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  1. Nevo's avatar

    I’d like to add on this: 1. Anyone who read a bit of the ancient Egyptian concept of Maat, that…

  2. Roger of Invisible America's avatar

    For me, the worry about anachronism still basically holds. But (as Hans Joas[1] might put it, and as Evan Thompson…

  3. Rollo Burgess's avatar

    I’ve read part 1 of this series (the one in which the axial age is covered); I would certainly not…

  4. Evan Thompson's avatar

    In general terms, Habermas takes the Axial Age to have introduced new theoretical attitudes that include second-order thinking (thinking about…

  5. Nevo's avatar

    You have Egyptian texts describing the equality of men as early as 2000BC. Henri Frankfurt has some tomb writings describing…

  6. Daniel Arvage Nagase's avatar

    I’m neither a scholar of the period nor a Habermasian. Yet it bears emphasis that Habermas (and the Frankfurt School,…

  7. C's avatar

    The idea of the “Axial Age” was introduced by Karl Jaspers. It’s been used by some anthropologists, intellectual historians, and…

Habermas on the “Axial age”

Brian Leiter

I was intrigued by this review by Andrew Buchwalter of volume 3 of Habermas’s huge history of philosophy. In particular, I was struck by Professor Buchwalter’s description of Habermas’s discussion of the so-called “Axial Age”:

Occurring in the period between 800 and 200 BCE, the Axial Age reflected the ascendance of the major world religions, including Confucianism, Taoism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Judaism, as well as classical Greek philosophy. Common to all these movements was an affirmation of principles and values central to the subsequent development principally of Western thought and culture. Among others, these included the idea of objective validity, the principle of the worth and equality of all individuals, a commitment to the welfare of humankind, and an expectation that human affairs be governed by binding norms and impartial standards of justice and morality.

The point about “objectivity validity” seems defensible, the rest seem to me an anachronistic projection of post-Stoic, post-Christian cosmpolitanism back into antiquity. Am I wrong? Do not comment unless you have scholarly knowledge of this period.

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9 responses to “Habermas on the “Axial age””

  1. Tammo Lossau

    Perhaps much of this becomes defensible, if we say that these things were up for discussion around that time. With respect to Chinese philosophy, I think we can say that Confucianism (as in Confucius and Mencius) on my best understanding affirms most of these things, although perhaps not so much the equality of all people. Daoism (as in the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi) does seem to affirm the equality of all people, but at least Zhuangzi rejects the “impartial standards of justice and morality” claimed by Confucianism, and also rejects objective validity (as do Western skeptics, and some slightly later Buddhists, on my view).

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    1. Rollo Burgess

      I’ve read part 1 of this series (the one in which the axial age is covered); I would certainly not claim ‘scholarly knowledge’ of the period – I’m not sure that nowadays many people are working scholars of a period of 600 years across multiple civilizations, and that is part of the point of this type of ambitious and sweeping work. I have no doubt experts in these disparate areas could dispute many of Habermas’s claims, but I do think that H, following Jaspers, makes a fascinating and compelling argument that these religions involved a qualititative break with the more limited and particularist belief systems that went before.

      Some of the features of this break do seem suspiciously, er, Habermasian… but I do think he’s onto something.

      Fundamentally, I’d guess not many scholars nowadays would dare write such a grand trilogy, or be taken seriously if they did. There’s plenty of detailed, careful, meticulous scholarship out there – there’s space for a bit of broad sweep and ambition too I think. (In fact thinking about this has inspired me to go back in for part 2; I took a break after the first…)

      Reply
  2. Mark

    Hope this is okay, just posting so I can subscribe to get actually knowledgeable people’s comments.

    Reply
  3. C

    The idea of the “Axial Age” was introduced by Karl Jaspers. It’s been used by some anthropologists, intellectual historians, and political theorists since then, but I doubt contemporary scholars of the periods or regions in question could take these kinds of sweeping generalizations seriously. The claim that this period represents a “revolution in human consciousness” strikes me pure hyperbole.

