Hans Jonas

Matérias

• Jonas: Seventeenth Century and After (I)
  19 de novembro de 2024, por Cardoso de Castro

  I
  We live in a revolution — we of the West — and have been living in one for several centuries. We are naming its central agency when we call it the scientific-technological revolution. Having begun as a "provincially" European event, it has by now become global. In its progress it reshapes the external conditions of our being — that is, the world we live in; it thereby reshapes the ways of our living; and finally — or perhaps first — it reshapes the modes of our thinking. In brief, what (…)

• Jonas: Seventeenth Century and After… (IX)
  19 de novembro de 2024, por Cardoso de Castro

  IX
  What has neither will nor wisdom and is indifferent to itself solicits no respect. Awe before nature’s mystery gives way to the disenchanted knowingness which grows with the success of the analysis of all things into their primitive conditions and factors. The powers that produce those things are powerless to impart a sanction to them: thus their knowledge imparts no regard for them. On the contrary, it removes whatever protection they may have enjoyed in a pre-scientific view. The (…)

• Jonas (PR:35-37) – ética do agir
  20 de setembro de 2020, por Cardoso de Castro

  JONAS, Hans. O Princípio Responsabilidade. Ensaio de uma ética para a civilização tecnológica. Tr. Marijane Lisboa & Luiz Barros Montez. Editora: PUC-Rio, 2006, p. 35-37
  Tomemos do passado aquelas características do agir humano significativas para uma comparação com o estado atual de coisas.
  1. Todo o trato com o mundo extra-humano, isto é, todo o domínio da techne (habilidade) era — à exceção da medicina — eticamente neutro, considerando-se tanto o objeto quanto o sujeito de tal (…)

• Jonas: Seventeenth Century and After… (IV)
  19 de novembro de 2024, por Cardoso de Castro

  IV
  The new cosmology called for a new physics but did not provide one itself. It offered a new image of the universe but no explanation of it. It showed, by an ingenious combination of hypothesis, observation, and mathematical construction, how the macrocosmos "looks" and what motions its bodies describe, but not why they do so — i.e., what causes operate in that universe. The major structures of the world system had decisively changed, but nothing in the Copernican system as such, or in (…)

• Jonas: Seventeenth Century and After… (X)
  19 de novembro de 2024, por Cardoso de Castro

  X
  It is a common misconception that the evolutions of modern science and modern technology went hand in hand. The truth is that the great, theoretical breakthrough to modern science occurred in the seventeenth century, while the breakthrough of mature science into technology, and thereby the rise of modern, science-infused technology itself, happened in the nineteenth century. What happened in between?
  The question involves the impact which science may have had on technology or vice (…)

• Jonas: Seventeenth Century and After… (XI)
  19 de novembro de 2024, por Cardoso de Castro

  XI
  Modern technology, in the sense which makes it different from all previous technology, was touched off by the industrial revolution, which itself was touched off by social and economic developments entirely outside the theoretical development we have been considering. We need not deal with them here, except for saying that they determined the first distinctive feature of modern technology, namely the use of artificially generated and processed natural forces for the powering of (…)

• Jonas (1980) – Technology and Responsibility…(VII)
  19 de novembro de 2024, por Cardoso de Castro

  Similar comparisons could be made with all the other historical forms of the ethics of contemporaneity and immediacy. The new order of human action requires a commensurate ethics of foresight and responsibility, which is as new as are the issues with which it has to deal. We have seen that these are the issues posed by the works of homo faber in the age of technology. But among those novel works we haven’t mentioned yet the potentially most ominous class. We have considered techne only as (…)

• Jonas (1980) – Technology and Responsibility…(I)
  19 de novembro de 2024, por Cardoso de Castro

  The novel powers I have in mind are, of course, those of modern technology. My first point, accordingly, is to ask how this technology affects the nature of our acting, in what ways it makes acting under its dominion different from what it has been through the ages. Since throughout those ages man was never without technology, the question involves the human difference of modern from previous technology. Let us start with an ancient voice on man’s powers and deeds which in an archetypal (…)

• Jonas: Seventeenth Century and After… (XII)
  19 de novembro de 2024, por Cardoso de Castro

  XII
  There may be in the offing another, still deeper-reaching, feat of the technological revolution. When we check what sciences have successively contributed to it — mechanics, chemistry, electronics, and, just beginning, nuclear physics — we notice the absence of one great branch of natural science: biology. Are we, perhaps, on the verge of another — conceivably the last — stage of that revolution, based on biological knowledge and wielding an engineering art which, this time, has man (…)

• Jonas (1980) – Technology and Responsibility…(V)
  19 de novembro de 2024, por Cardoso de Castro

  Returning to strictly intra-human considerations, there is another ethical aspect to the growth of techne as a pursuit beyond the pragmatically limited terms of former times. Then, so we found, techne was a measured tribute to necessity, not the road to mankind’s chosen goal — a means with a finite measure of adequacy to well-defined proximate ends. Now, techne in the form of modern technology has turned into an infinite forward-thrust of the race, its most significant enterprise, in whose (…)

