Image credit: Sigmar Polke, Axial Age, Pinault Collection
part 8 of a series
Woke
The thousands of years old ancient civilisations are everywhere brought to an end by the Axial Period, which melts them down, assimilates them or causes them to sink from view, irrespective of whether it was the same peoples or others that became the bearers of the new cultural forms. Pre-Axial cultures, like those of Babylon, Egypt, the Indus valley and the aboriginal culture of China, may have been magnificent in their own way, but they appear in some manner unawakened. The ancient cultures only persist in those elements which enter into the Axial Period and become part of the new beginning. Measured against the lucid humanity of the Axial Period, a strange veil seems to lie over the most ancient cultures preceding it, as though man had not yet really come to himself.
– Karl Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History
You may have learned by now—oh, but wait, you’re done with that, reading outside your preferred whatevers, reading anything that might take more than 30 second’s concentration—actually, reading at all, listening to idiot podcasts much better (and easier on the gray cells). Fine.
But you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to have learned (even if accidentally), when someone says, “This will change your life,” to run in the opposite direction. It may be a supplement, it may be a diet (vegan, paleo, Mediterranean, whatever), it may be an exercise routine, it may be an apologist. But if you’re honest, you’d have to admit that nothing is likely to change your life at this sad point, as stupid as you’ve slouched to make yourself. Which is probably just as well. Lord knows no one would want to hear what you might have to say if you attempted to express something resembling thought.
The same flight instinct might come properly into play when someone, particularly a Teutonic someone (Francophone someones not far behind), proposes a theory claiming, “This changed all of human history.” The this not being something you can put your finger on (like an ice age), but some sort of enormous, world-changing cultural shift. An awakening.
Academics, it must be noted, are immune from that adaptive response, which anyway wouldn’t be adaptive for them, as their resources (hence reproductive potential, hence fitness) are tied to gnawing dry bones past the marrow.
As an example, the endless discussion of Karl Jasper’s big idea.
It also must be noted that naming is very important for Homo nosce te ipsum, as it was the original chore, essential to cataloguing, which is essential to learning, if that is of any interest. For example, some people think that library cataloguing is a tedious endeavor. Which, to be fair, it is. No one considers Melvil Dewey of the Dewey Decimal System to be particularly heroic, nor the lineages of librarians relentlessly implementing his demonic system (and shushing you in their bureaucratic caverns). What bad names! Melvil…. Dewey Decimal System…. Neither the least salvageable. Does not matter a bit that Melvil revolutionized information retrieval. For a long time that was the only way your sort could navigate a library and its card catalogue … to learn. Oh, but wait—that would be the most boring kind of learning, of little interest to you (divine revelation being more than sufficient), caverns full of dust motes and the smell of mold, full of writing, which even Plato hated. Not at all as fun as learning how to improve your golf drive or how to use a kill bottle to collect specimens of winged insects.
So, if you had had some searing insight of a major cultural transition, one that changed everything, and you chose a lame name, like, “the Moral Revolution,” you’d be lost to history, as was one John Stuart Stuart-Glennie—the emphatic redundancy of the name being of no help to the poor forgotten Scotsman. Also the Scottish part didn’t help, Germans much preferred by academics in the late 19th century. What had the Scotts done besides John Knox? Well, inventing golf. So there’s that.
On the other hand, if you were a German with a searing insight and a brilliant name for it, your bones will be gnawed past the marrow for ages to come, conferring the only immortality likely on offer. Marketing (and cultural primogeniture) being everything.
Which is how one Karl Jasper, in 1949—75 years after the Scotsman with pretty much the same idea (but a lame name)—changed the world with his concept of Achsenzeit. The name makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up, even if you don’t know German. Like Blitzkrieg. Even the English translation, while not as apocalyptic sounding, does pretty well: “the Axial Age.” The historical pivot, defining the before and the after—”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….”
Like Archimedes’s fulcrum, big enough to move the world given lever enough, history providing plenty of lever. Or at least to move the academic world. Or at least that part of it that earns livings gnawing dry bones.
