2. The Eonic Effect:
Climbing
Mt. Improbable
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| 2.1.2 A Second Axial Age? | ||||
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We can discover the
significance of modernity at once by asking a question, Is there a second Axial
Age? The rise of the modern world is simply another ‘axial’ transformation,
disguised behind its secularism. The formulation of Karl Jaspers remains
ambiguous on the question of the rise of the modern. The reason is the stumbling
block created by misleading definitions of ‘secularism’. Darwinism, atheism,
scientific positivism, Nietzschean anti-modernism, the calamities of the First
World War and the Holocaust, are all taken in evidence to either define the
secular or castigate it. This misses the point entirely. The ‘secular’ is
suddenly obvious as the type of society emerging from the
early modern, ca. 1500 to 1800. This
is a complex dialectical spectrum (as was the Axial Age), not an ‘ism’ defined
by some watered down version of scientism or the Enlightenment. Thus the
‘secular’ for us is not a philosophy, but a temporal interval in a larger
sequence, with a geographical sourcing area, showing a complex dialectical
center of gravity around religious transformation (the Reformation), the
Scientific Revolution
, emergent economic modernism (capitalism,
and its potential counterpoints, e.g. socialism), the Enlightenment (and its
potential/actual counterpoints, e.g. the Romantic movement), re-emergent
democratic experiments, and much else. A kind of postmodern fog has already
settled over our perceptions on this point. In fact, the rise of
the modern period, once we clearly separate the interval of transition from what
follows, shows an unmistakable macrohistorical connection to the earlier Axial
period. It is in a real sense the ‘next Axial Age’. The double birth of
democracy and science in successive transitions is one clue. We should begin,
therefore, to drop the term ‘Axial’ and replace it with something more general
(although its usage remains useful). The period from 1500 to 1800 is the key to
understanding this question. We must adopt a comprehensive description of this
‘early modern’ period, from the Reformation and Scientific Revolution to the
Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution, since we are completely dependent on
the philosophies generated in this period for the very task demanded. One of the
problems created by some interpreters lies in the way that the Axial Age is
taken as the source of the great religions, to the neglect of the full
phenomenon. But the Axial Age is a comprehensive spectrum including most
especially the Greek transition with its different character, almost
foreshadowing the rise of the modern. This produces a kind of ‘postmodern hope’
that a new era of religions will arise. That is not likely to happen. The rise
of the early modern completely conditions the future of such religions, for
intangible reasons at first unclear, a statement that applies only to theocratic
geopolitics, and that makes no statement whatever about the actual ‘spiritual’
content of the various religious formations, which enter secular culture
à la carte as the inherited net
achievements of spiritual antiquity, viz. the classic Buddhist sutras. The
future will do something new, we can be sure. These issues create a
conflict over the meaning of the term ‘secularism’ in the attempts, mostly
unsuccessful, to define this in terms of the contrast of science and religion.
But we will need a more general set of terms to mediate this conflict in the
modern period. Proponents of traditional religion tend to be very
suspicious of modern secularism, and proponents of science, really scientism,
tend toward complete amnesia about spiritual history. This distracts us from
seeing the solution to a simple puzzle. The question of the Axial Age is
puzzling until we see its greater context, and the rise of the modern world in
many ways contains the key to its understanding. More specifically we will touch
on an integrating clue in the thinking of Kant, whose analysis of the antinomy
of causality and freedom provides the tool for the creation of a model for the
eonic effect, and the emergence of modernist ideologies of liberalism
which end up allergic to theocratic
remnants of the Axial Age. More than that the ‘triplet’ ‘divinity, soul, free
will’, so cogently conjoined by Kant, will be discovered to show the transition
points not only between philosophies of freedom, viz. a Kantian liberalism, Big
Histories as myths of ‘cosmic agents’ and (Upanishadic) religions of ‘soul’ (or
no-soul as in the case of Buddhism), but also between civilizations themselves.
We see Archaic Greece giving birth to ideas of freedom, So far from being a denatured secular age stripped of religious issues, the rise of the modern, with its immense descant on the idea of freedom, completes the basic series of eonic integrations of the evolutionary psychology of man, reflected in the triple metaphysical triad of god (or cosmic totality), soul, and free will. The rise of the modern has therefore an equal, nay superior, claim to be an ‘Age of Revelation’, although we will be exceedingly wary of such a term, wary to the point of not using it at all. The extraordinary emergence of the Idea of Freedom, in multiple manifestations becomes the keynote of modernity, and generates, as the philosopher Hegel saw clearly, one and the same ‘transcendental paradox’ as the ancient Axial transitions. |
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