the predicament of modern secularity and the perception of the world as devoid of spiritual meaning.Footnote ¹ Few, it seems, contributed more to the possibility of this conceptual connection than Hans Jonas. During the 1920s Jonas wrote a groundbreaking dissertation on Gnosticism—the blanket term referring to a collection of ancient Mediterranean sects emphasizing the radical distinction between a transcendent God and the fallen world and the secret knowledge offering salvation from the world, who were denounced as heretical by the early Christian church—under the supervision of Martin Heidegger (and Rudolf Bultmann) in the University of Marburg, partially published in 1930 as Der Begriff der Gnosis.Footnote ² In 1934 he published Part I of Gnosis und spätantiker Geist, utilizing the existential vocabulary outlined in Heidegger's masterpiece Being and Time (1927) to analyse the specific existential attitude (Daseinshaltung) of the Gnostic person.Footnote ³ After World War II Jonas returned to this theme in what is probably his most famous essay; he once again presses the conceptual relation between Gnosticism and Heidegger by juxtaposing Gnosticism and existentialism—and dubbing Being and Time the “most profound and still most important manifesto of existentialist philosophy.”Footnote ⁴ It is only fitting, then, that the Heidegger–Gnosticism link is probably the most widely explored theme in critical scholarship on Jonas's intellectual relation to his former mentor Heidegger.Footnote ⁵

However, notwithstanding the considerable research already dedicated to this theme, the present article argues that Jonas's mature account of the relationship between Heidegger and Gnosticism cannot be grasped correctly without accounting for his analysis of the philosophical implications and assumptions of the ontology and cosmology that emerged out of the seventeenth-century scientific revolution. Jonas, it will be claimed, holds what can be termed a “minimalistic” account of what “existentialism” is and what is its domain of reference. Existentialism, for him, does not deal with human existence as such but merely reflects the understanding of human existence that is dependent on, and can only make sense on the basis of, the modern scientific worldview. Existentialism, in other words, is a historically and conceptually specific constellation with historically and conceptually specific criteria determining what rightfully falls under its label, and these criteria are predicated on the modern scientific–ontological worldview.Footnote ⁶ This observation about existentialism complements a parallel observation recently made regarding Jonas's similarly historically specific definition of “Gnosticism.”Footnote ⁷ For Jonas, Gnosticism is not a general concept or universal spiritual disposition that can be applied independently but a particular movement with a unique conceptual setup developed in a specific ancient historical and cultural context. Gershom Scholem, in a letter to Jonas, expresses the matter succinctly: “Your definition of Gnosticism is not mine … For me gnosis is a constantly self-repeating structure within religious thinking, for you it is a unique historical–philosophical phenomenon.”Footnote ⁸ Or, as Jonas states in his critical response to Gilles Quispel,

One important implication of this historicized and minimalistic definition of both existentialism and Gnosticism is that it would be nonsensical for Jonas to consider Heidegger a modern “Gnostic.” But it also means that we are missing an important piece of the puzzle if we wish to comprehend how Jonas envisions the relation between Gnosticism and existentialism given this critical differentiation. The missing piece, I suggest, is his philosophical analysis of modern science.Footnote ¹⁰ Heidegger's philosophy is not a modern instance of Gnosticism but flows from the changes wrought by the scientific revolution, which negated the conceptual world that made Gnosticism possible. Jonas's critique of Heideggerian existentialism, it will be established, hinges on locating the origins of Heidegger's thought in the modern, natural-scientific worldview, and this critique may be counterintuitive in the context of Jonas's work and is novel in the context of the reception of Heidegger's work. Indeed, appreciating the indispensability of the role of the modern scientific worldview in Jonas's evaluation of Heidegger will shed important light on a number of issues: it will allow us to recognize Jonas's original and “against-the-grain” analysis of Heidegger's thought; it will clarify Jonas's broader understanding of the differences between ancient and modern philosophy (as Heidegger is seen as the culminating point of the latter); and it will illuminate a key motivation driving his constructive thought as a whole.

Jonas, we shall see, claims that Heidegger's philosophy is made possible by the reduction of nature to measurable and calculable extension which governs the modern scientific mind, a reduction that gives itself to technological and practical reasoning and to the dominance of efficacy, productivity, manipulation, and mastery. Heidegger, however, himself grappled with the ontological underpinnings and implications of modern science and technology and with its obsession with instrumental calculativity and what he termed “machination” (Machenschaft). In his philosophy Heidegger sought to think beyond the grips of technological reasoning and to develop a manner of reflection that is sensitive and receptive to the holiness and multiplicity of being's disclosure. While his reflections on spatializing approaches to time and the mathematized and violent imposition (Bestellen) on being began already in the early 1920s and are expressed in Being and Time, his most programmatic piece on this theme, “The Question Concerning Technology,” was written at around the same time that Jonas linked his former mentor to that very technological tradition of thought.Footnote ¹¹ By reading Heidegger as a paragon of the modern scientific and technological tradition, Jonas is attributing to Heidegger the very flaws Heidegger identified in the philosophical tradition he contested.

I begin my examination with a brief summary of Jonas's philosophical analysis of the modern scientific outlook. This will provide the pertinent background for the analysis of his essay on Heidegger and Gnosticism and the clarification of his understanding of “existentialism” that will follow. I conclude with contextualizing Jonas's reading of Heidegger with some major strands of Heidegger's twentieth-century reception history. This wider context will allow us to see that Jonas's originality as a reader of Heidegger is not to be found in the link with Gnosticism, which was not an uncommon trope, but in arguing that Heidegger is the philosophical outcome of the seventeenth-century scientific revolution and a manifestation of its calculative, technological reasoning.

