Hans Jonas e a diferença antropológica : uma análise da biologia filosófica

Abstract

This thesis offers an original interpretation of Hans Jonas’ philosophical biology. Initially we will show that jonasian philosophy is marked by the anthropological difference, from which Jonas equates the horizon of modern philosophy as it inherits from Husserl and Heidegger. Nonetheless, his thinking comes quite close to the longstanding movement of Philosophical Anthropology, although it is independent from that movement. Here philosophy is called to consider, beside the fundamental question of being as such, the problem of the being who tries to understand being as a whole. Within this bias of German philosophy, Jonas finds its own originality and inflection to consider man as having privileged access to being as such by just being part of that whole while living creature capable of knowing life. In this sense, we will see that the method of Jonas’ philosophy is marked by anthropological difference in considering both, the psychic dimension, fundamental trait of human experience, set aside on the account of natural science, and the rest of life from the point of view of human measure – without that being confused with a naive anthropomorphism. Once demonstrated this kind of critical anthropomorfism, we will follow how the anthropological difference is evident in the existential-dialectical reading of the organic freedom, in their advance throughout all their stages. This analysis will give us a conception of organic existence as characterized by a dialectical movement, which in its synthetic moment is not mere self-preservation, but self-transcendence, and that means, autonomous self-production of the living form opposite to the external environment, including also possible transcendence of the actual form itself (evolution), which, although only teleologically oriented iin terms of the individual, finds its ultimate aim of developing in the anthropos itself. As a final stage and being the ultimate expression of the process, the anthropological difference reveals itself not only as a key to reading the living world, but ultimate difference in being as whole – not as an uprooted spiritual being, but still so as a transanimal. We will see that Jonas thinks of anthropological difference as even transhistorical essence in history, marked by the symbolic faculty of the homo pictor, this figure of eidetic freedom of man, which takes place in a potential escalation ranging from building tools, apparently useless works of art, until find the strength of rational concept and human responsibility. Finally, we wil find that to be just the “pinnacle of being”, the anthropological difference becomes an ethical difference, giving man the place of guardian of being, which confers to him the responsibility for the survival of mankind and the biosphere – an ethical humanism that does not surrenders itself whatsoever to a naive ethical anthropocentrism, but covers in his own account the value of nature as a whole, and also intends to be an existential and ethical response to the problem of nihilism as such.