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PART ONE
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WORLD HISTORY
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INTRODUCTION
The Structure of World History
BY virtue of the extent and depth to which it has transformed human life, our age is of the most incisive significance. It requires the whole history of mankind to furnish us with standards by which to measure the meaning of what is happening at the present time.
A glance at the history of mankind leads us, however, into the mystery of our humanity. The fact that we possess a history at all, that history has made us what we are and that the duration of this history up to now has been comparatively short prompts us to ask: Where does it come from? Where does it lead? What does it mean?
Since the earliest times man has attempted to picture the whole to himself: first in mythical images (in theogonies and cosmogonies, in which man had his appointed place), then in the image of divine activity operating through the decisive events of world politics (the historical vision of the prophets), then as a process of revelation running through the whole course of history, from the creation of the world and the fall of man to the end of the world and the last judgement (St. Augustine).
The historical consciousness is fundamentally altered when it bases itself on empirical foundations and on these alone. The accounts of a natural genesis of civilisation, such as were devised everywhere, from China to the West, though still in fact legendary, were already empirical in intent. Today the real horizon has become immensely wider. Temporal limitationsâsuch, for example, as the Biblical belief in a world 6,000 years oldâhave been broken through. Something endless opens up into the past and into the future. Within it research adheres to historical remains, documents and monuments of the past.
Confronted by limitless multiplicity, this empirical conception of history must either restrict itself to the demonstration of single regularities and never ending descriptions of the manifold: the same happenings repeat themselves; the analogous recurs within the diverse; there are orders of power-politics in typical series of forms, and there are chaos and confusion; there are regular sequences of styles in the realm of the spirit, and there is levelling-down into that which endures without any regular pattern.
Or the endeavour is made to achieve a unified and integrating overall view of the history of mankind: the factual cycles of civilisation are seen in their development and declineâfirst in isolation and then in mutual interaction; the common element underlying the problems of meaning and mutual comprehensibility is apprehended and leads finally to the concept of a single meaningful pattern, in which all diversities have their appointed place (Hegel).1
Whoever turns to history involuntarily adopts one of these universal viewpoints, which reduce the whole of history to a unity. These viewpoints may be accepted uncritically, may even remain unconscious and therefore unquestioned. In the modes of historical thought they are usually taken as self-evident presuppositions.
Thus in the nineteenth century world history was regarded as that which, after its preliminary stages in Egypt and Mesopotamia, really began in Greece and Palestine and led up to ourselves. Everything else came under the heading of ethnology and lay outside the province of history proper. World history was the history of the West (Ranke).
As against this view nineteenth-century positivism aimed at according equal rights to all men. Where there are men there is history. World history embraces, in time and space, the entire globe. It is arranged geographically on the basis of its distribution in space (Helmolt). It took place everywhere on earth. Battles between negroes in the Sudan were on the same historical plane as Marathon and Salamisâor were even, by virtue of the greater numbers involved, of superior importance.
Hierarchy and structure seemed once more to be perceptible in history as a result of the conception of integral cultures.2 From the undifferentiated mass of mere primitive existence, culturesâso it was thoughtâdevelop like organisms, as independent life-forms having a beginning and an end, being of no concern to one another but capable of meeting and interfering with each other. Spengler recognises eight such historical organisms, Toynbee twenty-one. Spengler ascribes to them a life-span of one thousand years, Toynbee an indefinite one. Spengler sees the necessity for a mysterious total process to be accomplished by any given culture-organism: a metamorphosis governed by natural laws which he claims to perceive morphologically, from analogies between the phases of the various organisms. In his physiognomic conception everything assumes the character of a symbol. Toynbee under-takes a multiple causal analysis from sociological points of view. Beyond that he finds room for the free decisions of individuals, but in such a way that, in his view too, the whole appears in the guise of a currently necessary process. Both, therefore, make predictions for the future on the basis of their overall conceptions.3
In our time, apart from Spengler and Toynbee, Alfred Weber has evolved a great independent conception of history. In spite of his disposition to make the totalities of cultures the object of knowledge, his universal conception of historyâhis sociology of civilisationâremains, in fact, remarkably open. Guided by his clear-sighted historical intuition and gifted with an unerring feeling for the status of spiritual creations, he adumbrates the historical process in such a manner that neither dispersal into unrelated culture-organisms nor the unity of human history as such becomes a principle. In fact, however, he finds himself confronted by the shape of a universal historical process, which divides itself up into primary civilisations, secondary cultures at the first and second stage, and so on down to the history of the expanding West after 1500.
