Axial Age and Islam
Axial Age and Islam – Jaspers - Weber – Eisenstadt (a lecture based on earlier Published material*, Tehran January 2016)
I
Introductory Remarks:
To speak about Carl Jaspers’ concept of Axial Age is to be aware of the continued presence of Max Weber in Jaspers taught. Jaspers never denied that his philosophy was a prolonged discussion of Max Weber both were deriving from the marked background of the intellectual Protestantism which was cherished in the houses of their parents although they were in quite different parts of Germany’s North.
As with many thinkers of their time at the end of the 19th century in booming Germany, Jaspers and Weber shared serious concerns and doubts about Friedrich Nietzsche’s attack on Christianity and the ethics of Protestantism. As settled by Nietzsche the flowed concept of love and instrumental moral reasoning are the main sources of modern society and individual character building therein:
Their responses to Nietzsche’s “genealogy of morality” came in different ways and at different times. Weber’s “Protestant ethics and the spirit of Capitalism” came short in the period before the all-break of WW1. It entailed an ambivalent and at the same time positive judgement of the rewarding effects of Protestantism and Christian puritanism. However this book at least for Weber did not contribute in ending his doubts toward average Christian love ethics. Weber shortly before his death in 1920 finally come to the idea of ‘mystische Liebesethik’ as a potential source of resolving the social breaks of modernity and of transcending the ethics of resentment which as Nietzsche claimed were governing the character of man. Jaspers after a long period of reflection published in 1937 his book on Nietzsche und das Christentum in which he attempted to understand modern individualism as the result of the event of Christ and proclaimed that the world as a whole would move on to shaping an in itself lonely modern subject. Jaspers, as Weber before him, took Nietzsche serious. However, he could not share his Nihilism. While Nietzsche claimed that modern man was devaluating his own nature, and with it, all living nature, we should take his critique as a wake-up call for positive action. Jaspers, while rejecting Nihilism, here, propagated the preservation of the external world as a positive human task. He was however at the time doomed to silence by Hitler’s Fascism; he woke up in 1945 with his new Philosophy of human life. (follow up:)
II
Carl Jaspers was the German political philosopher of 1945:
In 1945 Carl Jaspers after the shattering events of the second World War marked the beginning of the new era, demanding something new a breaking history which he thought was decisive for the future of Europe; signifying the conditions as much as the potentials of the “new humanism”: the end of twelve years of Hitler’s third Reich and German Fascist rule and its hegemonic dominance of European affairs. From there on, as his biographer claim Jaspers turn into a political philosopher, I wish to make you aware that is what is known as the Jasper’s Axial Age theory can be fully understood in terms of the break of 1945 which shaped recent modern European and Western history.
I also wish to make you aware that Jaspers Axial Age is crucial to understand what happened in Islam and the West in recent Years.
III
The Millenium of Transcendence – 800 B.C. – 200 A.C (a theory of of the history of structural formation rather than of the rise of the subject in human development)
Jaspers’ political and historical philosophy in the years from 1945 to 1950 is a complete expression of the condition of “Neuanfang”, a new beginning and of his will to contribute to a complete humanitarian transformation of Europe and the West. For him this meant to actualise a new essence of the idea of humanity and the human based in their origin. Two main questions are invoked by Jaspers. First he reflects on how to appropriate anew the ideals of human formation and education from the classical, the Greek tradition. Second, he asks, how to reconstruct the concept of man from its origins.
Jaspers links both questions to the breakthroughs in history and the ascendance of new visions of transcendence from 800 B.C to 200 A.C. Thus Jaspers operating on Germany, Europe and the West, his pledge for the renewal of modern history after the Second World War, stands in close connection to his overall political and historical philosophy, which included what happened in China, India, Palestine and Greece to the millennium of transcendence his theory of the Axial Age. He invokes a decisive step to the inherent understanding of ‘world’ and ‘ethos’ beyond bondage to one single religion or nation.
However, in his explicit discussions of Axial Age, Jaspers’ speechlessness about Islam (the religion after) and Judaism (the religion long before) is painstakingly evident. Today this is difficult to understand. In as he formulates world history on a new stage, the exclusion of Islam and Judaism from his reflections on World and ‘history’, can only be interpreted as an inner contradiction to his own project. In connection with his sort of absolutist focus on ‘Abendland’, the West and the origins, this eclipse of Islam and Judaism can only be explained as a sort of implicit recognition of both, seen as being – sort of silently – part of the pre/post-axial evolution of the West.