So, what was Karl’s big idea, the one that changed the world? In short, he solved the most vexing of puzzles: how “Man, as we know him today, came into being.” Karl named the when, the where, the who and the how. And most importantly, both the what and so what. Pretty chesty.
The when was the period between 800 and 200 BCE, the most important axis point being 500 BCE. Which leaves out not only Akhenaten, but all of Egypt. Mesopotamia is out too. Pre-Axial cultures were “in some manner unawakened.”
The where being three “centers”: India, China and “the West,” the latter comprising Iran, Israel-Palestine and Greece. Which itself is a strange geography. Who could possibly imagine Iran, Israel-Palestine and Greece as being a common anything? But then, your sort can imagine almost anything, including things never having been known to exist. As for places never baptized in any of the three axial fonts, they remained “primitive,” living “that unhistorical life that had been going on for tens or even hundreds of thousands of years.” As did most everybody in the wheres, clinging to their old mythical worlds. The Axial Age is a story of Great Men.
The who is a cast of characters so inclusive as to be nothing sort of a Who’s Who of the first millennium BCE. In China, Confucius, Laozi, Mozi, Zhuangzi, and other philosophers; in India, the Upanishads and Buddha; in Iran, Zarathustra; in Palestine, prophets such as Elijah, Isaiah, Jeremiah; in Greece, Homer, the philosophers, tragedians, Thucydides, Archimedes. Pretty much anyone whose memory survived (or was invented) in the time and geography so neatly boxed.
When it comes to the how, things get a little murkier, which is what you get for reading a German who was both a psychiatrist (which, enough said) and a philosopher. A heady mix. Maybe too heady to be understood, or just heady enough to provide bones for the endless gnawing. Karl calls the how “the mystery of simultaneity.” And he dutifully runs through a number of possibilities. Maybe it was trade, “civilizing achievements” being like a craft that spreads along routes of commerce. Maybe the invention of writing. Maybe a biological propensity that manifested at the same time in “the evolution of the genus homo”—a possibility Jaspers dismisses out of hand, because that is “not a reality that can be apprehended as such or serve as an explanation of anything.” He was sympathetic to a causal explanation given by his friend Alfred Weber, Max’s little brother: horses. Charioteers and horsemen riding out of Central Asia to conquer and, inadvertently, introduced the horse to their foes. But after devoting more column inches to that idea than to the invention of writing, Jaspers concludes that the equestrian diffusion was a precondition at best.
No, the how, the origin of the thing that changed everything, “grows more mysterious the more closely we examine it,” having “the nature of a miracle.” It refuses to submit to a single cause, being rather “three independent roots of one history.” The technical term for this sort of thing is autochthonous, from, as ever, ancient Greek: αὐτός (autós, “self”) + χθών (khthṓn, “earth, soil”) + ous, together meaning “native to the soil”—and being at least one syllable beyond your comfort zone.
Which brings you to the what. It would be nice if Karl had felt any need to express himself clearly. To, as one bone-gnawer, Andrew Smith, puts it, develop “a rich account of the key features of the axial age that would link together details from the different textual sources into an illuminating constellation.” What a dope. Jaspers knew very well that clarity leadeth unto obscurity, having learned this from his philosophical mentors, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. Who, after all, is gnawing Andrew Smith’s bones?
What you get instead is this mouthful:
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.
Karl must have consulted Das Wörterbuch der wichtigen Wörter (The Dictionary of Important Words) to pull that off: Being, terror, void, redemption, absoluteness, selfhood, lucidity, transcendence. Your first thought might be Wow! Followed by, What in the world does he mean? But even if those weren’t your thoughts, they seem to have been the bone-gnawers’. More than a hint of Nietzsche in rhetorical flourish (Wow!) and much to be gnawed as to meaning (also like Nietzsche). Oh the conferences to be held, the papers to be written.
