Esistenza, evoluzione e ordine del mondo in Hans Jonas: questioni senza risposta?

This paper focuses on the text of a short but important conference held by Hans Jonas at ‘Columbia University’ (New York, 5 March, 1970). It seeks to reconstruct his view about some important questions, which might be defined ‘metaphysical’ from a specifically philosophical point of view, but which derive in fact from a deep confrontation with perspectives and solutions advanced by modern and contemporary physics as well as life sciences. Taking as his starting-point – or even as an indisputable datum, at least from Laplace, who is here his main polemical target – the central role of the scientific enterprise (also in its technological implications) and of a radically materialistic-mechanistic explanation of the world and its evolution, Jonas tries to show the inadequacy of this approach. His analysis refers to the distinctive picture of physical reality provided by recent, widely accepted models from thermodynamics, and especially from the controversial concept of entropy, and also to the distinctive epistemological status of biology. The biological side of contemporary science appears to transcend any mechanistic and deterministic perspective; according to Jonas, biology (or better a new ‘philosophy of biology’) should take into consideration other factors, including, for example, the principles of interest, of concern, of responsibility, and, in a word, of spiritual factors, since all of these aspects are decisive in order to clarify the boundaries and the exact components of our organic life. Within this comprehensive perspective on our humanity, we are clearly “questioning beings” and it thus becomes legitimate to raise again questions about God, its existence, its function within the evolution of the world and its order, while never forgetting that any question of this kind is (and must remain) an “unanswered question” – the object of (more or less risky) philosophical hypotheses, though certainly not of proofs