Jaspers silence on Islam can only be understood the within context of his task program for post-Hitler Germany and Europe, and his specific type of self-reflexivity with respect to Nazism, secularism and Christianity after the Catharsis. The failure of Science and of German ‘Geist’ in preventing it, sets the limits for Jaspers’ reflection , his focus on Christianity, Hinduism and Confucianism in terms of cultural history and his view on America, Europe and Russia in terms of world politics lead to a narrow self-reflective deadlock. And even in reflecting Science and Geist, Jaspers political philosophy, as Sternberger remarks, limits itself largely to the vast “Feld der Ämter”, the field of offices. In other words Institution-Building, rather than the rise of the Subject were his themes.
We should note here that exactly this problem of an attempt of inner affirmation of Western ‘office’, technically responsible state officials functional structures and the limited spirit of those who maintain them, that could be traced as a great hinder-ness in viewing the life attitudes in non-western configurations as they came to be setup in Islamic countries. These limitations are as well denominating the configurative points of self-affirmation and distinction turned against the non-modern world which are also present in the comparative civilizational theory as we will try to show with respects to some aspects of Eisenstadt’s theory of ‘multiple modernities’. As we show here, this relates to some important misunderstandings of the concept of Axial Age with respect to Islam.
IV
Let us turn to a sketch on the essence of Axial Age: Transcendence, Revelation, Scripture, Literati – Kulturträger, functional differentiation
One of the main essentials of Jaspers Axial Age theory is featured in the focus on “revelation” which Jaspers makes it his point in an article in 1947 in “Der Monat”, here he offered a universal humanistic pledge of civilization. In essence however Jaspers concept of revelation remains heuristically a Christian idea, namely rephrasing a Protestant, theologically highly elaborated issue. Analytically he used the concept of revelation as a type of a parameter for the egalitarian treatment in comparing Christianity, Hinduism and Confucianism.
The advent of Revealed Truth, for Jaspers meant that in the first time in history ‘communication’ between world civilizations was made possible by the common event of parallel similar spiritual experiences leading to the constitution of scriptures which all in all signified the potentially sharing of One Truth – the truth of God. A second point of the comparative parameter is what could be named an initial historical momentum that separated interpretative power – the field of the literati and the priests, the foundation of Amt, Office, as Weber already had made it the basis of modern professional calling – as against executive power, the power of politics itself. This separation, as Jaspers saw it in its origin, for him was taking a positive expression for structural formation of modern societies, a ground for functional differentiation between power and cultural specialist. Power and spirit became separate, however possibly in different poles interrelated poles, setting the institutional terms of discourse about world and order.
Since then the dialectics of “King” and “Prophet”, the secular world of power in contrast to the ordering power potentials of referring to the Beyond, took hold in the prophetic treatment of holy scripture among the Jews. Certainly, this laid the roots of a dynamic discourse between Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy, which, as Shmuel Eisenstadt had seen it, establishes a bi-polarity of discourse in the cultural sphere which later contributed to shape the various patterns of institutionalisation of protest in modern political culture.
Unfolding a permanent revolution of thought which related to the interplay of this-worldly and extra-worldly powers, Axial Age, here, means the global event of this continuous process of institutionalisation, originating in the strict conceptual break between “One God” and the “World”. Certainly in Christ and early Christianity this separation took a very special momentum that made this break definitive. It was the martyrdom of the Christ, and that he was refused by his own people as a prophet and a leader, that had irreversible and unique consequences. “Religion’ which so often parallel Christianity in Jaspers’ discourse, should come to have an important effect as a spiritual idea beyond worldly powers, setting the path to a new human universalism: The Church in fact, emerged as a unique institutional formation, as the administrator of universal truth, in the margins of political power and the state. For Jaspers it is exactly the point of revelation turning into – in different grades - relatively autonomous institutions of cultural formation, and of course within it – limiting absolutist politics and the power of political rulers or ruling centers that counts. This is where Jaspers took revelation as an axial breakthrough.
In a more detailed term, we may sum up three dimension of the inner axial age discourse that Jaspers finds crucial to the foundation of our modern perceptions of a common human history.
First the transformative effect of revelation were decisive for creating a very specific bond of particular religious belief which at the same time formed a new turn in human experience: the change in perspective linked to the quest for universal cognition and knowledge, a mutation of humanity, an experience that led to the foundation of a universal concept of history that spiritually integrated all humanity. The issue of humanity as a whole arose.
