Journal of Philosophy, Inc.

Review
Author(s): John W. Yolton
Review by: John W. Yolton
Source: The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 64, No. 8 (Apr. 27, 1967), pp. 254-258
Published by: Journal of Philosophy, Inc.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2024495
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254 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY

BOOK REVIEWS
The Phenomenon of Life: Towards a Philosophical Biology. HANS
New York: Harper &Row, 1966. x, 303 p. $6.00.
JONAS.

Philosophers of science today tend to eschew the examination of tra-

ditional problems of philosophy in the light of scientific theory and
data. They have been put off by the older attempts (e.g., by Edding-
ton, Jeans, Bergson) to extract philosophical conclusions from sci-
ence. The logic of the sciences has become (at least in the Anglo-
Saxon world) the philosophy of science. This limitation is as true for
the philosopher's attitude toward psychology and biology (cf. Wood-
ger's technical analyses of biology) as it is toward the physical sci-
ences. It is difficult to see what the philosopher can do in the face of
physical theories about the universe; it is the scientists themselves
who have led the way back to cosmology. Physical theory did seem to
Russell and Broad to have relevance, even support for philosophical
claims about the nature of the world, but today's philosophers are
hardly interested in those ontological theories.
With recent philosophers becoming so concerned with action and
the person, it might be expected that the life sciences, especially biol-
ogy, would be seen to be relevant. The phenomenological influx into
the Anglo-Saxon world has brought with it (despite much bad jargon)
some recognition of the relevance of science to philosophy, particu-
larly with its emphasis upon the role of the body in awareness and
acting. Phenomenological descriptions have in some cases proved
helpful, but they cannot go far without a close reliance upon scien-
tific data. The effectiveness of Merleau-Ponty's analyses of perception
and action is a function of his detailed knowledge of neurophysiology
and psychopathology. Philosophy as a rigorous science withers on the
phenomenological vine when not invigorated with good doses of rel-
evant scientific data. As examples of the kind of worth-while influ-
ence I have in mind the following could be cited: Albert Burloud's
De la Psychologie a' la philosophie and his Psychologie de la sensi-
bilite; F. J. J. Buytendijk's Traite de la psychologie de l'animale; in
a more general way, Adolf Portmann's New Paths in Biology; and
the recent collection edited by J. R. Platt, New Views of the Nature
of Man.
Professor Jonas tells us that the collection of his essays (written be-
tween 1951 and 1965), expanded and related in The Phenomenon of
Life, "offers an 'existential' interpretation of biological facts" (ix). If
'biological facts' is taken to mean facts uncovered by the experimen-
tal and theoretical work of biologists, Jonas's claim is false; he does

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 BOOK REVIEWS 255

not present or refer to, let alone interpret, that sort of biological fact.
He does show a general knowledge of evolutionary theory and of Dar-
win's work in particular, he does devote two pages to some remarks
about the DNA molecule, but these are apparently not the sort of
facts he claims to interpret. I suspect he is using the term 'biology' in
its generic sense of having to do with life. The facts he interprets,
then, are life facts: e.g., living organisms have an environment differ-
ent from themselves (102). Hence his title, rather than the subtitle,
gives an indication of what the book is about. The title is also very
close to that of one of Teilhard de Chardin's books-consciously so, I
would think, since what Jonas does is similar in approach to what
Teilhard does. Both are engaged in speculative philosophy set against
the background of man's biological history and the pre-history of life
as a form of being. The result in Jonas's hands is more acceptable and
significant than in Teilhard's. But the reader will not find here a phi-
losophy of man or of life being developed in close association with the
science of biology, despite references Jonas makes in his Foreword to
scientific biology and to "A new reading of the biological record" (ix).
An important point stressed in several of these essays is the need to
take account of the "dimension of inwardness that belongs to life"
(ix). Jonas wants to say that all life has this inwardness, no matter
where on the evolutionary scale it is. That is a doubtful and, as I will
argue, an unsupported claim. The importance I see in the claim prop-
erly restricted to human life is in its reminder that awareness, feeling,
emotion cannot be analyzed only (if at all) in physical terms. An anal-
ysis of seeing, for example, is complete only when we succeed in un-
derstanding seeing as an experience of being visually aware. Jonas is
correct in saying that scientific biology is "by its rules confined to the
physical, outward facts" (ix), as the science of mind may be said to be
confined to neurophysiology or to specific sets of behavior. An anal-
ysis of knowing, of thinking and perceiving, of action and the person,
can and should make use of the analyses of science, but one funda-
mental bit of information we all have about these matters comes from
our own experience. "The evidence we find in ourselves is an integral
part of the evidence concerning life which experience puts at our dis-
posal" (91).
Jonas uses some of this personal knowledge arising from our own
experience in his description of seeing, hearing, and other modes of
sensing (135-152). He also uses his own experiencing as a way of recti-
fying Hume's and Kant's accounts of causality (21-33). "The experi-
ence of living force, one's own namely, in the acting body, is the ex-
periential basis for the abstractions of the general concepts of action