I shall not devote any further time to the discussion of these conceptions, but shall attempt, in my turn, to outline the schema of a total conception.
My outline is based on an article of faith: that mankind has one single origin and one goal. Origin and goal are unknown to us, utterly unknown by any kind of knowledge. They can only be felt in the glimmer of ambiguous symbols. Our actual existence moves between these two poles; in philosophical reflection we may endeavour to draw closer to both origin and goal.
All men are related in Adam, originate from the hand of God and are created after His image.
In the beginning was the manifestness of Being in a present without consciousness. The fall set us on the path leading through knowledge and finite practical activity with temporal objectives, to the lucidity of the consciously manifest.
With the consummation of the end we shall attain concord of souls, shall view one another in a loving present and in boundless understanding, members of a single realm of everlasting spirits.
All these are symbols, not realities. The meaning of universal history, so far as it is empirically accessibleâwhether it possesses such a meaning, or whether human beings only attribute one to itâwe can only grasp when guided by the idea of the unity of the whole of history. We shall examine empirical facts in order to see to what extent they are in accordance with such an idea of unity, or how far they absolutely contradict it.
In so doing we shall evolve a conception of history which ascribes historical significance to that which, firstly, stands unmistakably in its place within one single overall process of human history, as a unique event, and which, secondly, possesses the qualities of reality and indispensability in the communication or continuity of humanity.
We shall now proceed, by an analysis of the structure of world history, to adumbrate our schema, whose aim is the greatest inclusiveness and the most categoric unity of human history.
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CHAPTER ONE
The Axial Period
IN the Western World the philosophy of history was founded in the Christian faith. In a grandiose sequence of works ranging from St. Augustine to Hegel this faith visualised the movement of God through history. Godâs acts of revelation represent the decisive dividing lines. Thus Hegel could still say: All history goes toward and comes from Christ. The appearance of the Son of God is the axis of world history. Our chronology bears daily witness to this Christian structure of history.
But the Christian faith is only one faith, not the faith of mankind. This view of universal history therefore suffers from the defect that it can only be valid for believing Christians. But even in the West, Christians have not tied their empirical conceptions of history to their faith. An article of faith is not an article of empirical insight into the real course of history. For Christians sacred history was separated from profane history, as being different in its meaning. Even the believing Christian was able to examine the Christian tradition itself in the same way as other empirical objects of research.
An axis of world history, if such a thing exists, would have to be discovered empirically, as a fact capable of being accepted as such by all men, Christians included. This axis would be situated at the point in history which gave birth to everything which, since then, man has been able to be, the point most overwhelmingly fruitful in fashioning humanity; its character would have to be, if not empirically cogent and evident, yet so convincing to empirical insight as to give rise to a common frame of historical self-comprehension for all peoplesâfor the West, for Asia, and for all men on earth, without regard to particular articles of faith. It would seem that this axis of history is to be found in the period around 500 B.C., in the spiritual process that occurred between 800 and 200 B.C. It is there that we meet with the most deepcut dividing line in history. Man, as we know him today, came into being. For short we may style this the âAxial Periodâ.
A. CHARACTERISATION OF THE AXIAL PERIOD
The most extraordinary events are concentrated in this period. Confucius and Lao-tse were living in China, all the schools of Chinese philosophy came into being, including those of Mo-ti, Chuang-tse, Lieh-tsu and a host of others; India produced the Upanishads and Buddha and, like China, ran the whole gamut of philosophical possibilities down to scepticism, to materialism, sophism and nihilism; in Iran Zarathustra taught a challenging view of the world as a struggle between good and evil; in Palestine the prophets made their appearance, from Elijah, by way of Isaiah and Jeremiah to Deutero-Isaiah; Greece witnessed the appearance of Homer, of the philosophersâParmenides, Heraclitus and Platoâof the tragedians, Thucydides and Archimedes. Everything implied by these names developed during these few centuries almost simultaneously in China, India, and the West, without any one of these regions knowing of the others.
What is new about this age, in all three areas of the world, is that man becomes conscious of Being as a whole, of himself and his limitations. He experiences the terror of the world and his own powerlessness. He asks radical questions. Face to face with the void he strives for liberation and redemption. By consciously recognising his limits he sets himself the highest goals. He experiences absoluteness in the depths of selfhood and in the lucidity of transcendence.