    Reply
  4. Daniel Arvage Nagase

    I’m neither a scholar of the period nor a Habermasian. Yet it bears emphasis that Habermas (and the Frankfurt School, more generally) has been heavily influenced not only by Jaspersm but also by Weber. We think today of Weber’s notion of disenchantment of the world primarily as the disenchantment of the world by *science*, but it should be noted that Weber thought that the process of disenchantment begins with *organized religion*, especially by displacing magical thinking. (Note that the organized religions named in the quoted paragraph were all studied by Weber in his *The Economic Ethics of the World Religions*, and it’s clear that his lens was precisely this process of rationalization.)

    Reply
  5. Nevo

    You have Egyptian texts describing the equality of men as early as 2000BC. Henri Frankfurt has some tomb writings describing the creation of the earth for the equal benefits of all men (Before Philosophy ch. 3)

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    1. Nevo

      I’d like to add on this:
      1. Anyone who read a bit of the ancient Egyptian concept of Maat, that corresponds to truth or justice*, will not see any qualitative difference with most parallel notions from the axial age bar for the ones investigated in Greek philosophy. This Egyptian tradition predates the axial age by over a thousand years.
      2. We have strong evidence from the Ancient Greek themselves that philosophy predates them, starting in Ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, or Gaul druids.
      3. This entire linear story of magic-religion-science popularised by Evan’s-Pritchard is of dubious foundations

      Reply
  6. Evan Thompson

    In general terms, Habermas takes the Axial Age to have introduced new theoretical attitudes that include second-order thinking (thinking about thinking) and universalistic perspectives on ethics and knowledge. He is relying not just on Karl Jaspers but also on the sociologist Robert Bellah, particularly his monumental work Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (Harvard University Press, 2011). (Habermas endorses this book on the back cover.) See also Bellah’s and Hans Joas’s co-edited volume The Axial Age and Its Consequences (Harvard University Press, 2012). Although one might quibble with the wording of Buchwalter’s description, I think Bellah’s work would generally support it.

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  7. Roger of Invisible America

    For me, the worry about anachronism still basically holds. But (as Hans Joas[1] might put it, and as Evan Thompson has) what it most directly targets is an apparently debatable paraphrase of Habermas rather than the key underlying point Habermas is trying to make. Habermas’s appeal to the so-called “Axial Age” is not, or at least need not be, the claim that “equality of all individuals,” “the welfare of humankind,” and “impartial standards of justice” were already sitting there, locked and loaded, as hand-ready commitments across the entire China/India/Israel/Greece conglomeration between roughly 800–200 BCE. A more defensible (and frankly more interesting, and even at moments more entertaining) thesis is that something like a shift in discursive posture becomes newly tenable: the emergence, as Evan Thompson has so helpfully noted, of reflexive stances that can take their own norms as objects of scrutiny (call it second-order thinking; or the opening of a space between validity and power; or the possibility of critique with genuinely universalizing intent). Of course, compared to Stoic or Christian cosmopolitanism, or (needless to say) to modern rights discourse, these are historically “thin” innovations. But thin here does not mean insignificant: genealogically speaking, they still matter, at least insofar as they alter what can be asked, what can be demanded, and what can be imagined as binding within (and sometimes across) particular forms of civil life.

    That said, the anachronism worry does not go away merely because one swaps “already possessed modern egalitarianism” for “began to argue in ways that later made modern egalitarianism thinkable”; it simply relocates. And this is exactly where Joas’s further caution really starts to gain traction: once “secular autonomous reason” is treated as the de facto arc of the story, the narrative begins to read later normative achievements back into earlier religious-moral transformational complexes, thereby masking plural trajectories, missed turns, and plain old contingency. Put differently: the deeper problem is not only the familiar Jaspers-style “Axial Age” hype; it is the linear-emancipation-narrative genre itself, where the present keeps sneaking into the past dressed like Kid Rock in a tuxedo. Hence the real methodological fault here is not that Habermas notices generative genealogical precedents; it is that, before we even notice it, the story can quietly harden into a quasi (dare I say it) “grand narrative”: religion “matures,” morality “rationalizes,” reason “autonomizes,” and thus we all end up, as if by the grace of Nero himself, luxuriating in the affordability of modernity.

    [1] Joas 2020: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0263276420957746

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