Jonas's philosophical analysis of modern science

Reading Jonas's comparative essay on Gnosticism and Heidegger in the context of other pieces from the same period—compiled together in his The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology (1966)—confirms that he interprets the scientific revolution as the condition of possibility of his former mentor's philosophy. The essays in this collection both develop, from different angles, a sustained philosophical assault on dualistic conceptual frameworks in general and modern science and philosophy in particular, and formulate some initial steps toward a holistic non-dualistic alternative, a philosophy of life based on a phenomenological analysis of organism and metabolism.Footnote ¹²

As Jonas explains, the modern scientific revolution brought about a new image of the universe, and many basic categories of classical cosmology were set aside, revamped, or replaced. A great, new homogenization of the universe took place, as the qualitative hierarchal order of the classical world, where entities were either “higher” or “lower” in the hierarchy of being, or “more” or “less” rational, was replaced by the quantitative distinction of complexity and simplicity. Teleology was rooted out and “efficient” mechanistic causation was taken to be sufficient to understand the world. Nature, now reconfigured as extension, was reduced into simple factors and framed in identical quantitative terms. “[T]he aristocracy of form,” Jonas states, “is replaced by the democracy of matter.”Footnote ¹³ In the new cosmology, the “whole” lacks an integral worth and is merely a “sum.” Variations in “quality” are no more than qualitatively different combinations of some simple and otherwise uniform substrata. In this egalitarian outlook, “The higher is the lower in disguise.”Footnote ¹⁴ The defining feature of the new cosmology is the reduction of an entity's features to the properties of mere extension, which can be measured, quantified, and analyzed by means of mathematics. Indeed, Jonas believes that perhaps the main discovery was that nature lends itself to this kind of reductive reasoning and that it can be analyzed through the symbolic language of mathematical equations. Johannes Kepler was likely the first to announce that quantity is the essential and truly knowable aspect of reality, but it was Galileo who formulated the new credo: “the great book of the universe is written in mathematical language.” Unlike in the ancient world, now “rationality of order does not testify to a rational cause, intelligible form no longer represents perfection of being.” From the modern scientific perspective, the world is intelligible but not intelligent. The farthest from reason is deemed most rational because it is most intelligible; that is, it is most immediately reduced to simpler quantitative elements. Being itself is not perceived as operating according to any reason, set-out plan, or immanent rationality, but its quantitative constants can be identified by mathematical examination.

For Jonas, Descartes's dualism both reflected and served the new scientific knowledge best. Its achievement resided in its consolidation of an entire realm of reality as basically one substance with one essential attribute, i.e. extension—a pure res extensa that can be described mathematically and investigated with the calculative measurements of science. This realm was strictly divided from a separate realm of reality, res cogitans, the essential attribute of which is consciousness, cogito, which is not knowable through calculative reasoning. As such, knowledge of res extensa is more clearly defined and easily achievable than knowledge of res cogitans. By isolating res cogitans beyond the domain of scientific reasoning and knowledge, Descartes's dualism offered an effective foundation and justification for a materialistic ontology according to which all external reality, as extended, is mathematized and mechanistic, and it did so without denying the existence of a non-mechanistical domain of existence.

The homogenization of nature had a crucial effect on the concept of time as well. If for classical ontology the future was conceived as “potentiality of becoming,” in the new mechanical notion of time the future is merely “the calculability of the operation of the forces discernible in a given configuration.”Footnote ¹⁵ The difference between classical and mechanistic conceptions of the “past” is displayed in their disparate accounts of the origin of the world. In the premodern world, the moment of origin was taken to be of different quality and beyond the standard categorization of all ensuing moments. For the modern mind it no longer makes sense for the moment of origin to be of a fundamentally different order. The moment of origin distinguishes itself solely in its location on an infinite temporal line of continual causes and effects. It is not qualitatively different, just earlier, and perhaps also simpler. The moment of origin, Genesis, must be the same as the product, the present world. Metaphysically, this picture of the world reverses the premodern idea that the “origin” or “cause” is superior to its effects—more powerful, more perfect, more real—and instead calls upon the primitive “to account for the more articulated, the unstable for the stable, disorder for order, becoming for being.”Footnote ¹⁶

One crucial outcome of the mathematization of the world and the emergence of calculative reasoning, Jonas maintains, is that nature now became instrumentalized; that is, data to be utilized and manipulated according to human will. Instrumentalization is not an accident but integral to the new conception of nature. “‘Science’,” he writes, “is technological by its nature.”Footnote ¹⁷ Jonas describes the difference between modern and classical knowledge as between “know-how” and “know-what”—between knowledge directed toward practical and technological manipulation and knowledge directed toward identifying first principles, essences, and ultimate truths.Footnote ¹⁸ Because of the functional and operative nature of the modern scientific understanding of knowledge, it does not, indeed cannot, reach its goal by definitely attaining the finite truly knowable things, as is the case with the Greek understanding of knowledges. Platonic knowledge, for example, is based on the union of the intellect with the intelligible, whereby the intelligible is the real. Modern knowledge, on the other hand, is hypothetical in character and judged by its practical implication and operation. It has no end goal, Jonas claims, but is rather in constant flux, seeking little but to reap more gains. The root of this difference between classical and modern scientific imagination, Jonas asserts, is the philosophical difference between nominalism and realism. For the former, concepts are products of the human temporal mind and subject to change, while for the latter, they reflect independently existing and immutable forms of being.Footnote ¹⁹

This is perhaps the gravest ramification of the modern reduction of quality to quantity and the abolishment of teleology and the hierarchical order of being: the denial of “essences” in nature. In a “sweeping repudiation of Platonism,” species are now seen as lacking a fixed nature and original and inherent determinations beyond the bare minimum of self-preservation. The premodern notion of immutable essences is replaced by the modern notion of “conditions,” understood primarily as the “situation” or “environment” precipitating evolvement, which serves now as the originating principle of the constitution of a being.