Second, this historical modification led to a sort of unlimited demand for human condition as thought, an inner need of thinking of one’s own consciousness as being related with all the others and even with that of the strangers
Third, Jaspers stresses the point that unlimited communication leads to put doubt on all attempts to generalize ultimate truth. (Western superiority claims, calls for De-westernisation, Naquib al-Attas, moves of “Protestantisation of Islam” etc. today’s discourses)
Thus Jaspers idea was making ‘transcendence’ both the prophetical revelation and the philosophical reflections of the limits of humanity and this worldliness the source of an emerging universal pattern, separating and differentiating institutions of worldly power of those of political rule on the one hand and those founded on the search of ultimate power and truth on the other hand. For Jaspers this meant the foundational setting of universal regulative communication as the ground for any new world order.
V.
Jaspers the Axial Age meant the earliest clear cut momentum of a breakthrough in history that paved through Monotheism and revelation the way to modernity. This is seen to be fundamentally related to the breakthrough of scripture. However if scripture includes a one way monolithic interpretatatio, a pure orthodox setting, this was not what Jaspers meant. For him rather it was an opening of a new discursive level at which a variety of interactive scenarios and of social milieus could unfold. This includes, as Eisenstadt later conceded, the ascendance of new elites and ‘Kulturträger’ – bearers of culture. And indeed the ascendance of Islam over its early period. one of more than 300 years, meant exactly a very complicated social development, one that hardly fits into the example of ‘world history’ European style, as Josef van Ess argued in a recent essay.
When Carl Jaspers speaks of “biblical religions” one is immediately struck with the question, what then is Islam? Without doubt, Islam stands in the biblical tradition, and with changing evidences Muhammad perceived himself as a new Jesus, or as an authentic final point crystallising in the line of Jewish Prophets, his teachings were accepted by Jewish priests as an expression of the Jewish prophetic myths and until today the literary tradition of the Qur’an with respect to the tales of the prophets is not questioned. How could this lead to a revelation of its own, to a completely separate religion? ‘Following Jaspers, could one apply axial theory in respect to the essence of Islam?
And perhaps there is a third question more important related to this, did Islam not attempt to accomplish “revelation” in the very sense of realizing conceptually the unfulfilled promises of the “biblical religions” with respect to monotheism, human equality and revealed scripture?
Although Jaspers - not surprisingly - never dealt openly with Islam, he seems to have approached it vaguely within the framework of “biblical religions”. This is why one easily could – despide the intriguing questions here - incorporate Islam, the revelation, the specific forms of personal morality, the ‘philosophy’ the institutional settings and structural conditions into the framework of Jaspers’ breakthrough theory. This certainly occupied Western Orientalists in the 1960s and 1970s at the first in a sort of attempting to modify the conventional views on structural hydraulic underdevelopment and ‘Asiatic’ influence. However, without referring to Jaspers Axial Age but rather to Max Weber’s Protestantism thesis, Maxime Rodinson, Bryan Turner, Ernest Gellner to name the most known and important contributors, acknowledged Islam in the tradition of breakthrough as a modern religion.
In terms of the early German “Islamwissenschaft” - to name Ignaz Goldziher and Carl Heinrich Becker - Islam emerged as a movement which was largely reflective to earlier axial development in Judaism, Hellenism and Christianity: an over-reflexive monotheism that manifests itself in the idea of an unreachable, absolute God, a highly regulative concept of revealed Law extending to all spheres of everyday life, self-responsible scholarship based on personal knowledge and reputation, social and civil attainment of spiritual power and transcendence. In a sense of an original egalitarian radicalism, the early Islamic movement was responding to Judaism and Christianity in radicalising the position of the religiously affirmed individual in front of the one God. In this framework of religious democratism affirming the individual self, the parameter of knowledge came to lead at the same time to a sort of hieratic differentiation, which itself makes personal institutional responsibility and submission to worldly institutions virtually impossible. Belief, honor, law, remain potentialities of the individual; however remain ineffective against tyranny and power. The paradox is that this does not mean, that modern institutions are obsolete in countries with Islamic populations, where they have been established and guarded, they function brilliantly within their given realms. What is obvious, however, and this shows the failure and in the end the disaster of an applied Jaspers project in Islam, that basing Islam today within the framework of a communicative discourse on revelation is a contradicio in adjecto – a contradiction in itself. Revealed issues - whatever their historical context – became often treated as non-communicators. This is what in reality happened, and in the period of post-colonialism was leading to the disasters and conflicts which we are witnessing today.
VI
I do not wish to enter here into a long detailed discussion on how and why ‘Islam’ does or does not fit into the ‘Axial-Age’ paradigm. Instead, I wish to add some reflections on humans and civilisation and the necessity to view this in terms of Axial interconnectedness. Here, again, Michel Foucault’s account of individualism as it stands against all structural accounts of modernity is important. His ‘empowerment of the body’ as expressed in relation to the Islamic Revolution is opening up for a new level of axial considerations. The rise of the subject, and its new ways of social interaction have to be brought into the field. His observations on Iran are of utmost importance.
