A Complex Integral Realist Perspective

Towards A New Axial Vision

Paul Marshall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317621249
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book sketches the contours of a vision that moves beyond the dominant paradigm or worldview that underlies and governs modernity (and postmodernity). It does so by drawing on the remarkable leap in human consciousness that occurred during the Axial Age and on a cross-pollination of what are arguably the three most comprehensive integrative metatheories available today: Complex thought, integral theory and critical realism – i.e. a complex integral realism. By deploying the three integrative metatheories this book recounts how the seeds of a number of biases within the Western tradition – analytical over dialectical, epistemology over ontology, presence over absence and exterior over interior – were first sown in axial Greece, later consolidated in European modernity and then challenged throughout the 20th century. It then discusses the remedies provided by the three integrative philosophies, remedies that have paved the way for a new vision.

Outlining a 'new axial vision' for the twenty-first century which integrates the best of premodernity, modernity and postmodernity within a complex integral realist framework, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of the Axial Age, critical realism, integral theory and complex thought. It will also appeal to those interested in a possible integration of the insights and knowledge gleaned by science, spirituality and philosophy.

Part I Axiality in pre-modernity

The purpose of Part I is to situate both the Western tradition and the three integrative metatheories in a larger historical context and to extract the core ingredients of the Axial Age and axiality, ingredients that will form part of the new axial vision outlined in Part III. The Western tradition, and philosophy and science in a more or less recognizably modern form, began with the Axial Age. This was a remarkable period in which humanity, in a number of distinct geographical regions of the world, underwent a shift or leap in consciousness and experienced the first flowering of a new vision of itself and its place in the scheme of things. It was in one of these regions, axial Greece, that the Western tradition was born and its foundations set in place. These foundations were then elaborated in a distinct form through a new shift in consciousness that took place in European modernity. This established a new paradigm or vision of humanity and the world, one that has been undermined now for some time in both philosophy and science and which the three philosophies all aim to move beyond. To do so, they draw varyingly on aspects of axial Greece and the Axial Age as a whole, as well as later expressions of axiality, especially on the contemplative core of the axial religions.¹ In many ways their search for a new vision of humanity and its place in the larger whole, one which rejects fundamental aspects of modernity and incorporates crucial elements of axiality, can be seen as an attempt to construct a new, albeit radically updated, axial vision. It is appropriate, therefore, to begin this process of historical contextualization with the Axial Age.

Chapter 1 examines the vibrant contemporary debate on the Axial Age and outlines some of the features of each of the four main centres. It takes an evolutionary/developmental perspective on the Axial Age, and examines the three main Axial Age breakthroughs (cognitive, moral and spiritual) with a special focus on axial spirituality and the contemplative core of the axial religions, which has inspired both integral theory and the philosophy of metaReality. Chapter 2 then considers axial Greece, focusing on its more balanced expression, in contrast to European modernity, of the mental structure of consciousness; on those features that can inform the new axial vision; and on the elements within the thought of Parmenides, Plato and Aristotle that laid down the foundations for the biases or tendencies that were later consolidated in modern European thought. For this last focus, it relies on the critical realist metacritique. Finally, Chapter 3 examines a number of expressions of axiality between the two major manifestations of the mental/rational/theoretic stage – between the Axial Age and modernity. These include the primarily cognitive axial developments in the Hellenistic-Roman era; various expressions of axial ethics at the beginning of the common era; the secondary axial breakthroughs of Christianity and Islam; axial philosophical rationality between the tenth and thirteenth centuries; axial spirituality and mysticism between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries in the three monotheistic religions; plus a brief look at Neo-Confucianism. It ends with a look at the transition period from the Middle Ages to modernity, in preparation for Part II’s focus on modernity.

Note

1. 1 By the axial religions I mean both those that emerged during the Axial Age – Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, Daoism, Confucianism – and those that arose in ‘secondary breakthroughs’ (Eisenstadt, 1986) or the ‘second wave’ (e.g. Morris, 2010) of axiality: Christianity and Islam. See below.

