Abstract
While I want to retain a commitment to justice as inherently universal, the Axial Age proposes a plurality of historical forms for achieving such universality as a species-ethic. Karl Jaspers elaborated the concept of the Axial Age as an attempt to reset the initiation of modernity at the seminal 800–200 BCE dates. He also sought to integrate these distinct cultural heritages more deeply into the post-WWII, decentered, multi-polar, and non-Eurocentric onset of what he terms global philosophy. While the Axial Age remains a contested concept, Jaspers’ confidence in the prospect of boundless communication provides us with a linguistic medium for reorienting the roots of political theory. My focus on the universal role of the second person in each tradition offers an abiding constant even in light of my endorsement of multiple modernities as a necessary consequence of the Axial Age—stemming simultaneously from cultural elites in India, China, the Hebrew prophetic heritage, and Greek philosophy. As a philosophical complement to Jaspers and the growing social scientific literature on multiple modernities, I amend his views by highlighting three contemporary appropriations of his Axial thesis. These include Taylor’s probing genealogical analysis of secularity, Habermas’s proclamation of the onset of a postsecular age, and my own transcivilizational recasting of Rawls’ overlapping consensus. My defense of cosmoipolitan justice seeks agreement upon shared sets of species-ethical norms that nonetheless take distinct legal forms and divergent background justifications.
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Notes
- 1.
According to Thomassen’s analysis of the role of reflectivity in Jaspers’ philosophical methodology, ‘Karl Jaspers’ idea of the axial age and his search for ‘the origin and goal of history’ was directly related to his generation’s experience of a total collapse of order, and the subsequent search for order in the midst of the possibly most extreme hopelessness humanity has ever faced: Germany at the end of the Second World War….The reflexive exercise goes much beyond the experiences of the single person, although those experiences are indeed both real and vital, and absolutely necessary to understand. Jaspers himself repeatedly emphasized the centrality of reflexivitiy: he found it constitutive of the very spirit of the axial age period, but despite the enormous difficulties of his own historical moment he also believed in a ‘new historical consciousness’ of the present period….This all indicated that the search for a new historical-global perspective was intimately linked to an experience of a collapse of order; it implied a search for a perspective of the present as rooted in an understanding of human history taken in its widest depth and globality’ (Thomassen 2010, p. 331).
- 2.
Thomassen—in a move not surprising for a theorist of liminality—notes the general uniformity of axial ‘free-standing’ intellectuals emerging at the fringes of civilizations: ‘[R]eferring to the spatial co-ordinates, the axial ‘leaps’ all happened in in-between areas between larger civilizations, in liminal places: not at the centres, nor outside the reach of main civilizational centres but exactly at the margins, and that quite systematically so in the eastern Mediterranean, China and India’ (2010, p. 333–334).
- 3.
This reinforces the autobiographical imprint of Eric Voegelin’s early academic forays with the appeal of American pragmatism he perceived as a necessary alternative to the third-person objectivigating stance of dead-end positivism to which he was so deeply indoctrinated in his Austrian academic ties to Kelsen, Hayek, and others. However, McKnight also notes that Voegelin concedes too that pragmatism alone cannot exhaust the richer ontology needed to expand the scope of the domain of the political: ‘The ecumene becomes a field of human action, primarily the libido dominandi. Political action becomes conquest and expansion and sound political action is measured not as attunement to the arche but in utilitarian or pragmatic terms. So the ecumenic expansion which is potentially a great breakthrough in human consciousness, results in a contracted, deformed view of reality’ (McKnight 1975, p. 362).
- 4.
McKnight defines historiogenesis as follows: ‘its function is to move from the author’s present, back through mythic history to the beginning of the cosmos in order to align the social creation with the cosmic. The principle motive in historiogenesis is the same as in the order of mythospeculative constructions. It is an attempt to supply a lasting, eternal ground for social order which will be able to resist the corrosive, destructive flow of time’ (1975, p. 359).
- 5.
In his own more lengthy explanation, Voegelin characterizes historiogenesis in light of the participant perspective of concrete membership in a particular community of being that nonetheless attempts a mix of both mythic and social scientific speculation as to a society’s origins: ‘There is more to this classification than the possibility of defining historiogenesis by the rule of genus and specific difference. The recognition of the class discloses its full importance, if one remembers that gods and men, society and the cosmos exhaust the principle complexes of reality distinguished by cosmological societies as the partners in community of being. The complexes in their aggregate comprehend the whole field of being, and the four symbolisms enumerated form a corresponding aggregate covering this field. Through the addition of historiogenesis to the other three varieties [(1) gods and men, (2) society, and (3) the cosmos], the aggregate becomes the symbolism that is, in the language of cosmological myth, equivalent to a speculation on the ground of being in the language of noetic [rational/mental] consciousness’ (1974, p. 109).
- 6.
