What do Confucianism, Daoism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, and Greek’s classical philosophies have in common?
Consider some of the relevant dates:
Confucius: 551-479 BCE
Laozi: late 6th century-5th century BCE
Buddha: 6th or 5th century BCE
Vedic period (Hindu synthesis): 500-200 BCE
Zoroaster: 6th century BCE
Era of the great Judaic prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, etc.): 8th to 5th century BCE
Heraclitus (Presocratic philosopher): late 6th-5th century BCE
Plato: 427-348 BCE
See the pattern? At least at first glance, all these thinkers (and many others), as well as the religious-philosophical movements they inspired, got started somewhere across the Eurasian continent in a period roughly going from 800 to 200 BCE. This period is often referred to as the Axial Age, after a term proposed by German philosopher Karl Jaspers in a book he published in 1949: The Origin and Goal of History. The term itself is a direct translation of the German Achsenzeit, the “axis” being the geographical line connecting the Mediterranean, India, and China, since Eurasia extends largely on a east-west, rather than north-south, direction.
Other thinkers, including Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron in the 18th century, Victor von Strauß in 1859, Ernst von Lasaulx in 1870, and John Stuart Stuart-Glennie in 1873, had advanced similar notions, but Jaspers more fully and organically elaborated the idea. He wrote:
“Confucius and Lao-Tse were living in China, all the schools of Chinese philosophy came into being, including those of Mo Ti, Chuang Tse, Lieh Tzu and a host of others; India produced the Upanishads and Buddha and, like China, ran the whole gamut of philosophical possibilities down to materialism, scepticism and nihilism; in Iran, Zarathustra taught a challenging view of the world as a struggle between good and evil; in Ancient Israel the 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, of Thucydides and Archimedes. Everything implied by these names developed during these few centuries almost simultaneously in China, India and the West.” (Origin and Goal of History, p. 2)
He also described the Axial Age as “an interregnum between two ages of great empire, a pause for liberty, a deep breath bringing the most lucid consciousness” (p. 51). Another philosopher, Eric Voegelin, referred to this period as The Great Leap of Being. Historian David Christian commented that the first universal religions, as he calls them, appeared in the age of the first universal empires and of the first all-encompassing trading networks, thus expanding the focus from moral philosophy to broader social and cultural transformations. Student of comparative religions Karen Armstrong devoted a book length treatment to the Axial Age where she attempts to extend the effects of that period to cover both Christianity and Islam (I’m not too impressed with her book, you can read my mini-review here). Even author Gore Vidal was attracted by the idea of an Axial Age, which he uses in his novel Creation, featuring a Persian adventurer that embodies the complexities and contradictions of the time.
Not everyone is onboard, of course. Historian Diarmaid MacCulloch said in 1986 that Jaspers’s thesis is “a baggy monster, which tries to bundle up all sorts of diversities over four very different civilizations,” and Old Testament scholar Iain Provan’s criticized the idea in his Convenient Myths: The Axial Age, Dark Green Religion, and the World That Never Was (2013).
Assuming, however, that something like the Axial Age is a useful historical construct, the next question is why it happened. Here too opinions diverge wildly, though the various proposed explanations aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive. They include:
1. Material conditions and socioeconomic changes: Some scholars suggest that urbanization, technological advances (especially iron metallurgy), the rise of monetary economies, and increased literacy created conditions favorable for intellectual breakthroughs and philosophical inquiry;
2. Political transformations: The shift from tribal societies to the early states, with their new forms of political organization and problems, may have prompted new ways of thinking about authority, justice, and social order;
3. Cultural exchange: Increased trade and political contacts between civilizations facilitated the exchange of ideas across regions, possibly contributing to parallel developments (it’s worth noting that ancient Romans imported silk from China, for instance!);
4. Psychological evolution: Karl Jaspers proposed a kind of cognitive shift or psychological evolution in human consciousness itself, enabling more abstract and reflective thought;
5. Response to crises: Some theories suggest these intellectual movements emerged as responses to social crises, warfare, and destabilization of traditional structures, pushing thinkers to question existing orders;
6. Elite competition: The development of new intellectual traditions has been linked to competition among elites for cultural authority in increasingly complex societies.
Of course, religiously inclined thinkers have even advanced the possibility that the Axial Age was the result of direct divine intervention, though by which and how many gods isn’t clear. As usual, I follow facts, not mythology, so we’ll set those aside.
It is also reasonable to ask why whatever happened took place in Eurasia and not in Africa or the Americas. There I’m inclined toward the sort of explanation advanced by Jared Diamond in his Guns, Germs, and Steel: the eco-geography of these regions is different, in ways that led to a delayed development of the sort of societal structures that were necessary to trigger the Axial transformations.
