Fritz Jahrs Bioethical Imperative Its origin point and influence

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Until a few years ago, the American biochemist Van Rensselaer Potter (1911-2001) was generally acknowledged as the first person to have used the term" bioethics". In 1997, however, Rolf Löther mentioned the name of Fritz Jahr, whom Löther credited for ...

Biogeosystem Technique, 2017

The theory of evolution of complex and comprising of human systems and algorithm for its constructing are the synthesis of evolutionary epistemology, philosophical anthropology and concrete scientific empirical basis in modern (transdisciplinary) science. «Trans-disciplinary» in the context is interpreted as a completely new epistemological situation, which is fraught with the initiation of a civilizational crisis. Philosophy and ideology of technogenic civilization is based on the possibility of unambiguous demarcation of public value and descriptive scientific discourses (1), and the object and subject of the cognitive process (2). Both of these attributes are no longer valid. For mass, everyday consciousness and institutional philosophical tradition it is intuitively obvious that having the ability to control the evolutionary process, Homo sapiens came close to the borders of their own biological and cultural identity. The spontaneous coevolutionary process of interaction between the «subject» (rational living organisms) and the «object» (material world), is the teleological trend of the movement towards the complete rationalization of the World as It Is, its merger with the World of Due. The stratification of the global evolutionary process into selective and semantic (teleological) coevolutionary and therefore ontologically inseparable components follows. With the entry of anthropogenic civilization into the stage of the information society, firsty, the post-academic phase of the historical evolution of scientific rationality began, the attributes of which are the specific methodology of scientific knowledge, scientific ethos and ontology. Bioethics as a phenomenon of intellectual culture represents a natural philosophical core of modern postacademic (human-dimensional) science, in which the ethical neutrality of scientific theory principle is inapplicable, and elements of public-axiological and scientific-descriptive discourses are integrated into a single logic construction. As result, hermeneutics precedes epistemology not only methodologically, but also meaningfully, and natural philosophy is regaining the status of the backbone of the theory of evolution -in an explicit form.

In 1926, Fritz Jahr described bio-ethics (German: bio-ethik) as “the assumption of moral obligations not only towards humans, but towards all forms of life.” Jahr summarized his philosophy by declaring, “Respect every living being on principle as an end in itself and treat it, if possible, as such!.” Bioethics was thus originally an ethical system concerned with the “problems of interference with other living beings… and generally everything related to the balance of the ecosystem” according to the 1978 Encyclopedia of Bioethics. This definition was predicated on the work of Fritz Jahr, Menico Torchio, and Van Rensselaer Potter.

As we know, it was Nietzsche’s project to reconceptualize Kant’s “judgment.” His choice of force managed to elude the problem of units of quantity, opting instead for an early dynamics. Nietzsche’s dynamics introduced interpretation, accommodation, and domination into the biological model of his time, emphasizing structures of obedience and command in order to preserve the hierarchy intrinsic to value judgments. This simply means that certain organizations of cells, tissues, even living beings “work” better for their growth and flourishing than do others. The problem we noted of a common currency is temporarily suspended with the epochē on quantity—displacing for heuristic ends the primacy of quantity and its metaphysical recourse to units of measure. As a number of Husserl’s commentators have asked (Paul Ricoeur, among them): What are we to make of conscious life when we remove the phenomenological brackets? Could not a similar question be posed of the neuro-phenomenology flowing simultaneously out of Gilbert Simondon and Maurice Merleau-Ponty? To be sure. But what we would have, upon removing the brackets, simply breaks into the objects of psychology and biology, or again, comes down to human experience as the object of multiple sciences or regional ontologies. Gilbert Simondon, like Andrieu and others since the publication of his work in the 1960s, attempted to demonstrate the possibility of a monism based on energetic interactions. His work resists summary because of its complexity and the plethora of new concepts he created. Some of these were the direct result of advances in chemistry and geophysics. The formation of crystalline structures provided one image of what he called “systems of potentials,” on the basis of which elementary schemas constitute “meta-stable fields.” The meta-stable field comes from the dynamics of liquids but should not be restricted to that domain. It could well be argued that the Nietzschean contribution to a psycho-physics lies in its similar refusal of statics and individual substances. And this strikingly anticipates the structural coupling and dynamic co-determination of organism and Urwelt in Thompson and von Uexküll. Without denying that beings “individuate” in transitional and ongoing ways, Nietzsche strove to keep his forces within a framework wherein becoming was not opposed to being. He might have found a real interest in the innovations of Simondon, Andrieu, Thompson, and Varella. That does not mean that we can, or should, speak poetically of qualities, as though no difficulties arose in the absence of some theory of energy or energetics. But most of these theories shared the fate of socio-political environments through whose lens they were read and adjusted to the ideals of a given cultural politics. Those readings are, of course, as hazardous as Hans Driesch’s 1930’s vitalism in which the concept of organic totality and a governing principle slid deplorably into an aestheticized, politicized Führerprinzip. Such slippages may be unavoidable and an entire history of 19th and early 20th century misappropriations of vitalism and Lebensphilosophie could be written. Nevertheless, the imperative of bridging body-world and mind-body dualisms must be taken up by a biology in continuous dialogue with psychology and, today, with neuro-philosophy. I have argued throughout that that was the direction in which Husserl’s biology as the universal ontology was moving.

Jahr - European journal of bioethics, 2017

In 1926 Fritz Jahr, Protestant pastor and German pedagogue, was the first, as far as we know, to use the term “bioethics”, a term that is a part of today’s common lexicon1. However, it is most surprisingly, the peculiar or particularly widespread meaning that this term acquires in Jahr’s article. “Bioethics”, in Jahr’s opinion, is the branch of ethics that states the existence of “ethical responsibilities not only towards human beings but towards all living creatures.”2 To ground the legitimacy of such a principle, Jahr refers to modern psychology, which was at his time physiology-based and attributed a “soul” (Seele, in German) to every living being3. It is clear from the context that the word Seele (the German equivalent of the Greek word psyché), or “psyche” or “soul”, has here no metaphysical or theological sense, but it should be understood as “inner life”, which can be scientifically measured in any living creature, or as “consciousness” in a broad sense. However, Jahr doesn’t...