Karl’s essential claims would seem to be that for the first time humans become aware of transcendence (“Being as a whole … apprehended without duality in the disappearance of subject and object”) and capable as individuals of second-order thinking (“thinking became its own object”). Which had a lot of knock-on effects. Instead of following along nose-to-tail, munching the same old myths, received truth could be challenged by actual individuals, actually thinking for themselves, launching “a struggle against myth (logos against mythos).” Existence became an object of thought, giving birth to history. The transcendence of One God was championed, religion was “rendered ethical,” myths transformed into parables.
In sum, “What was later called reason and personality was revealed for the first time during the Axial Period.”
Whew! Glad that’s sorted.
Except, nothing is ever sorted, which is where the bone-gnawers earn their keep, as they strive to make the rough places plain. Among the exegetical virtuosi, Arnaldo Momigliano (a historian), while a bit skeptical of Karl’s historical homogenization, characterized the period as “the age of criticism.” Robert Bellah (a sociologist) was all in on Karl’s idea, but narrowed the focus to “second-order thinking”; it was the age when “theoretic culture” emerged. Jan Assmann (an Egyptologist), wasn’t entirely all in. After all, Karl didn’t even mention Akhenaten, the first monotheist. Jan argued that the driver of the age was writing, and not just writing, but canonization, conferring on texts not just permanence but moral normativity. Charles Taylor (a philosopher) saw it as a “revolution in our understanding of moral order,” a process of “disembedding” (Charles’s contribution to Das Wörterbuch der wichtigen Wörter) from the previous cosmic sacred.
There’s a lesson for you here, if you have ears to hear. All your life you were pestered to strive for clarity of both thought and expression. Good luck with the thought part (all your endless internal disputations, which might be generously characterized as “second-order thinking”), but the expression part is critical. Remember how you were taught to write an essay? Inverted triangle (the apex being your thesis), paragraph, paragraph, paragraph, triangle (the apex reiterating your thesis, which you have just proved through clarity of argumentation in paragraph, paragraph, paragraph). Crisp sentences, an abhorrence of passive voice and subordinate clauses. A practice you have endeavored to employ with a slavish dutifulness and one that Karl studiously avoided. Which is why no one will remember you.
So what? you might ask, not about your inevitable erasure, but about Karl and his big idea.
Excellent question, as Karl answers the so what in a section entitled “The meaning of the Axial Period,” a title pregnant with the promise of clarity.
Three meanings are on offer. First, the Axial Period “founded universal history and, spiritually, drew all men to itself.” OK. Whatever.
Second, said period acts as a “challenge to boundless communication” (Karl’s italics!), which eliminates “the claim to exclusive possession of the truth, that tool of fanaticism, of human arrogance and self-deception through the will to power [Nietzsche alert], that disaster for the West….” Which is strange in all manner of ways.
Exclusive possession of the truth eliminated? Ever heard of YHWH, Karl? And, for someone claiming not to sneak the divine into your big idea, why would you say that “God has manifested himself historically in several fashions and has opened up many ways toward Himself?” Sigh. More theology masquerading as philosophy, which, thinking about it, might not be such a masquerade. Fraternal, if not identical, twins.
The third comes in the form of a question—which, of course, is presented as a paragraph’s worth of questions, boiling down to one: Are the Axial Age’s “creations” the “yardstick” for everything that comes after; does it define the before and after, as was previously claimed (“the new beginning”)? In a word, no. There is no final truth, no salvation to be found. “The Axial Period too ended in failure. History went on.”
Except, maybe yes: “Only this much seems certain to me: Our present-day historical consciousness … is determined … by the conception of the Axial Period.”
So, are you thereby woke, or not?
Here’s something funny: Karl uses his Axial Age to introduce a much grander and more expansive theory of history, one “based on an article of faith: that mankind has one single origin and one goal.” Hence the name of his book, The Origin and Goal of History. The origin being somewhat desultory: “In the beginning was the manifestness of Being in a present without consciousness.” You know, the age of myths and all that. Your sort dumber than monkeys for most of its sorry history, lacking any capability for nosce te ipsum, Being somehow without consciousness, whatever “consciousness” might mean for someone who uses all the Important Words, definitions unnecessary.
