The Axial Turn

What Was It, and What Was Wrong With It?

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A few weeks ago I published two articles arguing that the Western Canon needs revision and that laid the groundwork for this project.[1][2] As expected, this drew fire from those who want to preserve the proto-liberal elements in it.

Typically, the argument went something like that the Canon is fine as it is, and who are we to question the greatest minds of all time anyway? Ironically, these canon-enjoyers disagree with most of the canonical authors, in that most of them wanted to reform what was considered received wisdom in their time. Petrarch and the Quattrocento aside, only a minority of the great thinkers of the past wanted to be more inclusive rather than less.

But most of you were receptive to the idea because in your gut you know that something really is wrong—at its very best, we can say that the Canon has failed to prevent the Current Year. If ideas matter, they have culminated in Rawls, Jenner, and Kendi. If they don’t matter, then reading the Canon is idle and pointless. Clearly it’s not, so something, somewhere, has gone wrong.

In our examination of the Canon, we discovered that those elements in it that have rendered the Current Year inevitable are its Axial elements. We’ve referenced the Axial Age on this blog several times, and in this article we will explain just what that was and why it matters. As we will discover, it matters a great deal—in fact, opposing liberalism on principled grounds is impossible without understanding how ancient its roots are.

The Axial Age is a term coined by psychiatrist Karl Jaspers to describe a millennium-long turn from one mode of life to another (hence, “axial”). To understand this turn, we must first understand what it turned away from.

From the beginning of time up until about 3,000 years ago,¹ man lived in an ethnic society. Man’s relations were entirely given to him; the thought of choosing his own code made about as much sense as choosing his own father. Man belonged to a tribe; this formed his horizon of care, and outside of this horizon were something less than men, and closer to extra-terrestrials. Man was bound to the soil; on it alone stood his home, his property, his gods, his family, his salvation—all these were for him synonymous. Man’s life was essentially public and social; the ultimate judge of his worth was the divine, but his effective judge was the community of his fellows. Man’s norms were governed by specific and particular commands; he knew nothing of precepts, only ad hoc injunctions to do (or not do) this, in that situation. Man’s punishment or reward was immanent and immediate; the favours of the divine were to be gained or lost in this world, and how he fared in this world was evidence of his ultimate standing. Man’s life, just as the cosmos, moved in cycles; change was his ultimate reality, a joyous, ever-living fire, in measures being kindled and in measures going out.

But as change is the rule, this could not go on forever. For reasons that go beyond the scope of this article,² this could not last, and something new would emerge. At least, for a time. This something new was the Axial turn.

The Axial turn is characterized by a number of changes, but at the risk of oversimplifying, we can class these changes generally under the head of transcendence. As Jaspers describes it:

The new element that appeared in this epoch was that man became aware of existence as a whole, of his self, and of his limitations. He experienced the awesomeness of the world and his own weakness. He raised radical questions and, in his quest for liberation and redemption, came face to face with the abyss. While gaining consciousness of his limitations, he set himself the highest aims; he experienced the absolute in the depth of selfhood and in the clarity of transcendence.³

This unity (Jaspers’ calls the Axial Age “a base for the unity of mankind”) and liberation sound awfully familiar to those of us attuned to the dangers of Enlightenment.

Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me. I do not seek or conjecture either of them as if they were veiled obscurities or extravagances beyond the horizon of my vision; I see them before me and connect them immediately with the consciousness of my existence.⁴

In this turn away from tradition and toward something radically new, man transcends the merely particular, embodied, and thrown. His very existence merges with the universe itself—borders between self and other disappear, and his subjective apprehension of the moral law within him becomes the universalized, “rational” law of the cosmos. Man and cosmos merge in an indistinguishable unity.

In speculative thought man soared to the level of Being, which he grasped without duality; subject and object disappeared, and opposites became one. The objective formulations of speculative thought express, ambiguously and in a manner open to misunderstanding, what man in his highest flights experiences as a discovery of himself within the whole of Being, or a unio mystica, a merging with the godhead, or else a transformation of the self into an instrument of God’s will, or a consciousness of the self as transcending the arbitrary particularity of the hic et nunc.⁵

This transcendence erases—as it must—all borders, distinctions, and boundaries. In it no nationality is possible; there is no Zoroastrian, Greek, Jati, or clansman, but all are one in the universal Prajapati. This proved a useful paradigm for the rise of empire seen variously in India, Iran, China, and the West during the Axial Age.

To get an idea of exactly what concrete changes occurred in the Axial Age, we can turn to a specific example, the paradigm of what came later elsewhere: Zoroastrianism.

Zoroaster’s date cannot be established with any precision, but he lived some time around 1000 BCE in what is now Iran. Trained as a priest from an early age, at thirty he received a revelation when, on drawing water for the sacred haoma ceremony, he envisioned a shining being named Vohu Manah (“Good Purpose”) that led him to the high god Ahura Mazda (“Lord of Wisdom”) that called him to preach the gospel to all mankind that Mazda was the one, eternal, uncreated god and creator of all things. In this vision he likewise beheld Angra Mainyu (“Chaotic Spirit”), the equally uncreated, ignorant, and malignant primordial twin of Mazda, locked in eternal conflict until Frashokereti, the renovation of the world when Mazda will prevail and all will be in perfect unity with it. Until then, it is the lot of man to make an ultimate choice between the force of good in Mazda, or the force of evil in Mainyu. There is no third position—all the other gods of the Indo-Iranian pantheon are conceived as mere emanations of these two.

Even from this thumbnail sketch of Zoroastrianism, the outlines of the Axial turn emerge clearly:

Invention of the individual:

Man is no longer wholly circumscribed by his relationship to others, but free to go his own way. No longer is the tribe his world and his judge; he is radically liberated from these narrow concerns, but this liberation is only potential. The man himself must actuate his own liberty.

