The Axial Age and Its Consequences

Robert N. Bellah, Hans Joas

• Editorial: Belknap Press
• Año: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780674070448
• Categoría: Theology & Religion
• Categoría: History of Religion

The first classics in human history—the early works of literature, philosophy, and theology to which we have returned throughout the ages—appeared in the middle centuries of the first millennium bce. The canonical texts of the Hebrew scriptures, the philosophical writings of Plato and Aristotle, the Analects of Confucius and the Daodejing, the Bhagavad Gita and the teachings of the Buddha—all of these works came down to us from the compressed period of history that Karl Jaspers memorably named the Axial Age.In The Axial Age and Its Consequences, Robert Bellah and Hans Joas make the bold claim that intellectual sophistication itself was born worldwide during this critical time. Across Eurasia, a new self-reflective attitude toward human existence emerged, and with it an awakening to the concept of transcendence. From Axial Age thinkers we inherited a sense of the world as a place not just to experience but to investigate, envision, and alter through human thought and action.Bellah and Joas have assembled diverse scholars to guide us through this astonishing efflorescence of religious and philosophical creativity. As they explore the varieties of theorizing that arose during the period, they consider how these in turn led to utopian visions that brought with them the possibility of both societal reform and repression. The roots of our continuing discourse on religion, secularization, inequality, education, and the environment all lie in Axial Age developments. Understanding this transitional era, the authors contend, is not just an academic project but a humanistic endeavor.

Fundamental Questions

1

The Axial Age Debate as Religious Discourse

HANS JOAS

It is an undisputed fact that Karl Jaspers invented the term “Axial Age” in his 1949 book Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte, but it is also uncontested that the basic idea behind the new term is much older and was not first developed by Jaspers himself. While these facts seem to be clear, the same cannot be said about the exact meaning of the concept of an Axial Age, the origins of the term, and the origins of the idea behind it. In the following, I will offer some material that could help to clarify these three matters, but the main purpose of this chapter is not a contribution to conceptual history. These reflections are only necessary as a presupposition for my main argument. I will argue that the Axial Age debate of the last decades is not only one of the most important developments in the area of the comparative-historical social sciences, but also a religious discourse—a series of highly complex attempts of intellectuals to position themselves with regard to the problem of “transcendence,” its role in history, and viable forms of its articulation in the present.

But let me first briefly return to the question of the origin of Jaspers’ idea and concept. For all readers familiar with Georg Simmel’s last book Lebensanschauung, the term “axis” would seem to have been inspired by him, because in Simmel we find the idea of an “axial rotation” as the crucial step in the genesis of ideal validities.1 Love, according to Simmel, may have been induced by corporeal impulses, but when the original desire has led to the formation of intense personal relationships, then these relationships take on their own independent existence and become the source of demands and norms. What Simmel means by “axial rotation” is the genesis of autonomous forms of culture that, although being a product of life-processes, now have a retroactive effect on these processes of life themselves. Religion for Simmel is the most perfect rotation around the forms which life produces in itself. The leading American expert on Simmel, Donald Levine, has speculatively claimed that Simmel’s idea is the origin of Jaspers’ expression.2 But this seems to me to be not really plausible since Jaspers does not have the autonomy of cultural products in mind when he speaks of an axial turn, but the “axis” of world history—the one point in history that allows a dichotomous distinction between everything that came before or after it.

Moreover, Jaspers himself does not refer to Simmel in the relevant passage, but to Hegel. He saw Hegel as the last great representative of a long tradition of Occidental thinking about history for which since Augustine there was no doubt that the self-revelatory acts of God constitute the decisive turning points in world history. He indirectly quotes Hegel,3 for whom the birth of Christ was the crucial dividing line, the axis of world history. For Jaspers, writing after World War II, such a Christo-centric claim was no longer acceptable and had to be replaced by an empirically tenable and universally acceptable alternative. The problem with his reference to Hegel is, however, that no such passage has so far been detected in Hegel’s entire work. What comes closest to it is a passage in his lectures on the philosophy of history in which Hegel calls the idea of the trinity of God the decisive principle—“the axis on which the History of the World turns. This is the goal and starting point of History.”4 While these sentences may sound like the source of Jaspers’ book title, the problem with the whole quotation is that Hegel in the German original does not use the word “axis,” but “Angel”—a word that is normally translated as “hinge” or “pivot.” Could it be that Jaspers’ confusion of “Achse” and “Angel” is the origin of the term we all use today?

More interesting than this whole philological question, however, is the problem of the intellectual origin of the idea itself. Here Jaspers was indubitably influenced by the writings of Max Weber, his brother Alfred Weber, and through them by Weber’s close colleague and longtime friend Ernst Troeltsch and Troeltsch’s friend Wilhelm Bousset. They all wrote about similarities between the ancient Hebrew prophets and comparable phenomena in other civilizations and used terms like “prophetic age” or “synchronistic age” to designate these similarities as the common features of a specific phase in world history. They were in turn influenced by important scholars from the field of religious studies (Hermann Siebeck) and Indology (Rhys Davids) so that one could already speak of an “Axial Age debate” around 1900.5 But all these authors were not the first debaters either. Jaspers himself mentioned two forerunners: the Sinologist Victor von Strauss and the classicist and philosopher Ernst von Lasaulx. While von Strauss had only a few words to say on this topic in his commentary on Lao Tse,6 Lasaulx truly developed at length the idea taken up by Jaspers in a remarkable and almost completely forgotten book of 1856, Neuer Versuch einer alten, auf die Wahrheit der Tatsachen gegründeten Philosophie der Geschichte.7 But Lasaulx himself also mentioned some forerunners,8 and at the moment it looks as if the earliest formulation of the Axial Age thesis is from Abraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron (1731–1805). He was a deeply Catholic and royalist French scholar who spent almost six years in India, wrote an empirically founded work on “oriental” forms of political rule, criticizing Montesquieu’s distorted ideas about oriental despotism, and studied the ancient Iranian religious traditions. He has long been considered one of the founders of Iranian studies. In the year 1771 he claimed that the ideas articulated by Zoroaster probably in the sixth century BCE were part of a more general “revolution” in different parts of the world.9 I take it to be an empirical question whether even earlier formulations of this thesis will be found in the future. In any case, one must not assume that later authors were always influenced by earlier writers in this regard.

But what exactly does the Axial Age thesis refer to—beyond an observation of a certain parallelism in the cultural transformation of four or five major civilizations between 800 and 200 BCE? The best shorthand characterization is from the American Sinologist Benjamin Schwartz, who called the Axial Age “the age of transcendence”;10 it would perhaps be even more precise, although maybe a bit pedantic, to speak of the age of the emergence of the idea of transcendence. A cosmological chasm between a transcendental sphere and a mundane one is then seen as the defining characteristic of axiality. Others, for example Arnaldo Momigliano, speak of an “age of criticism”11 and emphasize the relativization of all mundane realities as the crucial feature of the age—an aspect that also plays the greatest role in Shmuel Eisenstadt’s sociological elaboration of the Axial Age thesis. The main emphasis in Eisenstadt’s work is on the desacralization of political domination that is a result of the emergence of transcendence, on the Axial Age as the origin of new forms of criticism, controversial claims about the true meaning of divine commandments, a growing separation between ethnic and religious collectivities, and a new historical dynamic.

There is no serious contradiction between the two characterizations, but only a difference in emphasis. The emphasis is either on a profound transformation of religious presuppositions or on the social and political consequences of this religious transformation. But this image changes when the focus on “transcendence” itself is questioned. Björn Wittrock has explicitly denied the view that the Axial Age can be characterized by its reference to transcendence. He proposes to consider “an increasing reflexivity of human beings and their ability to overcome the bounds of a perceived inevitability of given conditions in temporal and social orderings” as its defining characteristic instead.12 For him it is a matter of context and contingency whether this transformation leads to a cosmology in terms of transcendence or immanence. Empirically, the most contentious case in this connection is ancient China.13 A similar view is expressed by Johann Arnason, Eisenstadt, and Wittrock in their introduction to a jointly edited volume when they call the “epoch-making innovation that gave rise to enduring civilizational identities as well as to religious visions of universal community” in the Axial Age the most striking manifestation of social creativity in human history.14 Creativity here, it seems to me, replaces the assumption of a divine revelation of truth without any further discussion. When Wittrock speaks of cases without a cosmology of transcendence, one could, of course, exclude them from the set of relevant cases and restrict the investigation to those in which the idea of transcendence did indeed play a role. What I am aiming at is the fact that all contributions to the Axial Age debate are permeated by assumptions about and attitudes toward religion. It is difficult to find a language for the transformations of the Axial Age that is neither bound to a specific religious faith nor to unreflected secularist premises. When I spoke of the “emergence” of the idea of transcendence, I chose this expression in order to avoid speaking either of its “discovery” or its “invention”—because “discovery” refers to an understanding of religious evolution that considers the Axial breakthrough as progress, whereas “invention” is a term that can only be plausible from a secularist perspective for the creative achievements of mankind in that period. Furthermore, if “transcendence” is not the defining characteristic of the Axial Age, a possible loss of transcendence in our age is much less dramatic, much less of a threat to moral universalism than if it is. A return to the original claims of the Axial Age can be seen as a prophetic plea for a forceful liberation from later attenuated versions of the fundamental impulses of post-Axial religion and of philosophy—or as a dangerous regression to obsolete fanaticisms. Not only can the different versions of the Axial Age be played out against one another: Athens or Jerusalem?—there can also be a nostalgia for pre-Axial myths and cosmologies or a radical modernism that sees the heritage of the Axial Age as a mere preparation for a modernity that is in its core independent from it. This affects the implicit views on our relationship to the Axial turn—whether we think of it in terms of replacement and supersession or in terms of addition and integration.15

We can use, therefore, the contributions to the Axial Age debate on the one hand as a probe to find out the tacit religious (or antireligious) assumptions in important theories of history and social change, and on the other as a means to provide contemporary debates about religion with additional material from history and sociology. This chapter restricts itself to three main contributors: Ernst von Lasaulx, Max Weber, and Karl Jaspers. It leaves out the oldest predecessors as well as Alfred Weber and Eric Voegelin (who had studied with Jaspers and Alfred Weber) and all contemporary figures.

I. Lasaulx’s Organicist Defense of Revelation

Lasaulx’s name and work, once admired by great historians like Lord Acton and Jacob Burckhardt, are so completely forgotten today that it is probably appropriate to offer some biographical information about him first.16 Born in 1805 into an aristocratic German-speaking family of Luxemburgian origin, he had strong connections with several major figures of the conservative-Catholic milieu in nineteenth-century Bavaria. He was a student of Joseph Görres, the former Jacobin revolutionary, who had turned into the leading figure among Catholic intellectuals. Lasaulx was married to a daughter of Franz von Baader, another leading Catholic thinker of the time. As a young classicist he was invited to join the entourage of the Bavarian prince Otto when he became the first king of Greece after its independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1832. This brought him to Greece, and from there he traveled through the Middle East, returning with the deep conviction that Christianity can only be understood as the fusion of components from ancient Greece and ancient Judaism. For him Greek thinking appeared to be a kind of second, apocryphal Old Testament. When he returned to Germany, his academic career led to a professorial position at the University of Munich, where, among others, Lord Acton was one of his students. Interestingly, he also became involved in political matters, protesting against the Bavarian king when he tried to provide his lover—the dancer Lola Montez—with an aristocratic title; he was suspended from his academic position and became a member of the national assembly in Frankfurt during the revolution of 1848.

His main scholarly ambition was to reconstitute a Christian perspective in the writing of universal history, and this in an age of an increasing nationalization of historiography. Until the seventeenth century such a Christian perspective had dominated historiography in Europe, but since then it had gradually lost out to a strict separation of empirically grounded historiography and a theological discourse about the history of salvation. Lasaulx and other romantic thinkers assumed that a new “organicist” understanding of history would enable them to revitalize the older unity of theology and historiography—not by a return, though, to dogmatic or biblically founded statements about history, but in an empirically defensible manner. The title of his main work of 1856, literally translated, is “A new attempt at an old philosophy of history, based on the truth of facts.” I interpret this title as...