1 The Axial Age

First flowering of a new vision

DOI: 10.4324/9781315753485-2

The Axial Age, first studied systematically by Karl Jaspers (1949),¹ comprised a broad period of history between 800 and 200 bce, pivoting around 500 bce, that involved a shift in consciousness from mythos to logos and laid the ‘spiritual foundations upon which humanity still subsists’ (Jaspers, 1949: 98). It manifested most clearly in four distinct regions² – Ancient Israel, India, China and Greece – each one with its own singular expression. In Ancient Israel it gave birth to the prophets (e.g. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Hosea, Elijah) and monotheism; in India to Hinduism (the Upanisads and Bhagavadgita) and Buddhism (Gautama Buddha); in China to the period of the ‘Hundred Schools’, primarily Confucianism (Confucius and Mencius) and Daoism (Lao Tzu and Zhuangzi); and in Greece to the flowering of philosophical rationality that culminated in Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. Like any historical phenomenon it was the result of a complex recursive interplay of many factors, including an increase in social complexity and development; a growing literacy; the use of coinage and the beginnings of a market economy; instability caused by extensive warfare between small states as well as threats from larger early states (like the Achaemenid Empire in the Near East and India) or, in the case of China, a breakdown of political order after the downfall of the Zhou dynasty; and the emergence of autonomous intellectual/religious movements that challenged established practices and assumptions (Bellah, 2005; 2011; Wittrock, 2012). I will focus above all, however, on the shift in consciousness that occurred and resulted in ‘major spiritual, moral and intellectual breakthroughs’ (Schwartz, 1975a: 1).

The Axial Age debate

Since Jaspers’ seminal, but now limited,³ study, there has developed a rich interdisciplinary focus and debate on the Axial Age. There have been numerous contributions and significant moments in the Axial Age debate, including Eric Voegelin’s five-volume Order and History (1956–1987) and the Daedalus conference organized by Benjamin Schwartz and published in 1975, but we can perhaps highlight three major landmarks or turns in the debate. First, Jasper’s initial philosophical-normative focus that sought to unite humanity and promote a common future through a non-exclusionary/non-Eurocentric ‘axis’ in history – beyond the exclusivist Western conception of Christ as the axis of history (e.g. St Augustine, Hegel) – that displayed an experience common to all humanity.⁴ This experience was above all the leap in consciousness that took place during the Axial Age, ‘the evidence that human beings independently of each other are able to mentally transcend themselves and their culture under similar circumstances. This is in turn the basis for entering into communication with others’ (Roetz, 2012: 252). In a similar fashion, the philosophy of metaReality offers its ‘principle of axial rationality’ and related ‘principle of universal solidarity’, while integral theory adopts an explicitly developmental perspective.⁵

Second, Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt’s historical-sociological approach, starting in the mid-1970s, which converted the Axial Age into a full-blown research programme, detailing the rich diversity and plurality of axial civilizations. Eisenstadt (1986) also expanded the notion of the Axial Age to the broader notions of axial civilizations and axiality, which are no longer chronologically restricted. In this way, ‘secondary breakthroughs’ like those of Christianity and Islam are included, though Eisenstadt later adopted a typological approach in which he redefined axiality as a ‘set of characteristics that enhance the transformative potential of culture, and do so in specific ways linked to visions of transcendent reality’ (Arnason et al., 2007: 11). He also saw modernity as a new axial civilization that began in the West but later manifested in many ‘multiple modernities’ throughout the world, which Chapter 4 will draw upon (e.g. Eisentsadt, 2000, 2001). In this way, Jaspers’ ‘axis’ has been extended to cover axial and modern societies. A new axial vision, based on a complex integral realism, would expand the embrace one step further to include also the unique contributions and particular sophistication of indigenous societies, thus embracing all humanity (see the introduction to part three).

Third, and more recently, Robert Bellah’s (2011)evolutionary-developmental turn that reformulates his original theory of religious evolution (1964), which is now placed in a broader theory of the evolution and development of human consciousness, using Merlin Donald’s (1991, 1993, 2012) cognitive classification of human culture. He uses Donald’s three stages of human bio-cultural evolution – mimetic, mythic and theoretic – to trace religious evolution, and views the Axial Age as the first manifestation of the theoretic stage. This evolutionary-developmental turn resonates strongly with integral theory’s general developmental perspective, with Donald’s theoretic stage broadly paralleling its, and Habermas’ (1979), rational stage, as well as Jean Gebser’s (1949–1953/1985) mental structure of consciousness. I will focus primarily on this latest turn in the Axial Age debate, discussing Donald’s, Habermas’, integral theory’s and Gebser’s evolutionary stages, as well as the developmental/ontogenetic equivalents revealed by constructivist and adult developmental psychology and their broad relationship. I will also emphasise that the essentially cognitive evolutionary models are by no means isomorphic with the unique shift that took place in the Axial Age as a whole, which, as we saw, encompassed breakthroughs not only in the cognitive but also in the moral and spiritual domains. In later Chapters, 2 and 4, I argue that these largely cognitive evolutionary stages are directly related to four biases of the western tradition: analytical over dialectical, epistemology over ontology, presence over absence, and exterior over interior. And I use Gebser’s distinction between ‘efficient’ and ‘deficient’ forms of each structure of consciousness – here, the mental structure – to contrast axial Greek and European modern thought.