I am convinced that Foucault’s linking of the Iranian Happening of Ideas with the perspective of ‘bio-politics’ and the micro-conditions of power in a way radicalized Jaspers concept of unlimited communication in, as he saw it, how an idea which was broadly en-circulated among intellectuals corresponded to ideas which were prevalent in everyday practices of the masses, and which were then newly incorporated into a process of mass communication through media. Foucault idealized this in his terms of coinciding bodies’ which culminated in the extension of ‘naked life’ as a new power eroding the conventional power systems. In Paris this coincidence of interconnectedness was seen as a big mistake of Foucault. Because he developed the very intrinsic, deeply settling the European issue of sovereignty and the modern democratic subject into the perspective of the revolutionary ascendance of the modern political idea of Islam. In a way Foucault identifies this European essentialism in terms of a new, a modern political sensitivity based in religion. While his friends in Paris saw it a purely Oriental matter, Foucault developed the inherent political religious sensitivity in its very „origin“ for Europe: opening up the problem of sovereignty in the emerging modern institutions with respect to the “subject” in the condition of the overall spread of individualism in modern Europe. As a critical sociologist he clearly shows the process of monopolization of power and its effects in the underlying process of ‘synchronization’, he saw it as a general problem of civil insurgence and one of the manifest alternatives of communication between self-affirmed actors.
Michel Foucault, beyond structure formation and culture, signifies this second momentum in modern civilizational discourse: the spiritualizing chance of simultaneous applications of technologies for liberty-gains of the self. He created this very strange idea of “self-empowered naked bodies” and within this metaphor he indirectly came to put a general condition of the contemporary stage of ‘gouvernalitè’, namely the powerlessness of ruling centers in front of highly self-centered consumerist desires in mass societies. Foucault concomitant to Adorno stressed the relative powerlessness of the institutional centers due to the transposition of institutional to individual power, when it comes incorporated in the mass body. In the ‘reportage des ideas’ on the events in Tehran 1978, he realized how individuals, the naked hands of women and collective martyrdom could reverse the power balance. Foucault signalized a new pattern of ‘individual’ empowerment in global modern mass societies. In his view, absolute mass individualism expressed in empowered ‘naked bodies’ are mediating actions and attitudes as well as images of new types of human action, which in the millenniums before were unthinkable, however today have become part of public behavior and institutional discourse. So, as he saw it, in a relatively short period about 200 years a drastic change in the anthropological condition of the modern world as a whole became to the fore.
VII
Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, the eminent civilizational theorist of our days, who has established himself as a new axial age theorist, one who attempted to actualise Weber and Jaspers on a world stage of the comparative study of civilisations, argued that Foucault has no concept of culture, and therefore remains a pure theorist of power. I disagree. Eisenstadt, like Jaspers and Max Weber before him, stress culture largely in its pure effects on institution-building. Thus it produces a communicative deficit indeed, since it declares eo ipso a war on any realms of social action in de-institutionalised spheres, or what could be considered as such. It is true that with his concept of ‘multiple modernities’, Eisenstadt indicates how much the assumption and essentials of Western modernity as well as their parameters of cultural comparison are placed in the centre of an interactive perspective and certainly also in the center of discourse of reconstruction of modern civilization. However, this has largely to do with diffusion of modern institutional organisations in diverse cultural settings. Basically, it refers to an old German idea that culture can be organised, or rather is organisation as such. Eisenstadt similarly sees power-oriented heterodoxies, despite incorporating difference and protest, as playing part and parcel of this organisation of institutions. In contrast Foucault shows the new importance of relatively independent conditions of the subject makes this new subjective condition the remaining major source of resistance, leading to the potential erosions of institutions. To phrase this more positive, Foucault stresses the potentials of the individual culture of human being as being focal in any, name it, the civilizational progress. Perhaps he was too naïve. However the pendulum swing that returns to structural and institutional power gains (that seem possible only in terms to denigrate the cultural other), perhaps will not be able to fall behind the gains that the empowerments of the individual and the ‘naked bodies’ have so far achieved. To remain ambiguous, name it a new progress, name it a new stretch of Nihilism.
*cf. my “The Axial Age and Islam – Reflections on ‘World’ and ‘History’ today”, in: Oliver Kozlare, Jörn Rüsen, Ernst Wolff (eds.): Shaping a Humane World, Civilizations – Axial Times – Modernities – Humanisms. Transcript, Bielefeld 2012, 111-146.