This leads us to what Jonas considers a key distinction between modern and ancient cosmological assumptions, a distinction that is central to his analysis of Heidegger and Gnosticism. Ancient thought perceived nature, the cosmos, as a living, animated entity, and “life” was taken as the most natural condition that does not demand explanation. The nonliving, on the other hand, presented itself as in need of explanation; death was perceived as unnatural and anomalous, and needed to be, in some way, denied. With the Renaissance, an opposite theoretical situation developed. Jonas terms this shift a transition from the ancient pan-vitalism to the modernist pan-mechanism. According to the newly discovered mechanical cosmology, the lifeless became the “natural” and original state of things; matter became seen as the “real” reality. From science this conception quickly spread over all existence, with an ontology that stripped matter of all its features of life. From the perspective of this “ontology of death,” the theoretical problem of life, strange and impenetrable from a mechanistic perspective, became the exception in need of integration into the comprehensive worldview. A major task of modern science thus became to comprehend life in terms of nonlife. With appropriate drama, Jonas declares, “Our thinking today is under the ontological dominance of death.”Footnote ²⁰

It is important to note that while Jonas argues for a momentous break and difference between premodern and modern outlooks, he does not deny that some aspects of premodern systems have prepared the ground for modern ideas. He states, for example, that an inclination to mathematize knowledge can be said to be almost coextensive with Western thinking. While its modern manifestation is unique, there is a sense in which “a direct line of descent” extends from Plato's demiurge in Timaeus to the Leibnizian mathematical God. Jonas also sees Descartes's dualistic attribution of any inwardness exclusively to the human as a radicalization of the premodern Christian idea that an immortal soul is the imago dei in the human.Footnote ²¹ He likewise maintains that “the metaphysical charter” for the deistic “clockmaker” deity and the unintelligent but intelligible and mechanical world was provided by the biblical account of creation and its depiction of a God that is a creative agent external to and different than the homogenized “creation,” which is bereft of a soul and divine powers and operates according to its system of natural principles.Footnote ²²

Jonas insists that the transition from the premodern to modern outlooks is not a transition from dualism to monism. Both ancient pan-vitalism and modern pan-mechanism are monistic pictures that are only intelligible on the basis of a more general framework of dualism. Indeed, dualistic metaphysics is what connects these two extremes. Dualism, Jonas asserts, characterizes the world of the ancients who perceived, as the Orphic formula went, the body as a tomb (Soma-sema), polarizing the soul from the body and locating the “self” in the inwardness of soul. The peak of this dualistic outlook is Gnosticism, where the entire world is experienced as a tomb, a prison into which the soul is cast, alien and alone. Dualism is also the backdrop of the post-dualistic monism of the modern world, an “inverted monism” predicated on the logic of dualism by polarizing the world into two poles, rejecting the one and turning the other into a monism in itself, encompassing the entirety of what is. Modern materialism and idealism, the two main theoretical systems developed in the wake of modern science, are in truth “partial monisms,” presupposing a dualistic ontological polarization between spirit and matter and rendering one or the other the entirety of reality.

Thus the modernist mechanistic model of the world, like its classical counterpart, is based on dualism, but in place of the classical polarities of form–matter, active–passive body, and intelligible–sensitive, new polarities emerge, such as subject–object, mind–nature, consciousness–spatiality, and inwardness–outwardness. Likewise, “mind” is replaced with “ego” or “self” and its correlative is not “form” but the “not-I.”Footnote ²³ The classical distinction between “natural” and “artificial” loses its meaning. Unprecedently, Jonas claims, modern theorizing groups all forms of awareness, even non- and irrational sensations and emotions, into the realm of cogito—that is, of reason—over against, and in distinction to, every kind of spatial being, including rational forms such as mathematics. Nature is identified with the lifeless “matter,” which is seen as more rational, meaning more intelligible according to mathematical description, than “spirit.”

According to Jonas, the most decisive articulation and the logical result of the “anti-Platonic movement of the modern mind” is the nineteenth-century Darwinian theory of evolution and its view that entities, models, and “species” lack a predetermined “identity” or essence that is reembodied in every generation. Existing patterns are not eternal determinants but outcomes of temporal developments which will continue to develop and evolve. Building on the modern materialistic monism in seeking to explain the production of the living world through unaided matter, Darwin's doctrine of evolution maintains that nature progresses causally in a quasi-mechanistic fashion according to no predetermined plan, direction, or telos. In this open-ended escapade, Jonas explains, operative causation, chance variation, and natural selection are in command.Footnote ²⁴ Life is portrayed as a “sheer adventure with an entirely unforeseeable course” and as constituting its own means and achievement.Footnote ²⁵ The idea of an unfolding purpose in nature is done away with and replaced by subjectivity.Footnote ²⁶ The absence of teleological directedness, together with the elimination of immutable essences in nature, Jonas announces, “signifies the final victory of nominalism over realism.”Footnote ²⁷

Darwin's theory of evolution is a continuation of the modern scientific revolution in that it utilizes the strict rule of causal law, seemingly excluding contingency, within a wider, overarching principle of radical contingency. It accepts that every specific natural interaction is governed by the law of causality and thus necessity, but the entire apparatus within which this causality rules does not operate according to any intrinsic essences, ends, or transcendent plan. Causes, not reasons, direct this world. In this way, Darwin applied the combination of law and contingency marking the Newtonian–Laplacean cosmology to the living kingdom. Evolutionism, however, also represents a monistic subsuming of Descartes's dualism, for the continuity it describes between the animal and the human world neutralizes the latter's qualitative uniqueness as the sole bearer of “mind.” The categorical distinction between humans and animals based on Descartes's cogito is replaced by a difference in degree. “[E]volutionism,” Jonas writes, “undid Descartes’ work more effectively than any metaphysical critique had managed to do.”Footnote ²⁸ It succeeded in putting forth a purely mechanistic account of life which includes the “cogito” side of existence.

Jonas's critique of Darwinism, and of the modern scientific paradigm in general, is that presenting an account of life without attending to the unquantifiable realm of inwardness cannot be satisfactory. While materialism seems to have triumphed with the theory of evolution, in Jonas's understanding the wide acceptance of Darwinian evolutionism is in fact a dialectical event. For implicit to it is a gesture toward the transcending of materialism, a transcending that Jonas himself attempts in his preliminary reflections on a philosophy of biology.

