Sulla possibilità del futuro: Hans Jonas e Günther Anders

Abstract: On the Possibility of the Future: Günther Anders and Hans Jonas. This essay deals with the concept of the future in the thought of Hans Jonas and Günther Anders, two philosophers of the same age, with a similar education in many ways and forced to live the dramatic experience of exile. For both of them the dimension of the future has a strong existential declination supported by a precise ‘moral instance’; but there are significant differences between their elaborations. According to Jonas, the future is in the possibility of being (up to its negation in fact) and his ethics of responsibility is intended precisely to consolidate the possibility of the future and nurture the hope of the persistence of an acceptable condition for human beings. On the contrary, Anders does not speak to us of a possible future, but of the impossibility of the future, which is already denied by ongoing technological activity. The responsibility of human beings is the means by which they can bear the impossibility of the future, persisting in the present. Anders claims that the concept of hope is dangerous in itself: it encourages inaction and the risk of immorality