I
Introductory Remarks:
To speak about Carl Jaspers’ concept of Axial Age is to be aware of the continued presence of Max Weber in Jaspers taught. Jaspers never denied that his philosophy was a prolonged discussion of Max Weber both were deriving from the marked background of the intellectual Protestantism which was cherished in the houses of their parents although they were in quite different parts of Germany’s North.
As with many thinkers of their time at the end of the 19th century in booming Germany, Jaspers and Weber shared serious concerns and doubts about Friedrich Nietzsche’s attack on Christianity and the ethics of Protestantism. As settled by Nietzsche the flowed concept of love and instrumental moral reasoning are the main sources of modern society and individual character building therein:
Their responses to Nietzsche’s “genealogy of morality” came in different ways and at different times. Weber’s “Protestant ethics and the spirit of Capitalism” came short in the period before the all-break of WW1. It entailed an ambivalent and at the same time positive judgement of the rewarding effects of Protestantism and Christian puritanism. However this book at least for Weber did not contribute in ending his doubts toward average Christian love ethics. Weber shortly before his death in 1920 finally come to the idea of ‘mystische Liebesethik’ as a potential source of resolving the social breaks of modernity and of transcending the ethics of resentment which as Nietzsche claimed were governing the character of man. Jaspers after a long period of reflection published in 1937 his book on Nietzsche und das Christentum in which he attempted to understand modern individualism as the result of the event of Christ and proclaimed that the world as a whole would move on to shaping an in itself lonely modern subject. Jaspers, as Weber before him, took Nietzsche serious. However, he could not share his Nihilism. While Nietzsche claimed that modern man was devaluating his own nature, and with it, all living nature, we should take his critique as a wake-up call for positive action. Jaspers, while rejecting Nihilism, here, propagated the preservation of the external world as a positive human task. He was however at the time doomed to silence by Hitler’s Fascism; he woke up in 1945 with his new Philosophy of human life. (follow up:)
II
Carl Jaspers was the German political philosopher of 1945:
In 1945 Carl Jaspers after the shattering events of the second World War marked the beginning of the new era, demanding something new a breaking history which he thought was decisive for the future of Europe; signifying the conditions as much as the potentials of the “new humanism”: the end of twelve years of Hitler’s third Reich and German Fascist rule and its hegemonic dominance of European affairs. From there on, as his biographer claim Jaspers turn into a political philosopher, I wish to make you aware that is what is known as the Jasper’s Axial Age theory can be fully understood in terms of the break of 1945 which shaped recent modern European and Western history.
I also wish to make you aware that Jaspers Axial Age is crucial to understand what happened in Islam and the West in recent Years.
III
The Millenium of Transcendence – 800 B.C. – 200 A.C (a theory of of the history of structural formation rather than of the rise of the subject in human development)
Jaspers’ political and historical philosophy in the years from 1945 to 1950 is a complete expression of the condition of “Neuanfang”, a new beginning and of his will to contribute to a complete humanitarian transformation of Europe and the West. For him this meant to actualise a new essence of the idea of humanity and the human based in their origin. Two main questions are invoked by Jaspers. First he reflects on how to appropriate anew the ideals of human formation and education from the classical, the Greek tradition. Second, he asks, how to reconstruct the concept of man from its origins.
Jaspers links both questions to the breakthroughs in history and the ascendance of new visions of transcendence from 800 B.C to 200 A.C. Thus Jaspers operating on Germany, Europe and the West, his pledge for the renewal of modern history after the Second World War, stands in close connection to his overall political and historical philosophy, which included what happened in China, India, Palestine and Greece to the millennium of transcendence his theory of the Axial Age. He invokes a decisive step to the inherent understanding of ‘world’ and ‘ethos’ beyond bondage to one single religion or nation.
However, in his explicit discussions of Axial Age, Jaspers’ speechlessness about Islam (the religion after) and Judaism (the religion long before) is painstakingly evident. Today this is difficult to understand. In as he formulates world history on a new stage, the exclusion of Islam and Judaism from his reflections on World and ‘history’, can only be interpreted as an inner contradiction to his own project. In connection with his sort of absolutist focus on ‘Abendland’, the West and the origins, this eclipse of Islam and Judaism can only be explained as a sort of implicit recognition of both, seen as being – sort of silently – part of the pre/post-axial evolution of the West.