Notably, Jonas explicitly associates Darwinism and existentialism, presenting the latter as the philosophical offspring of the former:

Jonas also maintains that existentialism is the nihilistic implication of the jettisoning of any transcending “being” or notion of “nature” or “essence” to anchor the flux of becoming that has been embraced by evolutionism. Seemingly the only alternative left in the ever-evolving Darwinian world is the Will to Power. “Nietzsche's nihilism and his attempt to overcome it,” Jonas remarks, “are demonstrably connected with the impact of Darwinism.”Footnote ³⁰ While Jonas is careful not to suggest that the theory of evolution is exclusively responsible for the emergence of existentialism, he insists on a direct conceptual link between the two:

“Gnosticism, Existentialism, and Nihilism”

This reconstruction of Jonas's philosophical analysis of modern science leaves much unmentioned, but it allows us now to turn to his essay on existentialism and Gnosticism with closer care. This essay was originally published as “Gnosticism and Modern Nihilism” in 1952 by the journal Social Research, and was then revised and republished as an epilogue to the second edition of his work The Gnostic Religion (1963), an abridged and reworked English translation of his Gnosis und spätantiker Geist, bearing the title “Gnosticism, Existentialism, and Nihilism.” It then appeared again, with the same title, as the ninth essay in Jonas's The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology (1966).Footnote ³² In what follows I draw on the 1963–6 version of the essay, which is similar to the 1952 version except for some minor amendments and the addition of an Introduction. This often quoted Introduction is significant not only because Jonas relates in first-person narrative some of his motivations for pursuing a “gnostic” reading of existentialism, but also because in it he articulates the relatively humble expectations he has from his analysis. Indeed, Jonas repeatedly minimizes the pretentiousness and extent of the comparison between the two programs of thought and highlights its tentative, experimental nature. He contends that “the two have something in common” worth elaborating on, which may result “in a reciprocal illumination of both.”Footnote ³³ He voices his awareness of the problematic nature of any comparison of two bodies of thought so dramatically separated in time and space, acknowledging “all the reservations which the experiment of such a comparison calls for.” But he also speaks of “an affinity or analogy across the ages” that can be productively explored insofar as the important differences are kept in mind.Footnote ³⁴ A number of times throughout the essay Jonas reminds the reader of its experimental character, repeatedly legitimizing his comparison by minimizing the scope of its aims. He recognizes, for example, that the comparison between Gnosticism and existentialism may come as a shock, not least because of the considerable disagreement between the “expansiveness” of the former's “metaphysical fancy” and “the austere disillusionment of existentialism,” but also because of the religious character of the one and “the atheistic, fundamentally ‘post-Christian’ essence” of the other. While these important differences must not be overlooked, Jonas believes that “a comparison may yield some interesting results.”Footnote ³⁵

Jonas writes that during his early study of Gnosticism he discovered that Heidegger's philosophy in Being and Time was a useful optic through which various previously overlooked aspects of Gnosticism can be revealed. Later, he continues, he realized that his studies of this ancient movement actually assisted him “in discerning and placing the meaning of modern nihilism” because its categories fitted perfectly, “as if made to measure.”Footnote ³⁶ This similarity, however, does not reflect identity, only analogy, for Jonas insists on historicizing existentialism (and Gnosticism): “Existentialism which claims to be the explication of the fundamentals of human existence as such, is the philosophy of a particular, historically fated situation of human existence: and an analogous (though in other respects very different) situation had given rise to an analogous response in the past.”Footnote ³⁷ Any formally “analogous” vision of human existence in late-antiquity Gnosticism and modern existentialism is to be understood, first and foremost, on the basis of their preliminary historicization; that is, by treating them from the outset as two distinct programs of thought that are the result of idiosyncratic historical and philosophical conditions and traditions.

Notably, though not unexpectedly, Jonas turns to the seventeenth century, “where the spiritual situation of modern man takes shape,” as the background for understanding existentialism and its nihilism.Footnote ³⁸ Specifically, Jonas points to Blaise Pascal's recognition of the human “loneliness in the physical universe of modern cosmology.” In Pascal's famous words, “Cast into the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant, and which know me not, I am frightened.” What Jonas takes from Pascal is the profound experience of cosmic loneliness in light of the indifference of the universe toward humans. In this Pascalian picture, the human being perceives herself as part of the sum total of “things” in the world, as “an instance of nature,” a dehumanizing recognition that the self is “only a reed,” weak and disposable in the wider scheme of things. One's existence is “but a particular blind accident, no less blind than would be the accident of his destruction.”Footnote ³⁹ And yet, together with this daunting recognition, the human being also acknowledges that she is a thinking being and thus radically different from the dead, indifferent nature around her. She perceives herself as an objectified instance of the natural rex extensa and through her body she is bound to the mechanical determinations of nature; but she is not only an extended being but also a possessor of a mind. Consciousness or mind, which in the past made the human being distinct and superior to the rest of existence, is now what makes the human being a foreigner in the world. The human logos cannot feel kinship with the immanent logos of the cosmos or rejoice in its place within the organized order of the whole, because the theoretical–cosmological framework that made these ideas possible has been superseded. The world is no longer experienced as the natural home of human beings, who instead feel lost and alone in an instrumentalized universe that appears entirely contingent and without reason. This tragic human condition, articulated by Pascal, took shape as a response to the new understanding of nature, and continues to cast its haunting shadow.

Since teleological causation is no longer operative in modern cosmology, nature without reference to ends emerges as purposeless. By extension, human existence loses its purpose as well. This is the scientific underpinning of the “nihilism” of modern culture and philosophy: “A universe without an intrinsic hierarchy of being, as the Copernican universe is, leaves values ontologically unsupported.”Footnote ⁴⁰ This does not mean that no values are meaningful, only that meaning is no longer taken to be objective; the individual alone can construct for herself some local, subjective meaning—“ends are solely my own creation.” With the desuetude of objective ends and purpose, the Will takes over, and this, for Jonas, “is the Nietzschean phase of the situation in which European nihilism breaks the surface.”Footnote ⁴¹