But there is a happier eschaton on the horizon, one might say a kingdom to come, one already within you, thanks to die Achsenzeit. You know, a kingdom of the sapiental sort to start (“consciousness” previously lacking), later to be fulfilled, as all beginnings have ends:
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.
Nice. Super nice.
To be fair, Karl’s efforts were what another Carl (the Prince of Botany) had in mind when he named the species Homo nosce te ipsum. Karl was on a know thyself quest, an attempt to account for the modernity that all thyselves now inhabit, the historical fulcrum that shifted the lever of history from mythos to logos. His quest began with an origin myth and ended in an eschaton. A story as old as time itself.
Here’s a question: How hard do you have to squint to see a grand commonality between Israel-Palestine and Greece in the fifth century BCE? You know, that place that Karl somehow saw (with Iran) as one place, “the West,” one of the three places where an imagined Age was thrice born.
How hard do you have to squint to see “a new spiritual world” in Karl’s Axial Age? Even if you are gullible enough to accept that the most Important Words—justice, truth, Being, selfhood, transcendence—that your sort argues about these days were invented in those days, you’re probably not gullible enough to think there was any more agreement as to definition then as now.
How hard would history have to squint?
Pretty hard. None of the Great Thinkers of Karl’s Axial Age agreed. Zarathustra envisioned the cosmos as a battle between Ahura Mazda (good) and Angra Mainyu (evil), other gods being demons. The Hebrew prophets had their One God, the only true God; if they had known of Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu, they would have condemned them as false gods. Buddha rejected Vedic ritual tradition; his Middle Way was The Way. Even Confucius, while less judgy, implied that his virtue ethics was the proper path. The Greek philosophers, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Plato, all were smug in their formulations.
Once Christianity had triumphed over its forebear, it spent centuries trying to stamp out the cerebral irritations of the Greeks. Initially with its foolishness, thereafter with the sword that Constantine’s conversion conferred. Until the Enlightenment made a tentative advance—what Karl would call a renaissance—recapturing the Greek ideal (logos over mythos), but never quite succeeding in realizing Diderot’s preferred eschaton, a time “when the last king had been strangled in the entrails of the last priest.”
The problem with the Enlightenment, if might makes right (which would appear to be a general rule), is that its taste for slaughter was of a dabbling sort. Not much of that after the French Revolution. Well, and Jefferson, who wrote: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.” Which, you know?, might be forthcoming shortly. Christian nationalists are about, their kingdom within them.
Karl was a virtuoso of squinting. Somehow, he was able to screw up his eyes to see in the diversity of orthodoxies in his imagined age a shared act of transcendence, a community of communication across humanity, the basis for a spiritual development common to all mankind. All of time before was but preparatory and all time after a backward glance.
Karl saw unity in diversity. Not unlike the Parliament of the World’s Religions, which gathers from time to time a bunch of religious sorts who, were they honest, would admit that they would like to strangle their last competitor with the entrails of the next to last, only to enact publicly the play entitled, “One but Not the Same.” Ditto Harvard Divinity School, which pulls that rabbit out of the hat every weekday of the term.
Karl could also squint hard enough to see the goal of history, when all of your sorts finally recognize their essential oneness, that the Big Questions they ask are the same, no answer having noetic superiority. Various streams flowing into the same river of transcendence, universality and communication.
Of the past we have but an incomplete recollection, the future is obscure. Of the present alone we might expect to form a lucid picture. After all, we are in the midst of it. But it is precisely the present as such that is opaque to us, for it would grow clear only through complete knowledge of the past, by which it is borne, and of the future, which it conceals within it. We should like to achieve awareness of the situation of our epoch. But this situation contains hidden possibilities, which will only become visible once they have been realized.
What is historically new and, for the first time in history, decisive about our situation is the real unity of mankind on the earth.
What a nice awakening that would be.