Jaspers silence on Islam can only be understood the within context of his task program for post-Hitler Germany and Europe, and his specific type of self-reflexivity with respect to Nazism, secularism and Christianity after the Catharsis. The failure of Science and of German ‘Geist’ in preventing it, sets the limits for Jaspers’ reflection , his focus on Christianity, Hinduism and Confucianism in terms of cultural history and his view on America, Europe and Russia in terms of world politics lead to a narrow self-reflective deadlock. And even in reflecting Science and Geist, Jaspers political philosophy, as Sternberger remarks, limits itself largely to the vast “Feld der Ämter”, the field of offices. In other words Institution-Building, rather than the rise of the Subject were his themes.
We should note here that exactly this problem of an attempt of inner affirmation of Western ‘office’, technically responsible state officials functional structures and the limited spirit of those who maintain them, that could be traced as a great hinder-ness in viewing the life attitudes in non-western configurations as they came to be setup in Islamic countries. These limitations are as well denominating the configurative points of self-affirmation and distinction turned against the non-modern world which are also present in the comparative civilizational theory as we will try to show with respects to some aspects of Eisenstadt’s theory of ‘multiple modernities’. As we show here, this relates to some important misunderstandings of the concept of Axial Age with respect to Islam.
IV
Let us turn to a sketch on the essence of Axial Age: Transcendence, Revelation, Scripture, Literati – Kulturträger, functional differentiation
One of the main essentials of Jaspers Axial Age theory is featured in the focus on “revelation” which Jaspers makes it his point in an article in 1947 in “Der Monat”, here he offered a universal humanistic pledge of civilization. In essence however Jaspers concept of revelation remains heuristically a Christian idea, namely rephrasing a Protestant, theologically highly elaborated issue. Analytically he used the concept of revelation as a type of a parameter for the egalitarian treatment in comparing Christianity, Hinduism and Confucianism.
The advent of Revealed Truth, for Jaspers meant that in the first time in history ‘communication’ between world civilizations was made possible by the common event of parallel similar spiritual experiences leading to the constitution of scriptures which all in all signified the potentially sharing of One Truth – the truth of God. A second point of the comparative parameter is what could be named an initial historical momentum that separated interpretative power – the field of the literati and the priests, the foundation of Amt, Office, as Weber already had made it the basis of modern professional calling – as against executive power, the power of politics itself. This separation, as Jaspers saw it in its origin, for him was taking a positive expression for structural formation of modern societies, a ground for functional differentiation between power and cultural specialist. Power and spirit became separate, however possibly in different poles interrelated poles, setting the institutional terms of discourse about world and order.
Since then the dialectics of “King” and “Prophet”, the secular world of power in contrast to the ordering power potentials of referring to the Beyond, took hold in the prophetic treatment of holy scripture among the Jews. Certainly, this laid the roots of a dynamic discourse between Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy, which, as Shmuel Eisenstadt had seen it, establishes a bi-polarity of discourse in the cultural sphere which later contributed to shape the various patterns of institutionalisation of protest in modern political culture.
Unfolding a permanent revolution of thought which related to the interplay of this-worldly and extra-worldly powers, Axial Age, here, means the global event of this continuous process of institutionalisation, originating in the strict conceptual break between “One God” and the “World”. Certainly in Christ and early Christianity this separation took a very special momentum that made this break definitive. It was the martyrdom of the Christ, and that he was refused by his own people as a prophet and a leader, that had irreversible and unique consequences. “Religion’ which so often parallel Christianity in Jaspers’ discourse, should come to have an important effect as a spiritual idea beyond worldly powers, setting the path to a new human universalism: The Church in fact, emerged as a unique institutional formation, as the administrator of universal truth, in the margins of political power and the state. For Jaspers it is exactly the point of revelation turning into – in different grades - relatively autonomous institutions of cultural formation, and of course within it – limiting absolutist politics and the power of political rulers or ruling centers that counts. This is where Jaspers took revelation as an axial breakthrough.
In a more detailed term, we may sum up three dimension of the inner axial age discourse that Jaspers finds crucial to the foundation of our modern perceptions of a common human history.
First the transformative effect of revelation were decisive for creating a very specific bond of particular religious belief which at the same time formed a new turn in human experience: the change in perspective linked to the quest for universal cognition and knowledge, a mutation of humanity, an experience that led to the foundation of a universal concept of history that spiritually integrated all humanity. The issue of humanity as a whole arose.