Nietzsche represents another step in the process from Pascal, whose world was still perceived as created by God—albeit an unknown God whose fingerprint is not discernible in his creation. In this odd framework, God's mark is palpable in the world not in the familiar aspects celebrated by the tradition of natural theology, such as the world's order, beauty, or goodness, but only in “its magnitude, its spatial and temporal immensity.”Footnote ⁴² This is because “extension, or the quantitative, is the one essential attribute left to the world” and thus it is only through this attribute that the divine can be reflected. This comes close to the conception of a mathematician God which is examined and rebuked by Jonas in an earlier essay in The Phenomenon of Life, titled “Is God a Mathematician?”. There, Jonas rejects the mathematician God by claiming that such a God cannot be said to create anything that does not fall under the limited mathematical description of physical entities, such as the living organism. To this Jonas adds now another, moral, objection: the reduction of the world to quantitative magnitude is equal to its reduction to relations of power, mastery, and manipulation. The contingency of Pascal's world is relative contingency because it is dependent on God's inscrutable will, but this is no longer the case in the post-Nietzschean world, after the death of God. “The deus absconditus, of whom nothing but will and power can be predicated, leaves behind as his legacy, upon departing the scene, the homo absconditus, a concept of man characterized solely by will and power—the will for power, the will to will.”Footnote ⁴³ The nihilistic implications of existentialism, according to Jonas, are the result of two “deaths,” the death of “nature” and the death of God.Footnote ⁴⁴

We thus arrive at an important observation concerning Jonas's view of existentialism. The Gnostics’ dreadful anxiety in a fallen world is not “existentialistic” in the way Jonas interprets the term. Nor are, say, the stirring pleas of the biblical Psalter, Augustine's self-reflections in Confessions, or Luther's tribulations (Anfechtungen). Existentialism is not simply a consequence of Kant's critical philosophy, nor are Kierkegaard or Nietzsche strictly the “fathers of existentialism.” Heidegger's phenomenological rebellion against Husserl is not its inceptive event either. Rather, existentialism's origin is to be found in the seventeenth-century expression of Pascal's anxious response to the new mechanical, calculative, and indifferent universe.Footnote ⁴⁵ That Pascal is presented as the first existentialist indicates that existentialism is a specific experiential reaction to the new cosmological outlook, a particular manner of being-in-the-world, where the “world” is, quite literally, understood according to the new modern physics. Existentialism is a uniquely modern phenomenon which could not have developed without the seventeenth-century scientific revolution and its mathematical mind frame.Footnote ⁴⁶

Heidegger and Gnosticism

In the essay Jonas describes Gnosticism as predicated on a radical dualism between the human being and the world and between the world and God. The human being and God essentially belong together, but the world is contraposed to both and stands in the way of their unity. The human spirit (pneuma) is not of the world but is trapped in it and seeks salvation from it. The fallen world is not the creation of the True God, who is “strictly transmundane” and “unknown, the totally Other,” but of some other inferior principle of personal agency, a “lowly demiurge.”Footnote ⁴⁷ The Gnostic experience is that of being “thrown” beyond one's control and will into an alien world. This dreadful experience awakens the self from its absorption with the world to discover that “it is not really its own” and that “the world (not the alienation from it) must be overcome.” Knowledge—gnosis—the common locus between the human and the transcendental God, is for the human the way out of the world. Inside the world, however, not knowledge but power reigns. The world is reduced to the forces of power operating within it, and overcoming it can only be achieved through a counterpower, namely the powerful eruption of the Saviour into the immanence of the world from without and the power of the “knowledge” pressing outwards. The alienation of the real pneumatic self from everything in the world results in a profound antinomian impulse, since the idea of law—moral law included—is associated with the order of nature. Indeed, the Gnostic opposition to the cosmos and its demiurge creator generates a resistance to anything that could be considered “natural,” including the “natural” human essence and its definition as “rational animal.” Jonas adds that the Gnostic idea of being thrown into the world has the connotation of “speeding toward some end,” so that “life is a kind of trajectory projecting itself forward into the future.”Footnote ⁴⁸ The temporal structure that emerges is one in which the human has been thrown in the past and urges forth into the future, but the present is absent: “There is a past and a future, where we come from and where we speed to, and the present is only the moment of Gnosis itself, the peripety from the one to the other in a supreme crisis of the eschatological now .”Footnote ⁴⁹

According to Jonas, the general outlook just outlined resembles some of the details of modern existentialism. The dead God of the Gnostic cosmos parallels the dead God about which Nietzsche made his famous pronouncement. Interestingly, Jonas follows none other than Heidegger's interpretation of Nietzsche's “death of God” as the death of a metaphysical supersensible realm of ideas and ideals.Footnote ⁵⁰ For Jonas, this interpretation captures the kernel of modern-day nihilism, for the disappearance of the only realm from which values can be derived means “not only the actual devaluation of highest values, but the loss of the very obligatory values as such.”Footnote ⁵¹ Jonas is sensitive to the fact that this does not appear to constitute a similarity between Gnosticism and existentialism, for after all the entire Gnostic myth is based on the existence of such a realm of transcendence. Is it not true that “extreme dualism is of itself the very opposite of an abandonment of transcendence”? Jonas's reply is that the radically other and transcendent Gnostic God “has more of the nihil than the ens in his concept,” and so in a “modified, rather paradoxical way,” the Gnostic God can be likened to the dead God of modern existential nihilism in that “for all purposes of man's relation to the reality that surrounds him this hidden God is a nihilistic conception: no nomos emanates from him, no law for nature and thus none for human action as a part of the natural order.”Footnote ⁵² From the perspective of human existence, radical transcendence and no transcendence are the same thing; a God so far removed is basically equivalent to no God at all. Similarly, existentialism, like Gnosticism, portrays the human reaction to its dire condition as a feeling of alienation, of not being at-home-in-the-world, and dread about existence itself. The Gnostic experience of being “thrown” into the world finds an echo in Pascal's feeling of being “cast into the infinite immensity of spaces” as well as in Heidegger's notion of “having been thrown” (Geworfenheit). Here Jonas adds one of the few historical claims in the essay, that as far as he can tell, the idea of “being thrown” “is originally gnostic.”

