"Axial time" by Karl Jaspers

In the philosophy of history, the concept of "axial time" appeared due to the thinker Karl Jaspers. Analyzing the progress of human society, pondering over the emergence and death of civilizations of antiquity, the famous historiosophy tried to determine what gave rise to modern civilization and the mentality of people. As a result, he came to the idea that there was such a period (lasting about six hundred years), which can be called the axis of world history.

Jaspers believed that this phase lasted from the eighth to the second century BC. Why did not the first centuries of our era serve as a starting point, because the very system of chronology, adopted in the modern Western world, is based on the date of Christ's Nativity? Jaspers states that axial time is a universal category that can not be tied to one religion, even if it is global. The dogma of faith should not be the dominant criterion for the empirical comprehension of the history of mankind. And the creation of things and the "end of time," as they are described in the Book of Genesis and the Apocalypse, even a believing Christian separates in meaning from the secular history of society.

Before the axial time came, humanity knew two key cuts in its history. The first is the emergence of articulate speech, the making of tools, the ability to use fire. The second section is the V-III millennium BC, when in the favorable climate and in the channels of large rivers, ancient civilizations arise: Egypt, Babylon, Assyria, China, India. At this time, writing, the state, creating mythological religious treatises, there is trade, and, consequently, the clash and interpenetration of cultures. The ancient kingdoms prepared the ground for the axis of world history.

In the 700-s BC there comes the very "axial time". Especially it was manifested in the IV century before Christ. This section Jaspers calls "the spiritual foundation of humanity." Almost simultaneously in China live and create Lao-Tzu, Confucius and other great thinkers who create the foundations of Confucianism, Taoism, Legism and Moisma. In India, proclaims his Benares sermon Buddha, the Upanishads are written. Zarathustra teaches about the struggle between good and evil in Iran. In Palestine, this era was marked by the appearance of the prophets Isaiah, Elijah and Jeremiah. In Greece, there are all philosophical currents - from materialism and skepticism to highly scientific sophistry. Then lived Socrates, Aristotle and Plato, Heraclitus and Parmenides.

This axial time, according to Jaspers, is the most important in the history of society. It was then that there was a sharp turn that created the modern man, his attitude, individualism and rationality. In remote regions, at different ends of Eurasia, but almost simultaneously, people realize the value of the individual and the individual, their own helplessness in the face of a soulless environment. The desire for transcendental, to what is "beyond the world", influenced the mentality of people more than the invention of a plow and a water mill.

Axial time gave birth to the foundations of all the world religions now in existence. "The time of mercy" in Christianity took place two centuries later, but the morale of people was already ready to embrace the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount. The Buddha lived in the fourth century BC, but the wide spread of Buddhism also occurred several centuries later. According to Jaspers, the modern era is now developing and finalizing those ideas, the foundations of which were laid precisely in that key period. Logic, methods of knowledge of the world, philosophical views and attitude of the man of that time are surprisingly in tune with ours.