Second, this historical modification led to a sort of unlimited demand for human condition as thought, an inner need of thinking of one’s own consciousness as being related with all the others and even with that of the strangers
Third, Jaspers stresses the point that unlimited communication leads to put doubt on all attempts to generalize ultimate truth. (Western superiority claims, calls for De-westernisation, Naquib al-Attas, moves of “Protestantisation of Islam” etc. today’s discourses)
Thus Jaspers idea was making ‘transcendence’ both the prophetical revelation and the philosophical reflections of the limits of humanity and this worldliness the source of an emerging universal pattern, separating and differentiating institutions of worldly power of those of political rule on the one hand and those founded on the search of ultimate power and truth on the other hand. For Jaspers this meant the foundational setting of universal regulative communication as the ground for any new world order.
V.
Jaspers the Axial Age meant the earliest clear cut momentum of a breakthrough in history that paved through Monotheism and revelation the way to modernity. This is seen to be fundamentally related to the breakthrough of scripture. However if scripture includes a one way monolithic interpretatatio, a pure orthodox setting, this was not what Jaspers meant. For him rather it was an opening of a new discursive level at which a variety of interactive scenarios and of social milieus could unfold. This includes, as Eisenstadt later conceded, the ascendance of new elites and ‘Kulturträger’ – bearers of culture. And indeed the ascendance of Islam over its early period. one of more than 300 years, meant exactly a very complicated social development, one that hardly fits into the example of ‘world history’ European style, as Josef van Ess argued in a recent essay.
When Carl Jaspers speaks of “biblical religions” one is immediately struck with the question, what then is Islam? Without doubt, Islam stands in the biblical tradition, and with changing evidences Muhammad perceived himself as a new Jesus, or as an authentic final point crystallising in the line of Jewish Prophets, his teachings were accepted by Jewish priests as an expression of the Jewish prophetic myths and until today the literary tradition of the Qur’an with respect to the tales of the prophets is not questioned. How could this lead to a revelation of its own, to a completely separate religion? ‘Following Jaspers, could one apply axial theory in respect to the essence of Islam?
And perhaps there is a third question more important related to this, did Islam not attempt to accomplish “revelation” in the very sense of realizing conceptually the unfulfilled promises of the “biblical religions” with respect to monotheism, human equality and revealed scripture?
Although Jaspers - not surprisingly - never dealt openly with Islam, he seems to have approached it vaguely within the framework of “biblical religions”. This is why one easily could – despide the intriguing questions here - incorporate Islam, the revelation, the specific forms of personal morality, the ‘philosophy’ the institutional settings and structural conditions into the framework of Jaspers’ breakthrough theory. This certainly occupied Western Orientalists in the 1960s and 1970s at the first in a sort of attempting to modify the conventional views on structural hydraulic underdevelopment and ‘Asiatic’ influence. However, without referring to Jaspers Axial Age but rather to Max Weber’s Protestantism thesis, Maxime Rodinson, Bryan Turner, Ernest Gellner to name the most known and important contributors, acknowledged Islam in the tradition of breakthrough as a modern religion.
In terms of the early German “Islamwissenschaft” - to name Ignaz Goldziher and Carl Heinrich Becker - Islam emerged as a movement which was largely reflective to earlier axial development in Judaism, Hellenism and Christianity: an over-reflexive monotheism that manifests itself in the idea of an unreachable, absolute God, a highly regulative concept of revealed Law extending to all spheres of everyday life, self-responsible scholarship based on personal knowledge and reputation, social and civil attainment of spiritual power and transcendence. In a sense of an original egalitarian radicalism, the early Islamic movement was responding to Judaism and Christianity in radicalising the position of the religiously affirmed individual in front of the one God. In this framework of religious democratism affirming the individual self, the parameter of knowledge came to lead at the same time to a sort of hieratic differentiation, which itself makes personal institutional responsibility and submission to worldly institutions virtually impossible. Belief, honor, law, remain potentialities of the individual; however remain ineffective against tyranny and power. The paradox is that this does not mean, that modern institutions are obsolete in countries with Islamic populations, where they have been established and guarded, they function brilliantly within their given realms. What is obvious, however, and this shows the failure and in the end the disaster of an applied Jaspers project in Islam, that basing Islam today within the framework of a communicative discourse on revelation is a contradicio in adjecto – a contradiction in itself. Revealed issues - whatever their historical context – became often treated as non-communicators. This is what in reality happened, and in the period of post-colonialism was leading to the disasters and conflicts which we are witnessing today.
VI
I do not wish to enter here into a long detailed discussion on how and why ‘Islam’ does or does not fit into the ‘Axial-Age’ paradigm. Instead, I wish to add some reflections on humans and civilisation and the necessity to view this in terms of Axial interconnectedness. Here, again, Michel Foucault’s account of individualism as it stands against all structural accounts of modernity is important. His ‘empowerment of the body’ as expressed in relation to the Islamic Revolution is opening up for a new level of axial considerations. The rise of the subject, and its new ways of social interaction have to be brought into the field. His observations on Iran are of utmost importance.