Another point of resemblance is that the nihilation of the transcendental realm of God, ideas, and ideals in the modern world effects an antinomian stance. Existentialism's antinomianism is intimately linked to its perception that human existence does not have a predetermined “nature” or “essence,” but is a “freely-self-projecting existence.”Footnote ⁵³ Jonas refers to Heidegger's “Letter on Humanism,” where the philosopher maintains that defining the human as a rational animal obscures the fundamental difference between human and animal, namely that Dasein is the “open” through and by which being discloses itself.Footnote ⁵⁴ Placing the human within animality, Jonas commentates Heidegger, effectively places Dasein “too low.”Footnote ⁵⁵ In a footnote Jonas explains that Heidegger's real concern here is not the leveling of humans and animals to the same scale but the fact that Dasein is placed “in any scale, that is, in a context of nature as such.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Existentialism's rejection of “nature” comes up again in the essay when Jonas discusses Heidegger's distinction between the different modalities of entities, ready-to-hand (zuhanden) and present-at-hand (vorhanden). In Jonas's explanation, ready-to-hand is the modality of entities that are primarily “usable” and approached through “care” (Sorge), and present-at-hand is the modality of things that are merely “indifferent objects” in the “false present.” Present-at-hand is “what is merely and indifferently ‘extant’, the ‘there’ of bare nature,” beyond the relevance and significance granted to things through the attention and care of practical human concerns. For Jonas, Heidegger's present-at-hand denotes being “stripped and alienated to the mode of mute thinghood,” an obviously deficient mode of being that reflects the barely existent status left for “nature” in Heidegger's world.

This interpretation of present-at-hand is related to Jonas's analysis of Dasein's temporal structure presented in Being and Time which he claims parallels that of the Gnostics. If one examines the “existentials” detailed in Heidegger's Dasein analytic, Jonas states, one discovers an noteworthy feature: all the relevant categories of existence pertaining to the notion of “authenticity” correlate to either past or future dimensions of human existence, but no equivalent is found to the temporal tense of the “present” as an independent dimension in its own right. The present, an almost empty moment of non-duration, subsists only as the “crisis between past and future, the pointed moment between, balanced on the razor's edge of decisions which thrusts ahead.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Jonas goes on to interpret the Heideggerian structure of “fallenness” (Verfallenheit) as “the ‘existential’ proper to ‘present’ as such,” and the negative connotations of “degeneration and decline” associated with the term exhibiting its character as “a derivative and ‘deficient’ mode of existence.”Footnote ⁵⁸

Notwithstanding the various analogies Jonas identifies between Gnosticism and existentialism, it is of utmost importance that with every analogy proposed, he adds an underlying difference, and in each case the root of the difference is the same: the ontological and cosmological break that occurred in the seventeenth century that resulted in the death of nature and the death of God.Footnote ⁵⁹ For example, Jonas states that the quality of power marking the modern person's interaction with the world is very different from that of the ancients, because the overpowering that a Gnostic person had to undertake in the world was “anything but technological mastery.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Technology, it appears, is a specifically modern phenomenon. But “different as this is from modern man's power relation to world-causality,” Jonas continues, a formal similarity remains in that power and countering power are the only ways humans carry out a relation with the world. Additionally, while Gnostics completely devalue the cosmos, Jonas concedes that “[c]ertainly nothing remotely comparable to modern physical science was involved in this catastrophic devaluation or spiritual denudation of the universe.”Footnote ⁶¹ The devaluation of the world executed by the Gnostics is barely comparable to its modern scientific counterpart, but the formal similarity of the fact of devaluation remains. That there is “something comparable” in this parallel rejection of “nature” is based on a fundamental dissimilarity pertaining to their profoundly different understanding of what “nature” is. Here, too, Jonas affirms that unlike the Gnostics, the depreciation of “nature” by existentialism “reflects its spiritual denudation at the hands of physical science” and is more severe and radical than anything the Gnostics could have had in mind. “No philosophy has been less concerned about nature than Existentialism, for which it has no dignity left.”Footnote ⁶²

The discrepancy between the ancient and modern programs is also noted with respect to their shared antinomian impulse. As Jonas claims, “the denial of every objective norm of conduct is argued on vastly different theoretical levels in Gnosis and Existentialism,” so much so that the Gnostic antinomian impulse seems “crude and naïve” when compared to “the conceptual subtlety and historical reflection” of existentialism.Footnote ⁶³ This incongruity is evident in their formally parallel temporal structures as well. Humans in the Gnostic system are thrown into the temporal world from their origin in eternity, and their aim to transcend the world implies a return to this original eternity. This, Jonas admits, has no equivalent in modern existentialism. The classical world believed that only eternity grants the ever-fleeting “present” its own status and dignity, and the loss of eternity and the realm of ideals and ideas in existentialism—“the death of God”—means that it lacks the ability to secure a genuine present. It announces, in other words, “the absolute victory of nominalism over realism”—a judgment we have seen Jonas makes in his analysis of the philosophical aspects of the modern scientific revolution and Darwinism.Footnote ⁶⁴

Jonas concludes his essay with a final “cardinal difference” between Gnosticism and existentialism. “Gnostic man,” he writes, “is thrown into an antagonistic, antidivine, and therefore antihuman nature, modern man into an indifferent one. Only the latter case represents the absolute vacuum, the really bottomless pit.” This last point restates Jonas's view regarding the difference between classical and modern cosmology: in the former the world is conceptualized in terms of life, even if, as living, it is antagonistic; in the latter, however, the world is conceptualized in terms of death and indifference.

Comparative polemic

Some details of Jonas's interpretation of Being and Time are debatable. His claim that Heidegger's “present” is empty can be challenged by the notion of “moment of vision” (Augenblick), a peak moment wherein a coalescence of the past–present–future dimensions of Dasein's existence occurs. Linked to Kierkegaard's notion of øieblikket—“the moment” of intersection between finite temporality and divine eternity, itself an adaptation of the New Testament notion kairos—Heidegger's “moment of vision” is not a present moment of emptiness but of fullness, indeed the fullness of time in a radically temporal world.Footnote ⁶⁵ Jonas's interpretation of present-at-hand as “the ‘there’ of bare nature” and the ontically negative rendition of “fallenness” are similarly dubious. Indeed, his shared treatment of Heidegger and Sartre (and Pascal!) as instances of the definable and solidified theoretical school or stance called “existentialism,” while typical at the time, is disputable. Not only does it obscure profound differences between these thinkers—only a few years early Heidegger leveled a devastating attack on Sartre's philosophy in his “Letter on Humanism,” claiming it to be fundamentally metaphysical—but Heidegger also repeatedly and consistently repudiated the label of, and the association with, “existentialism.”