Introduction of choice:

Man must choose what’s right rather than it being handed to him by authority. We have here the introduction of conscience, where the burden of judging matters of ultimate moral weight is placed upon the newly-minted individual. Although Zoroaster tells us which of the options is light and which is dark, the individual is thrown into an existentialist crisis, where he alone is final judge between these alternatives—whether to follow Mazda or Mainyu.

Propositional religion:

Owing to this choice, emphasis moves from carrying out commands to accepting propositions. The essential project of religion has changed from governing action to governing belief.⁶ Morality in the form of a command was originally a matter of apt/inapt, of being for this man and not for that; now in its propositional form it has become a matter of true/false. And since what is true is true as well for Zoroaster as for a tadpole, we get the rise of universalism.

De-pragmatization of religion:

The move from right action to right belief shifts the centre of religious life from external observance to internal attitude. Religion still involves ritual and exoteric observance, but this has been subordinated to doctrine and esoteric “inwardness”—and this moves us from shame culture to guilt culture. No longer is the community the effective judge of moral worth, but each man is his own judge. This is necessary to detach man from his tribal affiliation, but to complete this revolution, something more is needed.

Importance of the hereafter:

The consequences of “universally” immoral choices follow primarily in the next life. This constrains even the powerful who are embarrassed of their power and who cast their eye away from this world and away from the consequences of abandoning their traditions. Suddenly the powerful no longer feel themselves justified by virtue of their power; Axiality loosens their confidence that they have the Mandate of Heaven. We have a middle-low vs. high on the horizon.⁷

Enfranchisement of the masses:

With the powerful no longer secure in their divine right, the new revolutionary priesthood further undermines “class collaboration” in order to weaponize the plebeian. Universalism, de-emphasis on lineage, and the promise of the hereafter bring the plebeian under the aegis of religion, setting him on an even footing with the powerful—maybe even above him.

Advent of linear history:

To ensure the permanence of this revolution, “year-zero” thinking and eschatology are introduced. The world itself, rather than being eternal or cyclical, moves in a direction and toward a final, permanent state. Every advance of the new revolutionary religion, however small, is taken as evidence of the inexorable tide of history “bending toward” its foretold end. We have here an engine for the centralization demanded by imperial politics.

De-territorialization of religion:

In order to accelerate this centralization, the domesticity of religion is minimized and the sacred precinct moves from the home to the imperial centre. Tribal affiliations are looked upon with suspicion, and the distant and abstract are privileged above the familiar and concrete. No longer is man’s salvation to be found in blood and soil, but in an imperial cult whose authority eclipses that of the ancient hearth fire.

De-nominalization of prayer:

This centralization is completed by the centralization of the pantheon itself. Ritual formulae move from being hortatory and supplicative, appealing to a god with agency, to mechanistic and agentive. The words of prayer move the gods almost mechanistically; the words have power in and of themselves and the gods, stripped of will, are compelled by them, tending to monotheism and ultimately, to atheism.

The parallels between this and Enlightenment liberalism will be obvious to the reader; they were obvious to Jaspers himself, who positively gushes with enthusiasm about it.

Mankind is still living by what happened in the axial age, by what it created and what it thought. In all its later flights mankind returns to that age and gathers new fire. The return to this beginning is the ever-recurring event in China, India, and the West; the renaissances that have brought new spiritual surges have consisted in the recollection and reawakening of the possibilities of the axial age.⁸

It falls outside the scope of this article to critique the Axial turn—this has been done in other articles and the reader will already have seen some of the problems in the turn simply from its clear articulation. At present we are only concerned with that articulation, with setting forth what has until recently only been implicit, what has been occluded by the pernicious idea of transcendentalism as deep and primordial rather than novel and superficial. But the reader’s attention will be directed toward two points.

First, the Axial Age never ended—we are still in it. In fact, what we call modernity really began ca. 1000 BCE. This will be a hard pill to swallow, and may even invite snickering from certain quarters. But scratch below a superficial analysis of modernity as “secularism”, “disenchantment”, “mercantilism”, “commoditization”, or “instrumentalization”, and you see that all of these things are really different ways of describing the Axial turn, just broken apart into its various logical conclusions.

Second, what came before the Axial turn was never superseded, only relegated to an inferior status. The pre-Axial is still with us the way that the building’s foundation is still with us, even if a particularly ugly edifice which invites termites has been built atop it. Any serious canon-enjoyer must admit that the pre-Axial is and always will be sovereign, will always be the deepest and most important layer of our cultural life. Even Jaspers himself admitted as much.

If the axial age takes on significance according to the depth of our immersion in it, the question arises: is this age and its creations a criterion for all that has happened since? [...] For all their greatness and uniqueness, does not Virgil pale before Homer, and Augustus before Solon?⁹

Our project of Canon revision is simply to formalize what Jaspers and any serious student of culture already knows, and to throw aside those elements that have rendered a Homer or a Solon¹⁰ impossible today.

1. The beginning of the Axial Age varies in different places.

2. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25496963/

3. Karl Jaspers, The Axial Age of Human History: A Base for the Unity of Mankind, 1953.

4. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 1788.

5. Jaspers, 1953.

6. We could say that objectivity moves from right to truth. Even if man receives his beliefs, those beliefs can only have been accepted (whether by him or his forefathers) by denying authority—man thereby becomes the highest authority.

7. Middle-low vs. high is discussed in the work of Chris Bond, taken from Jouvenel, as the way in which an intermediary class effects a revolution against the sovereign.

8. Jaspers, 1953.

9. Jaspers, 1953.

10. Jaspers would have been better to put Draco in place of Solon.