At some point there was a new emphasis on the person in the Ancient Near East. Karl Jaspers, the German-American philosopher, proposed soon after World War II that there had been in the first millennium bce between 800 and 200 an important change in the way some elites viewed themselves and their duties in the world, and this period was one in which, in many civilizations, human thought turned as on an axle in a new direction; he called it the Axial Age. He built on the perception, chronologically indisputable, that a number of seminal thinkers lived at roughly the same time and may have been responding to similar environmental changes or political crises, even though it seems very unlikely that there was direct communication among all their cultures. Jaspers strove for a broad view that did not entirely focus on European or proto-European developments (Jaspers 1968 German 1949).
A. Assmann has stressed the close connection of Jaspers’ work to his own times and especially the trauma of Naziism. She sees his work as an incantation against such totalitarian state forms, and Jaspers sought to find ‘‘the human being as an autonomous individual’’ (A. Assmann 1989).
The most revolutionary of Jaspers’ suggested thinkers was the Buddha, living in North India as early as 624 bce or as late as 368 bce, a young prince who rejected the glories of the world as unreal. He argued that the teaching of eternal rebirth, now ensconced in Hinduism, was wrong, and enlightenment and escape from rebirth was possible for everyone. Instead of seizing on the possibility of liberation for himself, he remained to teach humans the disciplines of liberation. Although Buddhism has since died out in India, it retains enormous influence in southeast Asia and has clearly affected the way millions think about their lives.
The most conservative was Confucius, 551-479 bce, who refused to speculate about gods which had been earlier revered in china but asserted that the way for a person to become virtuous was to memorize the ancient poetry. One thereby learned filial piety, the only virtue that really counted, and humility which allowed one to serve others. Laotse, the founder of Taoism, living in the 300s bce, argued that paradoxical folk wisdom could be used to guide one’s life and the state.
Zoroaster in the Iranian highlands around 1000 bce saw the world as a struggle between a good god and a bad god. The duty of the individual was to align oneself with the good god and struggle against the bad. Zoroaster was taking over some elements of earlier religious practice, but he saw his revelation as new.
The 600 years Jaspers selected had many formative thinkers and poets in the Greekspeaking world. The philosophers we call pre-Socratic, because they lived before Socrates, lived between about 600 and 400 bce. They seem especially to fit the view that old orders were being criticized and new formulations tried.
In the Hebrew-speaking area this was the time of the prophets from whom we have writings from about 750 to about 300 bce. Their political and religious situations varied, but perhaps their message may be summarized as the idea that individual Israelites ought to concentrate not on the traditional sacrificial cult but on their own ethical action, especially in regard to the poor as in Micah 6:8.
All of these Axial Age thinkers were of central importance for their respective cultures, and they all argued for the exaltation of the individual. Jaspers defines what he thinks happened in this way: ‘‘Consciousness became once more conscious of itself, thinking became its own object.’’ The ‘‘Mythical Age’’ came to an end, and ‘‘The Greek, Indian, and chinese philosophers were unmythical in their decisive insights, as were the prophets in their ideas of God.’’ Religion came to focus less on mythical stories and more on the demands of norms on persons, and consequently ‘‘Human beings dared to rely on themselves as individuals’’ (Jaspers 1968: 2). These statements appear to be reasonable for the Greeks with which Jaspers was most familiar and whom he and his discipline of philosophy saw as precursors. And Confucius was not interested in myth; Zoroaster, in contrast, created what appears to be a new myth of how the world works. It is true nonetheless that each tradition had new or renewed demands to make upon the individual for right action, with the possible exception of the Greek. There an individual philosopher might be trying to get to an idea of right action, but there were apparently no new norms that the philosophers were moving toward. In the Biblical material one might argue that the writing prophets had a new and more individualistic conception of how the person should behave, and, as we saw above, how the person would be judged.
Jaspers was not a historian. He said that he expounded an empirical fact, that these great figures all lived at roughly the same time, but he did not try to understand whether there was a single thread running through their work (A. Assmann 1989). Later historians have looked at aspects of the changes in the first millennium, but they have not tried to test the actuality of Jaspers’ suggestion (Schwartz 1975; Eisenstadt 1986). Jaspers himself points out that others had seen the synchronisms of the Axial Age philosophers before him, but they had not seen the significance of the facts (1968: 8-9). He draws a stark distinction between pre-historical unselfconsciousness and historical consciousness, but later concludes that there is no evidence of any transformation since the advent of writing (248). Others have stressed that there is good evidence that people long before the Axial Age perceived the contrast between norm and reality that Jaspers found in the Axial Age thinkers (J. Assmann 1990: 72-3). It could be that the Axial Age thinkers ratified moves toward an emphasis on the individual that had been going on for a long time in their cultures.
World History