All this took place in reflection. Consciousness became once more conscious of itself, thinking became its own object. Spiritual conflicts arose, accompanied by attempts to convince others through the communication of thoughts, reasons and experiences. The most contradictory possibilities were essayed. Discussion, the formation of parties and the division of the spiritual realm into opposites which nonetheless remained related to one another, created unrest and movement to the very brink of spiritual chaos.
In this age were born the fundamental categories within which we still think today, and the beginnings of the world religions, by which human beings still live, were created. The step into universality was taken in every sense.
As a result of this process, hitherto unconsciously accepted ideas, customs and conditions were subjected to examination, questioned and liquidated. Everything was swept into the vortex. In so far as the traditional substance still possessed vitality and reality, its manifestations were clarified and thereby transmuted.
The Mythical Age, with its tranquillity and self-evidence, was at an end. The Greek, Indian and Chinese philosophers were unmythical in their decisive insights, as were the prophets in their ideas of God. Rationality and rationally clarified experience launched a struggle against the myth (logos against mythos); a further struggle developed for the transcendence of the One God against non-existent demons, and finally an ethical rebellion took place against the unreal figures of the gods. Religion was rendered ethical, and the majesty of the deity thereby increased. The myth, on the other hand, became the material of a language which expressed by it something very different from what it had originally signified: it was turned into parable. Myths were remoulded, were understood at a new depth during this transition, which was myth-creating after a new fashion, at the very moment when the myth as a whole was destroyed. The old mythical world slowly sank into oblivion, but remained as a background to the whole through the continued belief of the mass of the people (and was subsequently able to gain the upper hand over wide areas).
This overall modification of humanity may be termed spiritualisation. The unquestioned grasp on life is loosened, the calm of polarities becomes the disquiet of opposites and antinomies. Man is no longer enclosed within himself. He becomes uncertain of himself and thereby open to new and boundless possibilities. He can hear and understand what no one had hitherto asked or proclaimed. The unheard-of becomes manifest. Together with his world and his own self, Being becomes sensible to man, but not with finality: the question remains.
For the first time philosophers appeared. Human beings dared to rely on themselves as individuals. Hermits and wandering thinkers in China, ascetics in India, philosophers in Greece and prophets in Israel all belong together, however much they may differ from each other in their beliefs, the contents of their thought and their inner dispositions. Man proved capable of contrasting himself inwardly with the entire universe. He discovered within himself the origin from which to raise himself above his own self and the world.
In speculative thought he lifts himself up towards Being itelf, which is apprehended without duality in the disappearance of subject and object, in the coincidence of opposites. That which is experienced in the loftiest flights of the spirit as a coming-to-oneself within Being, or as unio mystica, as becoming one with the Godhead, or as becoming a tool for the will of God is expressed in an ambiguous and easily misunderstood form in objectifying speculative thought.
It is the specifically human in man which, bound to and concealed within the body, fettered by instincts and only dimly aware of himself, longs for liberation and redemption and is able to attain to them already in this worldâin soaring toward the idea, in the resignation of ataraxia, in the absorption of meditation, in the knowledge of his self and the world as atman, in the experience of nirvana, in concord with the tao, or in surrender to the will of God. These paths are widely divergent in their conviction and dogma, but common to all of them is manâs reaching out beyond himself by growing aware of himself within the whole of Being and the fact that he can tread them only as an individual on his own. He may renounce all worldly goods, may withdraw into the desert, into the forest or the mountains, may discover as a hermit the creative power of solitude, and may then return into the world as the possessor of knowledge, as a sage or as a prophet. What was later called reason and personality was revealed for the first time during the Axial Period.
What the individual achieves is by no means passed on to all. The gap between the peaks of human potentiality and the crowd became exceptionally great at that time. Nonetheless, what the individual becomes indirectly changes all. The whole of humanity took a forward leap.
Corresponding to this new spiritual world, we find a sociological situation showing analogies in all three regions. There were a multitude of small States and cities, a struggle of all against all, which to begin with nevertheless permitted an astonishing prosperity, an unfolding of vigour and wealth. In China the small States and cities had achieved sovereign life under the powerless imperial rulers of the Chou dynasty; the political process consisted of the enlargement of small units through the subjection of other small units. In Hellas and the Near East small territorial unitsâeven, to some extent, those subjected by Persiaâenjoyed an independent existence. In India there were many S...
