ARTICLE Reading Heidegger against the Grain: Hans Jonas on Existentialism, Gnosticism, and Modern Science Daniel M. Herskowitz* Wolfson College, University of Oxford *Corresponding author. E-mail: Daniel.herskowitz@wolfson.ox.ac.uk (Received 1 August 2020; revised 23 November 2020; accepted 5 January 2021) This article argues that the link Hans Jonas drew between Martin Heidegger’s philosophy and Gnosticism cannot be properly understood without taking into consideration his philosophical interpretation of modern science. It claims that Jonas saw Heideggerian existentialism not as a modern instantiation of Gnosticism but as a specific experiential reaction to the new cosmo- logical outlook that emerged from the seventeenth-century scientific revolution, which negated the conceptual world that made Gnosticism possible. Jonas’s interpretation is “against the grain”: by claiming that Heidegger’s thought is a product of the reduction of nature to measur- able, manipulable, and calculable extension governing the modern scientific mind, Jonas attrib- uted to Heidegger the very flaws Heidegger critiqued in others. It is further claimed that Jonas’s original contribution to Heidegger’s reception history is not in proposing the link to Gnosticism but in reading him as the philosophical outcome of the instrumental reasoning of modern science. Overcoming “Gnosticism” One of the surprising features of twentieth-century European intellectual history is the reappearance of “Gnosticism” as an operative category for discussing the pre- dicament of modern secularity and the perception of the world as devoid of spir- itual meaning. 1 Few, it seems, contributed more to the possibility of this conceptual connection than Hans Jonas. During the 1920s Jonas wrote a groundbreaking dis- sertation on Gnosticism—the blanket term referring to a collection of ancient Mediterranean sects emphasizing the radical distinction between a transcendent God and the fallen world and the secret knowledge offering salvation from the world, who were denounced as heretical by the early Christian church—under the supervision of Martin Heidegger (and Rudolf Bultmann) in the University of Marburg, partially published in 1930 as Der Begriff der Gnosis. 2 In 1934 he © The Author(s) 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press 1 Some of the noteworthy figures involved in this debate were Hans Blumenberg, Odo Marquard, Karl Löwith, Gershom Scholem, Eric Voegelin, Jacob Taubes, and Susan Taubes. Willem Styfhals, No Spiritual Investment in the World: Gnosticism and Postwar German Philosophy (Ithaca, 2019). 2 On Jonas’s time in Marburg and his relation to Heidegger see Hans Jonas, Erinnerungen, ed. Christian Wiese (Frankfurt am Main, 2003), 108–28; Christian Wiese, The Life and Thought of Hans Jonas: Jewish Modern Intellectual History (2021), 1–24 doi:10.1017/S147924432100010X use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S147924432100010X Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Oxford Union Society, on 15 Mar 2021 at 09:57:27, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of