First, however, we need to take a slightly more detailed look at the unique manifestations of this general shift in human consciousness in the four main original axial centers, followed by a distillation of some of their common ingredients: specifically, the general nature of the Axial Age breakthroughs in the spiritual/religious, moral/ethical and intellectual/cognitive domains.

The four major axial centres

It is generally agreed that the four main and best-documented centres of the Axial Age are Ancient Israel, Greece, China and India.⁶ Jaspers also included Persia and Zoroaster, as have others, but because the evidence on Zoroaster and the relation of Zoroastrianism to the Achaemenid Empire is so limited and in dispute – and despite the significant impact that Achaemenid Persia had on the Near East and India – many scholars place it in brackets (e.g. Bellah, 2011). Some scholars also argue that proto-axial elements existed in the monotheistic revolution of Akhenaten in Egypt in the middle of the fourteenth century bce (e.g. Assmann, 2012).⁷

The axial status of Ancient Israel is based largely on a monotheism that was championed by critical and independent prophets (for example Isaiah, Jeremiah, Hosea, Elijah) from the ninth century bce onwards. They professed a devotion to Yahweh alone, took an ethical stance in defense of the oppressed and social justice for all, and rejected the pre-axial god-king relation. They had a conception of a transcendent God who created the universe and subjected it to His will and law. This ‘led to the development of universalization and rationalization of the religious orientations’ (Eisenstadt, 1986: 128) and also resulted in a strong ethical orientation and provided ‘a point of reference from which all existing presuppositions can be questioned, a basic criterion for the axial transition’ (Bellah, 2011: 322). Its axial breakthrough was more in the spiritual and ethical domain than in the intellectual or cognitive.⁸

It was precisely in this latter cognitive domain that Ancient Greece excelled. Greece’s unique axial features include its leap towards philosophical rationality, the development of formal logic and second-order thinking, an incipient science, significant literary and artistic achievements – as well as the first experiment in a radical (yet socially very limited) democracy based around the polis. In philosophy and rational speculation – its primary axial breakthrough – Greece produced a host of remarkable thinkers who instigated the Western tradition: the pre-Socratic cosmologists’ pioneering move from mythos to logos; the sophisticated dialectics of Heraclitus; Pythagoras’ formal ontology and attempt at a synthesis of science and religion; Parmenides’ leap to abstract analytical reasoning and second-order thinking; the Sophists’ shift of focus from the exterior object world to the subject world of human being; Socrates’ deep interiority, tending of the soul and intense search for the good and the true; all culminating in the flowering of philosophy and metaphysics under Plato and Aristotle.⁹ Its spiritual breakthrough was not in religious monotheism, as in ancient Israel, but rather in a sense of the Divine as a rational intelligence that governed the world (the purely materialist atomists and skeptical and practical Sophists being an exception). Its two philosophical exemplars both fully embraced the divine, Plato taking a more ‘mystical’ and even non-dual approach, and Aristotle depicting a God essentially divorced from the world (except as final cause of all beings). The next chapter discusses axial Greece in general and, more specifically, Plato, Aristotle and Parmenides.

Like Ancient Greece, Ancient China witnessed a similar flourishing of different ideas in the period of the ‘Hundred Schools’ between the early sixth and late third centuries bce. The two main schools were the Confucian and Daoist ones, with Confucius (fifth century) being the pivotal and most influential figure in Chinese philosophy – comparable to Plato in this respect (Bellah, 2011). His intense search for jen – ‘inner moral perfection’ (Schwartz, 1975b: 8) – emphasis on ethics and the moral development of his students and deep ‘looking within’ also make him comparable to two other axial sages: Socrates and Buddha. Two major Confucian thinkers were Mencius (fourth century) and Xunzi (third century), both social critics like Confucius and both also stressing the importance of moral self-cultivation. They are well known for holding different conceptions of human nature: Mencius seeing human nature as essentially good, Xunzi seeing xing (spontaneous aspects of human nature), though not human nature itself, as essentially bad – which led him to adopt a more authoritarian stance. The philosophical Daoism of the Daode Jing (Lao Tzu) and the Zhuangzi (Zhuangzi) was a more spiritual/mystical (and romantic) approach that, in contrast to the Confucians’ more socially engaged approach and focus on ethical conduct, stressed wu wei (non-action or cre...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I Axiality in pre-modernity
• PART II Modernity and the four biases
• PART III Contours of a new axial vision
• Conclusion
• Appendices
• Glossary
• References
• Index