DR. STRANGELOVE or: HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB, Stanley Kubrick, 1963
Hans Jonas’ Ethics of Technology and Stanley Kubrick’s, Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
In his other masterpiece, (click for a review) The Phenomenon of Life, Jonas writes: ‘through the continuity of mind with organism and of organism with nature, ethics becomes part of the philosophy of nature’. The view Jonas advocates is that nature – the sum total of what-is – is not only in the sense of physically existing, but also inextricably is in an ethical form, as the ontological source of value. Again, he says: ‘ethics must be based on ontology, which is to say that the law of human behaviour must be derived from the nature of the whole’. In this way, Jonas’ thought can be understood as taking up the ethical question which Heidegger was so temperamentally unsuited to tackle
In his other masterpiece, (click for a review) The Phenomenon of Life, Jonas writes: ‘through the continuity of mind with organism and of organism with nature, ethics becomes part of the philosophy of nature’. The view Jonas advocates is that nature – the sum total of what-is – is not only in the sense of physically existing, but also inextricably is in an ethical form, as the ontological source of value. Again, he says: ‘ethics must be based on ontology, which is to say that the law of human behaviour must be derived from the nature of the whole’. In this way, Jonas’ thought can be understood as taking up the ethical question which Heidegger was so temperamentally unsuited to tackle
Dr. Strangelove is quite possibly the blackest of black comedies. After all, what could possibly provide a less comic situation than the threat of nuclear war and the destruction of the planet? But somehow, Stanley Kubrick manages to wring hilarity from the absurdity of almost every scene in the film. This makes providing a philosophical commentary for such a comedy somewhat questionable, as nothing is more likely to kill laughter than a serious discussion of ethics. But then again, Kubrick’s film trades on the aforementioned absurd flippancy with which nuclear arms are treated – and it seems to me as though this black setting for the comedy in fact brings some interesting philosophical themes to the fore.
The philosopher who I wish to discuss in this regard is Hans Jonas, a hugely under-read German-Jewish thinker. Jonas lived an extraordinary life in extraordinary times – born in 1903 in Mönchengladbach, North-West Germany, Jonas studied at Marburg University under Martin Heidegger in the 1920s. However, Jonas soon found himself faced with a life of persecution, and worse, under Nazism following Hitler’s rise to the Chancellery in 1933. Sensibly Jonas fled Germany for Israel, reportedly vowing to himself ‘never to return except as a soldier in a conquering army’. (1) The chance to fulfil this pledge came when the Allies went to war against Nazi Germany. Jonas consequently left Israel for England in 1940, joining the Jewish Infantry Brigade – a division of the British Army set up specifically for Jewish soldiers – a real-life Inglorious Basterds. As a well-educated man he was offered a role in military intelligence, which he refused, preferring to play his part on the front line when the Nazi regime fell. By the end of the war Jonas had seen combat in Italy and Germany, and he subsequently attempted to get back in contact with his mother, only to tragically discover that she had been murdered by the Nazis in Auschwitz. Jonas felt that he could not forgive Germany, and emigrated for good. He spent the rest of his long life firstly as a Zionist, fighting in Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, and then in New York, where he became a professor at the New School for Social Research and died in 1993, aged 89. (2)
Jonas’ work was deeply influenced by his dramatic biography – his philosophy owes equal debt to Heidegger (whom he publically denounced for Nazi complicity) and Jewish theology, but also to the warring ideologies of capitalism and Soviet-communism which had after the war torn Germany in two. The influence of the Cold War – the war of economic and technological competition depicted in Dr. Strangelove– is felt in Jonas’ great book The Imperative of Responsibility. In this work Jonas puts forth the hypothesis that no previous Western morality, secular or religious, could now provide a comprehensive guide for ethical action in the age of nuclear warfare and environmental crises. He says: ‘my contention [is] that with certain developments of our powers the nature of human action has changed, and, since ethics is concerned with action, it should follow that the changed nature of human action calls for a change in ethics as well’. (3) We can see here the combined influences of Germanic philosophical scope with analytic clarity which marks Jonas’ philosophy as distinctive. Certainly, the aim of his work is not a modest one, so the focus here will be on one or two points which may illuminate some of the situations and events portrayed in Dr. Strangelove.
Firstly is the issue of what Jonas means by the ‘changed nature of human action’. The new capacities which Jonas has in mind are, of course, technological. Modern humanity has a degree of unprecedented power which our forebears, even of one hundred years ago, could never have imagined. Following from this, Jonas argues that all previous ethical systems were based primarily on a more modest picture of relations between humans – the world-as-a-whole was something which figured into ethical considerations only as an afterthought, simply because it was so vast that humanity could scarcely affect it. However, the Second World War signified a fundamental shift – whereas World War I was still fought traditionally by men against men, World War II concluded with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The ethical relation between humanity and the earth had by then essentially altered, as we acquired the power – and demonstrated the will – to destroy both it and ourselves en masse. In light of this, Jonas argues that the common basis of traditional ethical systems is too limited in scope, too anthropocentric, to deal with this new power, and the net of ethical consideration must therefore be cast far wider to cover this moral gap left by weapons of mass destruction. Jonas calls for the imperative of ethical responsibility – not just to humanity, but to all life on earth – which he delivers most powerfully in ‘The Outcry of Mute Things’. He says: ‘[i]t was once religion which threatened us with a last judgement at the end of days. It is now our tortured planet which predicts the arrival of such a day [...]. The latest revelation [...] is the outcry of mute things themselves that we must heed by curbing our powers over creation, lest we perish together on a wasteland of what was creation’. (4)
The obvious moral force of this imperative for the technological age is precisely what the characters in Dr. Strangelove flagrantly disregard. In fact, Kubrick’s film highlights Jonas’ central point in comic style – humans are portrayed as simply too irresponsible to be allowed to wield such enormous power, and the technology supporting the chain of command as too unreliable to deliver such catastrophic orders. The only characters who seem to fully grasp the gravity of the situation are the repressed ex-Nazi and Presidential adviser Dr. Strangelove, née Merkwürdigliebe (played with relish by Peter Sellers), and the hapless Group Captain Lionel Mandrake (Sellers, again). By contrast, those who wield actual power are shown to be either gung-ho imbeciles like General Buck Turgidson (George C. Scott) and Major T. J. “King” Kong (Slim Pickens), paranoiacs such as Brigadier General Jack. D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden), or simply the bickering married-couple of U.S. President Merkin Muffley (Sellers, once more) and Soviet Premier Dmitri Kisov. Perhaps the best example of the film’s nightmarish situation heightened by black humour is the iconic climactic scene in which Major Kong jumps on the nuclear bomb to facilitate its drop from the plane – falling with it down to earth, Kong rides the shell rodeo-style to the earth’s imminent destruction. Little did Kubrick know, in forty years the scene would perfectly capture the worrying predicament of real-life cowboy George W. Bush sat in the White House with the nuclear codes in one hand, and in the other a foreign policy not entirely unlike that of Kubrick’s military buffoons.
Dr. Strangelove presents us with another a situation which flies in the face of one more of Jonas’ maxims: ‘[a]ct so that the effects of your action are not destructive of the future possibility of genuine human life’. (5) .. read more:
