From the Axial Age to the Moral Revolution: John Stuart-Glennie, Karl Jaspers, and a New Understanding of the Idea

John Stuart-Glennie, Karl Jaspers, and a New Understanding of the Idea

E. Halton

• Éditeur: Palgrave Pivot
• Année: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137473509
• Sujet: Philosophie
• Sous-sujet: Geschichte & Theorie der Philosophie

In 1873, John Stuart Stuart-Glennie elaborated a theory of 'the moral revolution' to characterize the historical shift from roughly 600 BCE in a variety of civilizations, as part of a critical theory of history. This book brings light to the now eclipsed theory and offers new contexts and understandings of the phenomenon.

1

Jaspers, Stuart-Glennie, and the Origins of the Theory

Abstract: Karl Jaspers published his theory of an “Axial Age” 1949, which was translated into English in 1953. He claimed credit for elaborating the first full theory of the axial age. Yet 75 years earlier, in 1873, unknown to Jaspers and to contemporary scholars today, folklorist John Stuart Stuart-Glennie elaborated a fully developed and nuanced theory of what he termed “the Moral Revolution” to characterize the historical shift around roughly 600 B.C.E. in a variety of civilizations. He continued to write and develop his theory, and also presented his ideas to the Sociological Society of London in 1905. This chapter provides evidence for Stuart-Glennie’s claim to be the first to develop a fully articulated theory of what later became known as the axial age, as well as his three stage “ultimate law of history.” It also considers Lewis Mumford’s original contributions to the theory.

Keywords: Karl Jaspers; Axial Age; John Stuart Stuart-Glennie; The Moral Revolution

Halton, Eugene. From the Axial Age to the Moral Revolution: John Stuart-Glennie, Karl Jaspers, and a New Understanding of the Idea. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137473509.0004.

Jaspers’ axial thesis

Karl Jaspers published his theory of an “Axial Age” in his book Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte in 1949, which was translated into English in 1953 as The Origin and Goal of History. The German term “Achsenzeit,” literally “axis-time,” translated as Axial Age, signifies axis or pivot, and characterizes the historical shift that occurred largely between 800 and 200 B.C.E. in a variety of civilizations, though inclusive of later figures including Jesus and Mohammed. Jaspers cites Hegel’s remark, “All history moves toward Christ and from Christ. The appearance of the Son of God is the axis of history.” But he notes that this really applies only to believing Christians, and that if there is an axis of history, it must apply to all humankind. Let me quote at length his depiction of the axial age to give a sense of his understanding of its breadth:

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 deep cut dividing line in history. Man, as we know him today, came into being. For short we may style this 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 Mo-ti, Chuang-tse, Lieh-tsu, and a host of others; India produced Upanishads and Buddha and, like China, ran the whole gamut of philosophical possibilities down to skepticism, to materialism, sophism and nihilism; in Iran Zarathustra taught a challenging view of the world as a struggle between good and evil; in Palestine prophets made their appearance, from Elijah, by way of Isaiah and Jeremiah to Deutero-Isaiah; Greece witnessed the appearance of Homer, of the philosophers—Parmenides, Heraclitus and Plato—of 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 the others.¹

Other characteristics include the rise of “rationally clarified experience” over myth; religion becoming increasingly ethical belief; the appearance of philosophers, speculative thought, and longing for transcendence, whether through Buddhist Nirvana, Greek ataraxia (lucid freedom from agitation), or Chinese alignment with the Tao; and a heightening of “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 world.”²

Jaspers notes further:

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 asks radical questions. Face to face with the void he strives for liberation and redemption. By consciously recognizing 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 . . . . In this age were born the fundamental categories within which we still think today, and the beginnings of the world religions, by which humans still live, were created.³

Through the axial age, Jaspers claimed, “the spiritual foundations of humanity were laid simultaneously and independently . . . And these are the foundations upon which humanity still subsists today.”⁴ In providing “the spiritual foundations,” the axial age appeared to Jaspers as the prime pivot of all of human development.

Jaspers takes credit for elaborating the first full theory of the axial age. He does cite Ernst von Lasaulx and Viktor von Strauss as the earliest scholars to call attention to the facts of the axial period, in 1856 and 1870 respectively:

Lasaulx writes: “It cannot possibly be an accident that, six hundred years before Christ, Zarathustra in Persia, Gautama Buddha in India, Confucius in China, the prophets in Israel, King Numa in Rome and the first philosophers-Ionians, Dorians and Eleatics-in Hellas, all made their appearance pretty well simultaneously as reformers of the national religion.”⁵

Viktor von Strauss, in his wonderful Lao-tse commentary . . . (1870), says: “During the centuries when Lao-tse and Confucius were living in China, a strange movement of the spirit passed through all civilised peoples. In Israel Jeremiah, Habakkuk, Daniel and Ezekiel were prophesying and in a renewed generation (521–516 [B.C.E.]) the second temple was erected in Jerusalem. Among the Greeks Thales was still living, Anaximander, Pythagoras, Heraclitus and Xenophanes appeared and Parmenides was born. In Persia an important reformation of Zarathustra’s ancient teaching seems to have been carried through, and India produced Sakyamuni, the founder of Buddhism.”⁶

Both of these quotations denote the phenomenon explicitly, and the Lasaulx quotation cited by Jaspers continues, in Hans Joas’s translation: “this remarkable coincidence can have its foundation only in the inner substantial unity of mankind and the life of peoples . . . , not in the particular effervescence of one national spirit.” Joas notes, “It would seem as if Jaspers had directly taken it up from here.”⁷

Jaspers did acknowledge these forerunners, yet also notes that “Since then these facts have now and then been noted, but only marginally. As far as I am aware, they have never been grasped as a whole, with the aim of demonstrating the universal parallels obtaining for the entire spiritual being of the humanity at that time.”⁸ In his early 1919 book, Psychology of Worldviews, Jaspers had drawn heavily from his mentor Max Weber’s work on world religions, and was aware later of Weber’s suggestion of the parallel rise of prophecy “in connection with the reconstitution of the great world empires” in the eighth through fifth centuries B.C.E.⁹ But again, Weber’s statement was at best a marginal footnote to Jaspers’ independent development of the axial age theory. Weber had stated in his book, Economy and Society, posthumously published in 1922:

The period of the older Israelitic prophecy at about the time of Elijah was an epoch of strong prophetic propaganda throughout the Near East and Greece. Perhaps prophecy in all its types arose, especially in the Near East, in connection with the reconstitution of the great world empires in Asia, and the resumption and intensification of international commerce after a long interruption. At that time Greece was exposed to the invasion of the Thracian cult of Dionysos, as well as to the most diverse types of prophecies. In addition to the semiprophetic social reformers, certain purely religious movements now broke into the simple magical and cultic lore of the Homeric priests . . . It is not necessary to detail here these developments of the eighth and seventh centuries, so brilliantly analyzed by Rhode, some of which reached into the sixth and even the fifth century. They were contemporary with Jewish, Persian, and Hindu prophetic movements, and probably also with the achievements of Chinese ethics in the pre-Confucian period, although we have only scant knowledge of the latter.¹⁰

This is a clear intuition of the common theme Jaspers later termed the axial age, though Weber did not develop it explicitly further. Also of note is that Stuart-Glennie had explicitly written decades earlier, in 1873, about “Prophetianism” as a new outlook characterizing emergent religions of the age of the moral revolution, when Max Weber was only nine years old.

Jaspers also took Max Weber’s brother Alfred as an influence. In 1935 Alfred Weber had noted, “The three established cultural spheres—the Near Eastern—Greek, the Indian and the Chinese—arrived at universally-oriented religious and philosophical seeking, questioning and choosing with remarkable synchronicity and apparently independently of one another from the beginning of the second half of the age of the great migrations, that is, from the ninth to the sixth century B.C.”¹¹ He also argued for the expanding colonization by central Asian horse cultures as an influence in the cross-civilizational simultaneity of the axial period.

Jaspers’ idea of the axial age slowly spread, and began to reach a broader audience after a special issue devoted to it appeared in the journal Daedelus in 1975. In 1986 S. N. Eisenstadt edited an excellent collection titled The Origins and Diversity of Axial Age Civilizations, and more recently co-edited Axial Civilizations and World History in 2005. As mentioned, sociologist Robert Bellah has also written recently on the concept, publishing a major book in 2011, and in 2008 organized a conference with Hans Joas on the topic, which resulted in the recent comprehensive volume The Axial Age and Its Consequences (2012). One of Bellah’s chief concerns was to address the rise of “second order” or theoretic thinking in the axial age, through using Merlin Donald’s approach to the evolution of culture and cognition. I shall discuss Bellah’s work in Chapter 7.

But almost twenty years before the 1975 Daedelus issue, and three years after the translation appeared in English, Lewis Mumford devoted a whole chapter to “axial man” in his 1956 book, The Transformations of Man. Mumford acknowledged using Jaspers’ concept of the axial age, but also claimed that he used the word “axial” independently in his 1951 book, The Conduct of Life, though his context for the term in that work is to argue for a contemporary axial transformation rather than to single out an earlier historical epoch. But he also mentions that the idea has been around for a while, and how “this change of direction was noted early in the present century by J. Stuart Glennie [sic].”¹²

Later, in his 1967 book, Technics and Human Development, Mumford again drew attention to Stuart-Glennie: “The first scholar to describe this simultaneous movement and understand its significance was an almost forgotten Scotsman, J. Stuart Glennie (sic), who also called attention to a five-hundred year cycle in culture: and both Karl Jaspers and I have independently called these new religions and philosophies ‘Axial’—a deliberately ambival...