Convenient Myths: The Axial Age, Dark Green Religion, and the World that Never Was

2. Serious People, Bad Ideas: An Inquisition on the Axial Age

19 Serious People, Bad Ideas An Inquisition on the Axial Age 2 The Confucian reworking of much older Chinese traditions differs in fundamental ways from the Jewish counter-model to Egyptian “political theology,” even though the pre-axial past is the context in which the new paradigm emerges. The case of Greece is different again; and of India, different once more. —Johann Arnason, “The Axial Age and Its Interpreters” A Chinese personal existence under the cosmic tao, or an Indian personal existence in acosmistic illumination, is not an Israelite or Christian existence under God. —Eric Voegelin, Order and History As a way into the discussion that follows, we may begin with a significant , fairly recent critique of Karl Jaspers’ thought by Johann Arnason . 1 Ironically, in view of Jaspers’ appeal to observable or recorded fact, Arnason criticizes Jaspers precisely for a lack of careful attention to empirical historical data in his theorizing. In fact, he understands Jaspers ’ various claims, “including some of his most aberrantly unhistorical statements[,] . . . as attempts to settle, bypass or neutralize unstated problems to which we must return.” 2 20 Convenient Myths Johann Arnason on Karl Jaspers One of the most fundamental problems, claims Arnason, is the very sharp distinction that Jaspers makes between preaxial, “unawakened” cultures and their successors. We simply do not know enough about all the preaxial cultures to be able to generalize about them in this way, and what we do know tells against any notion of uniformity. The circumstances under which individual cultures moved from a preaxial to an axial condition likewise varied. When Jaspers describes the common denominator of the axial breakthroughs in terms of a change of consciousness in which “man becomes conscious of Being as a whole, of himself and his limitations” and “experiences absoluteness in the depths of selfhood and in the lucidity of transcendence,” 3 he is doing nothing less (says Arnason) than imposing an anachronistic model on history arising from his own existentialist philosophical commitments. One important aspect of Jaspers’ lack of attention to historical detail lies in his description of the social context of the alleged spiritual breakthrough in the axial age. Jaspers envisages small states and cities engaging in fruitful economic competition leading to fundamental change. The problem here is that we do not actually find invariant patterns of state formation to which the various axial transformations can be linked. China and Greece are very different from each other, for example. With respect to India, we can make “some kind of connection between state formation in the eastern Ganges plain and the rise of Buddhism, but it is much less obvious what the Upanishads might have had to do with that kind of background.” 4 The situation in Israel is quite different again—one small state dominated by various empires. 5 A similar problem arises with respect to Jaspers’ understanding of the transition from the axial to the postaxial age. For Jaspers “the Axial Age ended everywhere in unequivocal decline” in conjunction with imperial resurgence (e.g., in the Hellenistic and Roman Empires). There was a return to the preaxial phase of history (although the postaxial empires depended on axial sources at an ideological level). As Arnason argues, however, the actual historical reality is much more complex. There is no uniform pattern to the relationships of imperial formations with “axial legacies.” For example, “an imperial background . . . seems to have been essential to the legacy which the most lastingly influential current of axial thought in China wanted to preserve and refine.” Empire remained crucial. In India, the Mauryan Empire “was Serious People, Bad Ideas 21 perhaps . . . at one point more receptive to axial innovations than any other contemporary state.” 6 Empire and axial innovations were not at odds with each other. Finally, Arnason takes issue with Jaspers’ claim that between the three axial regions “a profound mutual comprehension was possible from the moment they met. . . . [T]hey recognized that they were concerned with the same problems.” 7 To this Arnason responds as follows: “I do not think that the rest of the book does much to back up this astonishing statement, and it would be all too easy to marshal evidence against it from modern history.” 8 There is a globalizing potential in the various axial ideas as they come to expression within each civilization, Arnason agrees, but the history of encounters between these civilizations is complicated and is never superseded by the...