Nevertheless, given our analysis of the essay, one is certainly justified in wondering whether the fundamental cosmological difference between Heidegger and Gnosticism does not produce a different existential situation and attitude. Both Gnosticism and Heidegger speak of “thrownness,” but is not the sense of being thrown into an antagonistic world with a covert avenue toward salvation (“gnosis”) profoundly dissimilar to the sense of thrownness into an indifferent and purposeless world? Jonas's description of the Gnostic attempt to overcome the world rather than the alienation from it cannot be applied to existentialism, where only the desire to overcome the alienation, not the world, can make sense. This, indeed, is precisely Jonas’s conclusion:

In fact, Jonas believes that the comparison with Gnosticism allows us to challenge existentialism's claim for self-consistency. In the final analysis, the Gnostics can speak consistently of a meaningless world in which a meaningful individual is “abandoned” only because they held a dualistic metaphysical worldview. Heidegger's existentialist position, however, in proper modern fashion, is predicated on a dualism but operates monistically. Using familiar terminology from his analysis of modern science, Jonas describes Heidegger's world as one in which “seeing is a product of the blind.” How can Dasein be a non-indifferent, caring being if all that exists is an indifferent world? “Does not this paradox cast doubt on the very concept of an indifferent nature, that abstraction of physical science?”Footnote ⁶⁷

A significant portion of the essays collected in The Phenomenon of Life deals, in one way or another, with the meaning and importance of the momentous break between classical and modern science. The essay “Gnosticism, Existentialism, and Nihilism,” ostensibly dedicated to illustrating the similarities between ancient and modern theoretical systems, seems to be at odds with this overarching stance. But in light of the discussion above, we see that this is not the case. Jonas lists a handful of formal resemblances between Gnosticism and existentialism, such as their shared dualistic basis, their nihilism, and some shared features in their depiction of the human response to a dualistic world. However, given his historicized view of both, these are only considered against the backdrop of pivotal historical and conceptual differences between the two programs, the watershed moment between them being the modern scientific revolution.Footnote ⁶⁸ In the end, Jonas rejects Heidegger's existentialism for its reliance on the modern scientific concept of nature and the nihilism that springs from it. The comparison with Gnosticism is a rhetorical tool, demonstrating that, in comparison with another nihilistic framework, the present nihilism is so much more radical and the present philosophical situation is so much more dire. Jonas's motivation is polemical: while the two programs of thought share some formal resemblances, they are not equal in their nihilistic disposition. Heidegger's nihilism, the reader is expected to conclude, is not Gnostic—it is so much worse.Footnote ⁶⁹

Thus Jonas's unrelenting critique of existentialism actually partakes in a more expansive critical project of discrediting some of the very basic assumptions of the modern worldview, which he takes to be rooted in, and intimately tied to, the seventeenth-century scientific overhaul. The vision of the world formed by the emergence of modern science, Jonas believes, not only is unable to come to terms with the actuality of human life in its embodied and nonmaterial, “spiritual” existence, but also has ominous moral consequences as well, and these are exhibited, most radically, in existentialism's unprecedented nihilism. This more expansive critique, in turn, serves to justify Jonas's own constructive attempt to develop an integral, non-dualistic philosophy of life.

Contextualizing Jonas's “scientific” reading of Heidegger

Jonas's philosophical interpretation of the modern scientific revolution is thus key to his reading of Heidegger and indispensable to understanding the scope and limits of his Heidegger–Gnosticism connection. I wish to suggest now that while Jonas shares various elements of his critical interpretation of Being and Time with other prominent twentieth-century readers of Heidegger, approaching this work through the history of modern science is novel and should be seen as Jonas's original contribution to the already rich and multifaceted Heidegger reception history. Due to space limitations it would be impossible to recount Heidegger's twentieth-century reception in excessive detail, but it is useful to mention some of the central lines of interpretation that intersect with Jonas's. These will be presented as demarcated and distinct “strands” in Heidegger's reception for the sake of clarity, but in truth no real clear-cut divisions exist between them and they are not mutually exclusive; indeed, many of Heidegger's interpreters could be affiliated with more than one of them.

When Jonas applied the terminology of Being and Time to shed light on the Gnostic existential attitude in the interwar period, he did so whilst the general intellectual environment around him was grappling with a disturbing sense of the godlessness of the world and with questions concerning radical immanentism, transcendence, and nihilism.Footnote ⁷⁰ In its own way, Heidegger's philosophy was an expression of this intellectual climate, and from the very beginning Being and Time was read as such. For example, one of the earliest analyses of Heidegger's magnum opus, by Siegfried Marck in his Die Dialektik in der Philosophie der Gegenwart, approached it through the paradigm of monism/dualism.Footnote ⁷¹ Heidegger, Marck interprets, seeks to replace the “Platonist dualism” of idea and experience, value and reality with a monistic framework that posits “existence” as the overarching and unifying notion. And while “Heidegger's system is a monism of finitude,” he notes, it nevertheless wishes to establish two distinct modes of existence, authenticity and inauthenticity, without having an external set of values to draw on by which they can be differentiated.Footnote ⁷² Others claimed that Heidegger's analysis of Dasein's world left little or no room for God, and many also pointed to the secularized Christian vocabulary it employed. Heidegger was frequently perceived as a “secularized Kierkegaard” who drew on the Dane's insights and terminology and operated within the “infinite qualitative difference” between God and the human he set forth, while absolutizing the immanent order.Footnote ⁷³ Heidegger was similarly read as an atheistic version of Karl Barth, the Swiss theologian, who at the time preached a radical distinction between heaven and earth.