I am convinced that Foucault’s linking of the Iranian Happening of Ideas with the perspective of ‘bio-politics’ and the micro-conditions of power in a way radicalized Jaspers concept of unlimited communication in, as he saw it, how an idea which was broadly en-circulated among intellectuals corresponded to ideas which were prevalent in everyday practices of the masses, and which were then newly incorporated into a process of mass communication through media. Foucault idealized this in his terms of coinciding bodies’ which culminated in the extension of ‘naked life’ as a new power eroding the conventional power systems. In Paris this coincidence of interconnectedness was seen as a big mistake of Foucault. Because he developed the very intrinsic, deeply settling the European issue of sovereignty and the modern democratic subject into the perspective of the revolutionary ascendance of the modern political idea of Islam. In a way Foucault identifies this European essentialism in terms of a new, a modern political sensitivity based in religion. While his friends in Paris saw it a purely Oriental matter, Foucault developed the inherent political religious sensitivity in its very „origin“ for Europe: opening up the problem of sovereignty in the emerging modern institutions with respect to the “subject” in the condition of the overall spread of individualism in modern Europe. As a critical sociologist he clearly shows the process of monopolization of power and its effects in the underlying process of ‘synchronization’, he saw it as a general problem of civil insurgence and one of the manifest alternatives of communication between self-affirmed actors.
Michel Foucault, beyond structure formation and culture, signifies this second momentum in modern civilizational discourse: the spiritualizing chance of simultaneous applications of technologies for liberty-gains of the self. He created this very strange idea of “self-empowered naked bodies” and within this metaphor he indirectly came to put a general condition of the contemporary stage of ‘gouvernalitè’, namely the powerlessness of ruling centers in front of highly self-centered consumerist desires in mass societies. Foucault concomitant to Adorno stressed the relative powerlessness of the institutional centers due to the transposition of institutional to individual power, when it comes incorporated in the mass body. In the ‘reportage des ideas’ on the events in Tehran 1978, he realized how individuals, the naked hands of women and collective martyrdom could reverse the power balance. Foucault signalized a new pattern of ‘individual’ empowerment in global modern mass societies. In his view, absolute mass individualism expressed in empowered ‘naked bodies’ are mediating actions and attitudes as well as images of new types of human action, which in the millenniums before were unthinkable, however today have become part of public behavior and institutional discourse. So, as he saw it, in a relatively short period about 200 years a drastic change in the anthropological condition of the modern world as a whole became to the fore.
VII
Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, the eminent civilizational theorist of our days, who has established himself as a new axial age theorist, one who attempted to actualise Weber and Jaspers on a world stage of the comparative study of civilisations, argued that Foucault has no concept of culture, and therefore remains a pure theorist of power. I disagree. Eisenstadt, like Jaspers and Max Weber before him, stress culture largely in its pure effects on institution-building. Thus it produces a communicative deficit indeed, since it declares eo ipso a war on any realms of social action in de-institutionalised spheres, or what could be considered as such. It is true that with his concept of ‘multiple modernities’, Eisenstadt indicates how much the assumption and essentials of Western modernity as well as their parameters of cultural comparison are placed in the centre of an interactive perspective and certainly also in the center of discourse of reconstruction of modern civilization. However, this has largely to do with diffusion of modern institutional organisations in diverse cultural settings. Basically, it refers to an old German idea that culture can be organised, or rather is organisation as such. Eisenstadt similarly sees power-oriented heterodoxies, despite incorporating difference and protest, as playing part and parcel of this organisation of institutions. In contrast Foucault shows the new importance of relatively independent conditions of the subject makes this new subjective condition the remaining major source of resistance, leading to the potential erosions of institutions. To phrase this more positive, Foucault stresses the potentials of the individual culture of human being as being focal in any, name it, the civilizational progress. Perhaps he was too naïve. However the pendulum swing that returns to structural and institutional power gains (that seem possible only in terms to denigrate the cultural other), perhaps will not be able to fall behind the gains that the empowerments of the individual and the ‘naked bodies’ have so far achieved. To remain ambiguous, name it a new progress, name it a new stretch of Nihilism.
*cf. my “The Axial Age and Islam – Reflections on ‘World’ and ‘History’ today”, in: Oliver Kozlare, Jörn Rüsen, Ernst Wolff (eds.): Shaping a Humane World, Civilizations – Axial Times – Modernities – Humanisms. Transcript, Bielefeld 2012, 111-146.