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256 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY

and causation; and the 'schematism' of directed bodily movement,

not of neutrally receptive intuition, mediates between the formality
of the understanding and the dynamics of the real" (22-23). A shorter
way with the same point is to say "Force indeed is not a datum, but an
'actum' humanly present in effort" (25). Jonas overlooks what I see as
Kant's clear recognition of agent causality, a causality of the person
in action, but he is right to object against Kant's category sense of
cause, as against Hume, that "the primary aspect of causality is not
regular connection, not even necessary connection, but force and in-
fluence; ... these are themselves original contents of experience" aris-
ing from "our body exerting itself in action" (33). Related to this
proper reminder about force and bodily action as the source of the
idea of cause are a recognition of the role of tactuomuscular experi-
ences in our knowledge of the physical world and the recognition of
the way in which self-awareness is bound up with object-awareness
(147-148).
To understand human experience we must pay attention to our
own acts of experiencing. Jonas wants to generalize this insight into
"life can be known only by life" (91) or "The observer of life must be
prepared by life" (82). Being alive, he claims, has some similarity
throughout the biological scale. "Where, then, throughout the enor-
mous extent of this series can we draw with reason a line with the
'nothing' of inwardness on its far side and the incipient 'one' of it on
the near side? Where else than at the beginning of life can the begin-
ning of inwardness be placed?" (58). Can any meaning be given to
'inwardness' applied in this wholesale way, especially at the begin-
ning of life? Even the application to other animals of an inwardness
like our own is precarious. How, for example, does Jonas know that
birds perceive "in the scarecrow ... a likeness to ... a human figure"?
(166). What are the grounds for saying an animal "knows the pang of
hunger, the agony of fear, the anguished strain of -flight"? (105). It
seems to be true in our own case that "to experience the distantly per-
ceived as a goal, and to keep its goal quality ,alive. . . desire is re-
quired" (101), but what reasons do we have for saying the goal-di-
rected animal experiences the goal as a goal? An intimate knowledge
of the physical structures of various forms of life may give us some
grounds for conjecturing about the experiences some animal may
have, but in the examples I have cited nothing but behavior and
anthropomorphism are at work. In a penetrating discussion of cyn-
bernetics as it has been used as a model for thought, Jonas comments
that "There is a strong and, it seems, almost irresistible tendency in
the human mind to interpret human functions in terms of the arti-

