In the 1st millennium BC there was an astonishing development: seemingly independently of each other, great personalities emerged from the shadow of prehistoric times in the most diverse parts of the world. It was not tyrannical rulers who had their names and glories immortalized in stone, but the first philosophers and religious founders in human history. Their teachings have survived the millennia to this day.
While philosophy developed in Greece through thinkers such as Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Socrates or Plato and art also flourished, Confucius and Laozi also spread revolutionary thoughts at the other end of the world, in China. In India, scholars from Hinduism developed the Upanishads, a collection of philosophical writings, and Siddhartha Gautama founded Buddhism. At the same time, Judaism finally became a monotheistic religion, under the impression of the Babylonian captivity and the prophecies of the Old Testament prophets. This was the first time an abstract image of God was created.
Was it just a coincidence that these events, which were significant in the world historical, occurred almost parallel in different places, or was there more behind it? The German philosophers and psychiatrists Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) also did not go to this question. In 1949 he published the book "From the origin and goal of history". In it he shaped for the era around 500 BC. BC or roughly between 800 and 200 BC. The concept of the "axis time".
Jaspers wanted to prove that it was precisely this historical phase that had a unique significance for the spiritual development of mankind. It is even the "axis" around which the entire history of the world revolves. From what happened then, what was created and thought then, humanity lives to this day," writes the philosopher. In each of its new upswings, it returns reminiscent of that Axial Age, allowing itself to be rekindled from there."
A noteworthy period in human history?
For Jaspers, the axis time was nothing less than the birth of the actual, modern human being. In several cultures in parallel, a breakthrough would have been made and the world view that had previously been predominated by myths and superstitions. "The new of this age is (...) that people of being in the whole, themselves and their limits become aware." Myths were pushed back in favor of reason, man began to reflect on themselves and the world Jaspers was convinced that the basic categories in which we still think today.
The discovery that around the 6th century BC there was an impressive density of pioneering personalities around the world was not new. Almost 180 years before Jaspers, the French orientalist Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron (1731–1805) was the first to say something similar in his studies on the Iranian religious founder Zarathustra, whom he – erroneously – dated to the 6th century BC: This century could "be regarded as a remarkable epoch in the history of the human species". Anquetil-Duperron continues: "At that time, a kind of revolution took place in nature, which produced geniuses in several parts of the earth who were to set the tone for the universe."
From this thought, Jaspers developed a scientific thesis with a catchy name. However, he could not give a satisfactory explanation for the simultaneity of the events. The philosopher spoke of a "riddle" and "mystery", called "common sociological conditions", which, perhaps, were especially beneficial for intellectual creativity, as the "simplest explanation".
For him, the consequences that arise from this observation were ultimately the decisive factor: the world history that started with the axis time has three independent roots with Greece including Israel, India and China. Accordingly, nobody can claim the sole origin of civilization - or even historically justify superiority. In the axis time, the philosopher saw the proof that a universal human spirit worked in history. And in the 1st millennium BC BC would have broken in different places.
There is no elitism among the people.
Anquetil duperron had already derived consequences for the present from his discovery. In India, where the Frenchman lived for his research for several years, he had become a passionate opponent of Eurocentrism, slave trade and colonialism. As a cosmopolitan and child of education, he concluded from the simultaneous occurrence of great intellectual innovations at various ends in the world that all cultures are equivalent. Anquetil duperron rejected every hierarchy among the peoples.
Jaspers, too, was concerned with drawing lessons from recent history. The Heidelberg scholar had spent National Socialism with his Jewish wife in internal emigration. Shortly before the end of the war, the Nazis had decided to send him to a concentration camp. He escaped internment only by the arriving U.S. troops.
After the catastrophe of the Second World War and the collapse of all European values by the Nazi regime, Europe had lost the right to a primacy in the world in the philosopher's eyes. "Gone is the European arrogance, the self-confidence from which the history of the West was once called world history, foreign cultures were brought to museums of ethnology, were regarded as an object of exploitation and curiosity," Jaspers expressed in a lecture as early as 1946.
Europe's culture is a rare occurrence.
The Axial Age was ideally suited to break up the Eurocentric view of history and become the »classic of a globalized humanity«, as the Egyptologist Jan Assmann puts it in his book »Axial Age – An Archaeology of Modernity« from 2018. » In this open horizon of a globalized cultural memory," Assmann writes, "Europe no longer appears as the one origin, but only as a local manifestation of a global intellectual breakthrough." The revelation of a universal human spirit in the past could be interpreted in this sense as a commitment to the future to act henceforth as a united humanity.
But Jaspers understood this revelation above all as a call to understand the other and to overcome narrow-mindedness, hatred and violence. And it was the best means for him to take action against claims of absoluteness, for example, to make a religion the only true one. After all, the Axis Period proves "that God has historically shown himself in multiple ways and has opened up many paths to himself".
After Jasper's' thesis initially only found modest reverberation, scientists from the 1970s began to take up his idea and continue to spin it. The concept of axis time subsequently became a fixed epoch name for the period between 800 and 200 BC. Chr.
Nevertheless, there was no lack of criticism from the beginning. With his fixation on the said period, Jaspers would exclude founding figures such as Pharaoh Akhenaten, Jesus or Mohammed from the great leap of mankind. And comparable breakthroughs have occurred again and again both before and after the Axial Age, Assmann complains. In addition, the fundamental question arose as to what ultimately Buddha, the prophets of the Old Testament and the pre-Socratic philosophers have in common – except that they lived at about the same time.