According to James Bohman’s neo-pragmatic and distinctly Habermasian social-scientific approach, ‘second-person approaches see interpretation as dependent on the right sort of performative attitude typical of ordinary conversation and upon complex practical abilities to triangulate behavior, intentions, and reference to the common world in which agents interact’ (‘The Importance of the Second Person,’ Boulder: Routledge, 2000, p. 224). In contrast to the continental overtones of Bohman’s explanation, throughout the remainder of the book I will also draw upon more recent analytic philosophies of the second person, particularly those of a neo-Thomistic and narrative bent. While those referenced tend to employ these rubrics of analysis upon Hebrew and Christian scriptural narratives, my project will attempt to employ the same sort of hermeneutic to the canonical scriptures of all of the great Axial traditions, particularly in my ensuing Chaps. 2 and 3. For example, Eleonore Stump describes the second person philosophical analysis of biblical texts from this narrative angle: ‘A story takes a real or imagined set of second-person experiences of one sort or another and makes its available to a wider audience to share. It does so by making it possible, to one degree or another, for a person to experience some of what she would have experienced if she had been an onlooker in the second-person experience represented in the story. That is, a story gives a person some of what she would have had if she had had unmediated personal interaction with the characters in the story while they were conscious and interacting with each other, without actually making her part of the story itself. The re-presenting of a second-person experience in a story thus constitutes a second-person account. It is a report of a set of second-person experiences that does not lose (at least not lose extremely) the distinctively second-person character of the experiences’(78). For a more comprehensive analysis of what she terms ‘second-person experiences,’ see her ‘Narrative and the Analysis of Persons,’ Chap. 4 in her Wandering in Darkness, Oxford, 2010, pp. 64–81; see especially pp. 77–80). For a more direct tie of the requisite socialization processes of the second person perspective to the philosophy of Aquinas, see Andrew Pinsent’s The Second Person Perspective in Aquinas’s Ethics: Virtues and Gifts (New York, Routledge, 2012). Pinsent’s work represents the book version of his original doctoral thesis written under the direction of Prof. Stump under the same title.
- 7.
Communicative action presupposes among each actor the cognitive, social, and moral capacity simultaneously to switch between observer and participant roles in the same communicative interaction. What the objective-theoretical perspective overlooks is our capacity to play participant role, and thus take ‘yes’ and ‘no’ stances upon the observed claims that social and empirical sciences make concerning the intentional states of the observed. Therefore the observer-theoretic perspective belies a basic pragmatic assumption of free consent that we must presuppose in attributing responsible moral action to the observed behaviors of others.
- 8.
In providing a micro-analysis of the discursive interaction of subjects for a postsecular pragmatic of discourse, as an axial constant across traditions—even when initially unsuccessful—each had historically overcome various material manifestations of civilizational crisis by encouraging diverse forms of reflexive contestation, protest, and periphery to center critiques over the social distribution of power and wealth (Eisenstadt 2003a, pp. 249-277).
- 9.
In Communication and the Evolution of Society, Habermas argues that a strict adherence to the objectivigating third-person perspective of the expert social scientist undermines both our cognitive learning potential and our moral-practical sensibilities: ‘If we are not free then to reject or to accept the validity claims bound up with the cognitive potential of the human species, it is senseless to want to “decide” for or against reason, for or against the expansion of the potential of reasoned action. For these reasons I do not regard the choice of the historical-materialist criterion of progress as arbitrary. The development of productive forces, in conjunction with the maturity of the forms of social integration, means progress in learning ability in both dimensions: progress in objectivating knowledge and in moral-practical insight’ (Habermas 1979, p. 177; see also Bellah 2011, pp. 573–574).
- 10.
Nussbaum has even granted religious and ritual praxis as among her basic list of capabilities (2011).
- 11.
Some of the confusion in terms has, to no fault of his own, stemmed from lax scholarly misunderstandings of Taylor’s A Secular Age that mistake his evocative title for the nuanced themes in the book. My view on Taylor’s ‘secular 3’ would be to place it already fully within the basis requirements needed for qualifying his seminal work as a discourse on the postsecular as much as or even more so than in line with classical secularization theory. Given the acknowledged reflexive dialect between the secular and reason in a postsecular context, Taylor’s focus on moral-ethical authenticity (secular 3) over church-state separation (secular 1) or demographic declines in belief indices (secular 2), and his account of fullness ascribed to the buffered self of the believer under conditions of secular 3, he could just as fittingly (but less provocatively) titled his book A Genealogical Account for How We Have Arrived at Our Current Postsecular Age.
- 12.
Yves Lambert points out that Jaspers even considered the prospect of hypothesizing a ‘second axial period’ that one might situate somewhere between my formulation of Axial 2.0 (multiple modernities) and Axial 3.0 (the postsecular age). She remarks that ‘Jaspers, while in fact considering modernity as being a new axial period, regarded the turn taken by modernity in the nineteenth century as the harbinger of a probable “second axial period” (Jaspers 1954, p. 38). He hesitated because globalization was not yet a widespread phenomenon when he first wrote this in 1949, although we can assume that this is the case today. Jaspers identified modernity with four fundamental distinguishing features: modern science and technology, a craving for freedom, the emergence of the masses on the historical stage (nationalism, democracy, socialism, social movements), and globalization’ (Lambert 1999, p. 305).
- 13.
As far as I can tell, actually, the closest equivalent to my view comes from the non-Anglo-American, non-Western, anti-colonial outlook masterfully espoused in the 2010 Hague Lectures by the Japanese jurisprudence of Yusuaki Onuma which he fittingly terms his transcivilizational perspective in his A Transcivilizational Perspective on International Law (2010).
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Bowman, J. (2015). Introduction: Why Cosmoipolitan Justice? Species-Ethics and the Competing Ecumene of the Axial Age. In: Cosmoipolitan Justice. Studies in Global Justice, vol 15. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-12709-5_1
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