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 BOOK REVIESWS 257

facts that take their place" (110). Jonas himself illustrates the irresisti-
ble tendency of a number of speculative philosophers of life (Bergson,
Whitehead) to interpret all life in human terms. That interpretation
is not (as Jonas's note on anthropomorphism suggests, pp. 33-37)
merely to give a teleological explanation to living creatures: it con-
sists in attributing the modes of inwardness we know from our own
experience to all other life forms. The exclusion of teleology by sci-
ence "is not an inductive result but an a priori prohibition" (34).
Similarly, though Jonas fails to admit this, the inclusion of teleology
and inwardness for all forms of life is not a factual claim but a meta-
physical prejudice.
That prejudice is important for Jonas, since he needs it in order to
predicate freedom as a fundamental trait of all life. Any form of life
is, Jonas claims, a system of matter that is a unity of parts, that unity
being self-imposed, self-sustained, and for the sake of itself (79). The
materials needed by any particular living individual in order to live
are distinct from that individual, even though the individual is de-
pendent upon them. Jonas sees a self-sustaining being here because,
although the materials are essential to the living individual, the indi-
vidual is not bound to any one particular bit of matter: it retains its
identity throughout the uses of its environment. In the absence of an
analysis of 'freedom' at any level of life, we are hard pressed to give
sense to 'freedom' at all levels. Besides freedom, Jonas insists that self-
transcendence is meaningfully applied throughout the evolutionary
scale: the organism-environment distinction shows that every life
form exemplifies self-transcendence in that it entertains "a horizon,
or horizons, beyond its point-identity" (85). The "quality of felt self-
hood" (84) may be faint in some instances, but the term 'self' is "un-
avoidable in any description of the most elementary instances of life"
(82). It is unavoidable only if you begin with Jonas's metaphysical
prejudice.
Metaphysical prejudices can be respectable if they do not masquer-
ade as fact; they can be useful if they extend our understanding in a
significant manner. One of their major weaknesses is their ambiguity;
the very ambiguity of a metaphysical concept constitutes its attrac-
tiveness, since it is the ambiguity that gives us a feeling of understand-
ing the concept and of thinking we see its application. 'Self' and 'free-
dom' in Jonas's use are good examples of ambiguously employed
metaphysical concepts. Jonas says that felt selfhood may be faint at
some levels of life. In his Introduction he frankly says, "obviously, all
consciously 'mental' connotations must at first be kept away" from
these concepts (3). If we extract the consciously mental content (note

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258 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY

his double ambiguity with the use of quotation marks around 'men-
tal') from 'self', 'freedom', 'feeling', what do we have left? I cannot
find that Jonas helps us to discover the meaning of these terms when
applied to early and simple forms of life, nor for that matter, to forms
of life more sophisticated than man's. I do not think this failure to
specify what it means to ascribe these terms to life can be excused by
the confessed preliminary nature of these essays (6). The philosophy
of life adumbrated here stands or falls on the meaning of these men-
tal-sounding terms.
These essays as a whole occasionally promise insights never quite
realized, they do here and there make incisive comments, and they are
marked throughout by imagination and breadth. Nevertheless, they
very infrequently go beyond repeated generalities. There is mention,
but no explanation, of the philosophy of organism and of mind. The
last three essays are thinly if at all related to the main theme, the es-
says on "Gnosticism, Existentialism, and Nihilism," "Heidegger and
Theology," and "Immortality and the Modern Temper." The Epi-
logue leaves the reader with some ill-defined notions about ontology
as the ground of ethics. A philosophy of mind, we are told, comprises
ethics. How or why it does is not indicated (282). The promise that we
may elicit from "the immanent direction of [life's] total evolution ...
a destination of man by whose terms the person, in the act of fulfilling
himself, would at the same time realize a concern of universal sub-
stance" (282) may be intriguing to some. I find the notion of a concern
of universal substance just as ambiguous in its total predication as
those inward concepts so fundamental to Jonas's reading of the "bio-
logical record." Even as a preliminary study, these essays are inade-
quate because they fail to specify what facts they are going to inter-
pret, what it means to say that interpretation is existential, what the
biological record is that is to be read, what criteria the author is using
for a satisfactory philosophy of life, and, most importantly, what
meaning we are to give to those terms which Jonas wants to apply to
life in all its forms.
I do not think these deficiencies can be repaired with Jonas's
method of speculative imagination. What is needed is a much closer
examination of all the relevant sciences, plus much more of the ana-
lytical scrutiny that Jonas does give to some of his topics. There is no
reason why we cannot come to a careful and rewarding philosophical
biology, one that will replace the very outmoded ones of the past,
one that will show philosophical analysis and metaphysics working
closely with science.
JOHN W. YOLTON
York University, Toronto

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