The Dasein analytic was also accused of depicting not human existence as such but merely an anxiety-ridden existence in a dark and godless world of impervious immanence.Footnote ⁷⁴ Among many examples, already in 1928, immediately after the appearance of Being and Time, the Jesuit thinker Erich Przywara claimed that Heidegger establishes a radical dualism between God and world and “frames the concept of being in such a way that … the inner-worldly is closed and locked in on itself, since being as being is in its essence ‘in the world.’ At the same time, the supra-worldly falls away by itself or at least must be traced back to the immanent.”Footnote ⁷⁵ In 1934 Przywara associated Heidegger's position with Manichaeism, and in 1938 Martin Buber identified in the idea that Dasein ought to regain its self after being abandoned in the facelessness of the “They” (das Man) “a gnostic concept by which the Gnostics meant the concentration and salvation of the soul which is lost in the world.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Susan Taubes's 1954 article on the Gnostic foundation of Heidegger was the published fruit of a reading she had been developing during the 1940s together with her then husband Jacob Taubes.Footnote ⁷⁷ In fact, Susan Taubes's article, which relied heavily on Jonas's Gnosis und spätantiker Geist, was sent for peer review to Jonas. His evaluation of her article is illuminating:

Particularly noteworthy here is Jonas's open skepticism whether “the indubitable analogies justify speaking of ‘the Gnostic foundation of H's ontology’,” a matter regarding which he is “more cautious than Mrs. Taubes.” What can be seen, in any case, is that Jonas's 1952 association of Heidegger and Gnosticism is in line with this broad exegetical perspective. While it may be the case that the biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy suggested to Jonas to write a book on Heidegger as a modern Gnostic in 1950, this general prism was well in place for quite some time.Footnote ⁷⁹

Indeed, Jonas's essay is written in the historical and philosophical context of the debate that took place during the 1950s and 1960s in Germany and elsewhere on modern secularism, secularization, and the apparent loss of spiritual meaning in the world, in which a repeated appeal was made to the category of “Gnosticism” as a hermeneutical key for making sense of the present predicament.Footnote ⁸⁰ The conceptual backbone of this debate was, among other things, Jonas's own prewar work on Gnosticism. It is evident that, unlike some of the figures participating in this debate, such as Eric Voegelin, Jacob Taubes, or Susan Taubes, Jonas does not hold a formal or “metaphorical” conception of Gnosticism which would allow him to speak of Gnostic aspects of modern thought or dub Heidegger a “Gnostic,” as they do.Footnote ⁸¹ His “scientific” prism limits him to speak merely of certain formal analogies between Gnosticism and modernity and makes him more restrictive about attributing the tag “Gnostic” to Heidegger.

Reading Heidegger as positing either a radical dualistic separation between transcendence and immanence or an absolutized immanence is connected to another frequent theme in the critique of his philosophy, echoed by Jonas as well—that of “nihilism.” Condemning his philosophy as “nihilistic”—a common trait of some early and contemporary readers—was usually pinned to its emphasis on Dasein's historicity, temporality, and finitude, which came together with a denial of eternal principles, timeless metaphysics, or a ground in God. With this radical plunge into history, rejection of metaphysics, and groundless atheism, it is claimed, Heidegger's philosophy is incapable of upholding morality and values, and in effect all that can be resorted to in the world he depicts is power. Heidegger was often read alongside the “great nihilist” Nietzsche and even as the ultimate manifestation and end point of the nihilistic impulses in modern thought. For many, that he joined the Nazi Party exhibited and validated the immorality of his philosophy.Footnote ⁸²

Historicizing Being and Time as Jonas does is another common critical response to Heidegger. These historicizations contest Heidegger's self-perception of breaking away from modern philosophy and from the main line of the Western metaphysical tradition more generally, and present it instead as in continuity with these traditions. On this reading, Heidegger's thought is not a new beginning but a continuation of the traditional way of thinking. Moreover, it suggests that Being and Time does not provide an ontological analysis of Dasein's existential features undergirding any ontic instance, across historical periodizations, geographical locations, and cultural contexts, as it claims, but only a portrayal of a specific mode of modern human existence, unwittingly displaying some basic modern assumptions.

One not infrequent manner of historicization is coupling Heidegger and Descartes, which Jonas does too. Usually the claim in this context is that Being and Time attempts to overcome or operate beyond the tradition of modern subjectivism inaugurated by Descartes, but its emphasis on the selfhood and authenticity of Dasein demonstrates that it is indebted to, and even culminates, the Cartesian–subjectivistic tradition. At times this point is blended with the aforementioned ethical critique, maintaining that the theoretical system presented in Being and Time lacks the possibility for morality because it portrays Dasein as a solipsistic monad closed off onto itself, incapable of the intersubjectivity of ethics. Emmanuel Levinas's claim that Heidegger's philosophy is oblivious to the responsibility toward the other, or the charge, leveled by Karl Löwith, Karl Jaspers, Friedrich Gogarten, Max Scheler, Buber, and others, that Heidegger's thought is monological or solipsistic, all represent this dominant critique.Footnote ⁸³ If, however, it is usually the image of Descartes as the father of the subjectivistic tradition in modern philosophy that is culled in the context of Heidegger, for Jonas it is primarily Descartes the philosophical father of the physicization of the world and of res extensa who is the correct theoretical basis for Heidegger's philosophy.Footnote ⁸⁴ Also Leo Strauss offers a form of critical historicization which, like Jonas, returns to seventeenth-century intellectual innovations to explain Heidegger, and he too claims that the rejection of human “nature” is central to Heidegger's philosophy and the crux of its nihilism (a point made by Löwith as well). But while Strauss's narrative focuses on the novelties of the early modern political philosophers such as Hobbes, Spinoza, and Machiavelli, Jonas looks to the scientific novelties of that period.Footnote ⁸⁵ This ‘scientific’ lens onto Heidegger—that is, the historicizing of Heidegger's philosophy through the history of science rather than just through the history of philosophy—is Jonas's contribution to twentieth-century Heidegger exegesis. As noted, however, Jonas is doing more than simply historicizing Heidegger—he is reading him “against the grain.” For by associating Heidegger with the modern technological attitude and its logic of predictability, machination, and control which Heidegger himself reviled, Jonas is delegitimizing Heidegger's philosophical project on Heidegger's own terms.Footnote ⁸⁶ By interpreting Heidegger as a product of the modern scientific rationality, Jonas is using a method of delegitimating that is likewise found in other former students of Heidegger whose attitude toward him can be described as a dialectic of attraction and repulsion, such as Löwith, Levinas, Strauss, and others, which can be aptly described through Jürgen Habermas's idiom: with Heidegger against Heidegger (Mit Heidegger gegen Heideggers Denken).Footnote ⁸⁷