• Jonas (Arendt:89-91) – natalidade e mortalidade
  16 de maio de 2024, por Cardoso de Castro

  destaque
  O nascimento (Gebürtlichkeit) é, juntamente com a morte (Sterblichkeit), a categoria que define a existência humana para Hannah Arendt ou, em suas palavras, a "natalidade" (Natalität) que contrabalança a "mortalidade" (Mortalität). Sejamos claros. Com "natalidade", Hannah Arendt não está apenas cunhando uma nova palavra, ela está, na verdade, introduzindo uma nova categoria na doutrina filosófica do homem. Até agora, a morte tem estado no centro da reflexão, e a meditatio mortis, (…)

• Jonas (1980) – Technology and Responsibility…(VI)
  19 de novembro de 2024, por Cardoso de Castro

  Kant’s categorical imperative said: "Act so that you can will that the maxim of your action be made the principle of a universal law." The "can" here invoked is that of reason and its consistency with itself: Given the existence of a community of human agents (acting rational beings), the action must be such that it can without self-contradiction be imagined as a general practice of that community. Mark that the basic reflection of morals here is not itself a moral but a logical one: The "I (…)

• Jonas (1980) – Technology and Responsibility…(IX)
  19 de novembro de 2024, por Cardoso de Castro

  And here is where I get stuck, and where we all get stuck. For the very same movement which put us in possession of the powers that have now to be regulated by norms — the movement of modern knowledge called science — has by a necessary complementarity eroded the foundations from which norms could be derived; it has destroyed the very idea of norm as such. Not, fortunately, the feeling for norm and even for particular norms. But this feeling becomes uncertain of itself when contradicted by (…)

• Jonas (1980) – Technology and Responsibility…(IV)
  19 de novembro de 2024, por Cardoso de Castro

  All this has decisively changed. Modern technology has introduced actions of such novel scale, objects, and consequences that the framework of former ethics can no longer contain them. The Antigone chorus on the demotes, the wondrous power, of man would have to read differently now; and its admonition to the individual to honor the laws of the land would no longer be enough. To be sure, the old prescriptions of the "neighbor" ethics — of justice, charity, honesty, and so on — still hold in (…)

• Jonas (1980) – Technology and Responsibility…(III)
  19 de novembro de 2024, por Cardoso de Castro

  It follows that the knowledge that is required — besides the moral will — to assure the morality of action, fitted these limited terms: it was not the knowledge of the scientist or the expert, but knowledge of a kind readily available to all men of good will. Kant went so far as to say that "human reason can, in matters of morality, be easily brought to a high degree of accuracy and completeness even in the most ordinary intelligence" ; that "there is no need of science or philosophy for (…)

• Jonas: Seventeenth Century and After… (VI)
  19 de novembro de 2024, por Cardoso de Castro

  VI
  It only remains to draw one last inference so as to have this account of the conceptual revolution terminate in a full-fledged mechanics of nature. To use abridged labels, it means completing the Galilean with the Newtonian record. There recurred in our account one term which is obviously crucial but is not a geometrical term and not resolvable into purely geometrical, i.e., space-time, terms; the concept of "force." It lurks in the concepts of both acceleration and inertia. We may (…)

• Jonas (1980) – Technology and Responsibility…(II)
  19 de novembro de 2024, por Cardoso de Castro

  Let us extract from the preceding those characteristics of human action which are relevant for a comparison with the state of things today.
  1. All dealing with the non-human world, i.e., the whole realm of techne (with the exception of medicine), was ethically neutral - in respect both of the object and the subject of such action: in respect of the object, because it impinged but little on the self-sustaining nature of things and thus raised no question of permanent injury to the integrity (…)

• Jonas (2006) – características da ética
  19 de novembro de 2024, por Cardoso de Castro

  Tomemos do passado aquelas características do agir humano significativas para uma comparação com o estado atual de coisas.
  1. Todo o trato com o mundo extra-humano, isto é, todo o domínio da techne (habilidade) era — à exceção da medicina — eticamente neutro, considerando-se tanto o objeto quanto o sujeito de tal agir: do ponto de vista do objeto, porque a arte só afetava superficialmente a natureza das coisas, que se preservava como tal, de modo que não se colocava em absoluto a questão (…)

• Jonas: Seventeenth Century and After… (V)
  19 de novembro de 2024, por Cardoso de Castro

  V
  All this is far from obvious. In fact, all appearances are on the side of the opposite, Aristotelian view. In our common experience, bodies do come to rest when the force propelling them ceases to act: the wagon does stop moving when no longer pulled or pushed; and the pulling or pushing, when done by us, is felt to produce the motion from moment to moment. Nor is there anything obvious about a circular motion not being a simple, unitary act. The Galilean revolution has this in common (…)

• Jonas: Seventeenth Century and After… (II)
  19 de novembro de 2024, por Cardoso de Castro

  II
  My contention here is, to repeat it once more, that the theoretical beginnings - what we may call the ontological breakthrough occurring at the onset of the modern age and laying the foundations on which the edifice of modern science was reared - was the all important event. To understand this event historically, we do well to turn our minds back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was a time not only pregnant with change but also conscious of it, with a will for it, and with (…)