Filozoficzno-religijne podstawy odpowiedzialności za życie. Propozycja Hansa Jonasa

Abstract

Responsibility for the sake of responsibility would relate to the purely formal aspect of man’s existence. To avoid formalism, the ethics of responsibility should, as Jonas puts it, be the ethics of care for life and carry more intense reference to metaphysical and anthropological arguments and ultimately to theonomy of the human world. Accepting that autonomy of world’s existence is in fact theonomic or penetrated by participant theonomy, we obtain a definite illumination of truth about man’s responsibility for life. Such truth would comply with the idea of natural law which in its transcendental dimension is the fullest expression of God’s relation to the rational order of the world and particularly to rational and personal nature of man. Realising that the human world is willed by God for the world itself, man, who is placed in the personal relation to God, will accept this truth as a norm for his rational principle of action. The ultimate foundation of responsibility for life in the world is the relation of man to the Creator, to the call which God constantly addresses to the human mind and freedom. Applying philosophy, as Jonas does, the responsibility for life cannot be a purely formal imperative, it should rather stem from the personal relation where the practice of responding to good and appealing to the other becomes the condition of being a person. Jonas rightly shows the paradigmatic model of the parent and the statesman’s responsibility, yet at the same time he does not distinctly indicate the personalistic foundations of ethics of responsibility for life. Personal responsibility is not only the paradigm of universal responsibility but its essence and the proper meaning. It flows directly from the idea of vocation addressed to man as a rational and free being capable of personal reply to the good he recognises.