A historical transcendental at the heart of Jonas' research on Gnosticism
(2024) Hans Jonas: The Early Years — accepted/in-press
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- Why has Jonas' work on Gnosticism, GSG, received such a problematic reception from the history of religions as well as from philosophers? This article attempts to clear up a double misunderstanding: on the one hand, despite the mass of historical documents analyzed, Jonas was not only doing research in the history of religions or in the philosophy of religions in the 1930s, but was also laying the foundations of his philosophy of history. If his research was very informed on the historical level, it was in order to bring out the spirit of an era from its most manifest phenomena: in this case the sects and the gnostic religions. Thus the real scope of his research was more philosophical and historical than religious history. In order to establish this, we must return to his methodology presented in his methodological introduction to Gnosis und spätantiker Geist I. In the line of Heidegger, Jonas highlights a historical level (geschichtlich) as the spirit of an epoch that he qualifies as historical transcendental, which is characterized by a free and collective response to a given epoch. Producer and product of its epoch, this Dasein is the a priori at the foundation of the empirical attitudes and conditions, without determining it, the free will. Thus, at this transcendental level, the history of the spirit and the history of freedom coincide in reason and objectifying language. However, this notion of transcendental is double and Jonas will insist more and more on the fact that this historical transcendental (the condition of the Gnostic civilization, of the modern mood, of the technological civilization, etc.) distinguishes itself from an anhistorical transcendental (which he also calls the essence of man, i.e. his biological and worldly nature) which is its condition of possibility. It is about the concrete, material and biological conditions of the history and for the human history of a living body and an ambivalent freedom that exercises in the world. The political stake of the distinction between historical transcendental and anhistorical will be decisive, since it will be a question of conceiving freedom as thought and thought as freedom. Indeed, human history rests on a separation and a free decision (Entscheidung) which is opposed to the notion of destiny and more particularly to the destiny of the Heideggerian Being.
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Frogneux, N. (2024). A historical transcendental at the heart of Jonas’ research on Gnosticism. In Daniel Herkowitz (ed.), Hans Jonas: The Early Years (Routledge). Routledge. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/260265