Many accused Jaspers of only keeping an eye on the elite strata of the societies of that time. For him, only the great individual personalities had heralded a turning point in time. However, their work says little about the generally prevailing attitudes of the time.
History lacks a purpose and a sense.
Researchers now see some of the foundations of Jaspers' thesis as outdated. The scholar assumed that the Axial Age cultures existed largely isolated from each other. However, archaeological finds prove that there were already manifold relations between the Mediterranean and China in the 6th century BC. The fact that this could also have led to an exchange of knowledge calls into question the thesis of parallel developments, which take place completely independently of each other.
In the end, Jaspers' idea was absurd at its core. The German philosopher, marked by the horrors of war and exclusion, had entered with a new, universalistic view of history: he wanted to replace the dominant European perspective with a global perspective. But even the basic idea of the Axis Era was based on the idea that history had a meaning and a goal. An idea that was inspired by a Christian and Jewish worldview.
Likewise, the motive arises that there are turns in times, a typical occidental tradition, as Assmann has shown: »For thousands of years, Europe has lived in the sign of the time axis, before and after, the large, all -changing turn: from polytheism to monotheism, from paganism to Christianity , from myth to the logos. ”The axis time was ultimately the attempt to define a all -important turn for the whole world in which the whole humanity would have shared.
Why Egypt and Mesopotamia were excluded from the time of the axis
Ultimately, the axis time was a construct. Because Jaspers has excluded all historical figures from the outset that did not meet his conditions. For example, with this criterion: "Man becomes aware of the whole, self and his borders," Jaspers defined a characteristic of the axis time. This was done because man developed a reflexive and reason -gifted thinking. And because one questioned its previous worldviews - for example, whether the traditional myth stories could actually have happened.
Jaspers' criteria, however, were fed by Western intellectual history. He thus dropped the great civilizations of antiquity in Egypt and Mesopotamia through the cracks. In his opinion, they were characterized by a "magical religion without philosophical enlightenment, without the urge to redeem, without breaking through into freedom before the borderline situations". They formed a "world that became the basis of the Axial Age, but perished in it and through it," writes the philosopher. They only have a universal-historical significance because the actors of the Axial Age have learned from them and have grown from them. Jaspers included all those cultures that neither formed a foundation of the axial breakthrough nor built on it into the category of "primitive peoples" without history.
Dabei würden Kulturen, die der Philosoph aussortierte, aus seinen Kategorien entsprechen. Das fand eine internationale Forschergruppe in den vergangenen Jahren heraus. Sie stellte die Achsenzeit erneut auf den Prüfstand. Dafür zapfte sie eine gigantische Datenbank an: Seshat - Global History Databank. Das Onlinearchiv hat Daten zu rund 450 Kulturen gespeichert, die bis in die Zeit um 4000 v. Chr. zurückreichen. Das Team um Jenny Reddish vom Complexity Science Hub Vienna, einem Forschungsverein in Wien, und Daniel Hoyer vom George Brown College in Toronto durchsuchte die Datenbank nach Zeiten und Orten, die den Kriterien der Achsenzeit entsprechen. 2019 veröffentlicht sie ihre Erkenntnisse in dem Buch «Seshat Geschichte des Achsenzeitalters".
One result of the researchers was: Religion and law changed in Egypt and in the anatolian kingdom of the Hittiter at the end of the 2nd millennium BC. BC long before Jaspers' axis time. "The data show that" axial "features appeared repeatedly," explains Hoyer in a press release. »This happened in many parts of the world and at their own pace, in some cases much earlier than 800, in others much later than 200 BC. BC, Hoyer suspects these developments, according to Hoyer, that the companies had become increasingly complex.
Jaspers' thesis not only contradicts the known historical facts, but the philosopher also excluded suitable cultures. Thus, the project to gain an inclusive and non-Eurocentric perspective on history had already failed in theory. "The 'European arrogance' explicitly rejected by Jaspers is obviously at work in his project to evaluate all cultures and societies according to a single standard of rationality," says cultural scientist Aleida Assmann in an anthology on the Axial Age from 1992. Ultimately, Jaspers wanted to find common ground. But he ignored cultural peculiarities. "The desire for a royal road to the human core has led to disregard, if not abhorrence, of traditions and environmental conditions," writes Aleida Assmann.
A thesis ought to integrate humanity
Jaspers' thesis of the Axial Age was nourished by a longing. He hoped for a humanity that saw itself as a unit, acted cosmopolitan and humanistic. To this end, the philosopher wanted to create a point of reference in the past where humanity could "rekindle itself". But how was this supposed to work with a thesis that wanted to force unique historical processes into a scientific construct? As such – and not as a "fact", as Jaspers put it – most experts judge the Axial Age today.
Others go even further and accuse the thinker of having ultimately created exactly what he actually wanted to devalue with his philosophy of history as irrational and unfashionable: a myth. Jan Assmann also sees it that way. For him, the Axis Period is one of the "most powerful myths of modernity", along with Sigmund Freud's Oedipus complex and Max Weber's thesis on the disenchantment of the world. And like them, this myth could probably only arise on the basis of Christian-Jewish traditions of thought.
