The Axial Age: 5 Fast Facts

The Axial Age (also called Axis Age) is the period when, roughly at the same time around most of the inhabited world, the great intellectual, philosophical, and religious systems that came to shape subsequent human society and culture emerged—with the ancient Greek philosophers, Indian metaphysicians and logicians (who articulated the great traditions of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism), Persian Zoroastrianism, the Hebrew Prophets, the “Hundred Schools” (most notably Confucianism and Daoism) of ancient China….These are only some of the representative Axial traditions that emerged and took root during that time. The phrase originated with the German psychiatrist and philosopher Karl Jaspers, who noted that during this period there was a shift—or a turn, as if on an axis—away from more predominantly localized concerns and toward transcendence.

The term literally means “to go beyond.” In the case of the Axial Age “revolution” in human thought about the world, “going beyond” has several meanings, according to the Canadian philosopher and sociologist Charles Taylor. Among them are a shift to thinking about the cosmos and the way it works rather than taking for granted that it works, the rise of second-order thinking about the ways that human beings even think about the universe in the first place and come to know it, and a turn away from merely propitiating tribal or civic deities (which Taylor characterized as “feeding the gods”) and toward speculation about the fate of humanity, about human beings’ relationship with the cosmos, and about “The Good” and how human beings can be “good.”

Axial Age thinkers displayed great originality and yet exhibited surprising similarity with respect to their ultimate concerns. Indian thinkers came to think of karma, the residual effects of past actions, as having direct impact upon human life, and they proposed solutions for how human beings could attain liberation (moksha) from karma’s effects. In ancient Greece Socrates was the exemplar of thinkers who emphasized the use of reason in the relentless investigation of truth, and his student Plato (arguably the father of Western philosophy) adapted his teacher’s insight in theorizing how the world of everyday existence and the eternal world of the ideas interrelate. Chinese thinkers striving to unify the kingdom and avert civil war disputed and debated the appropriate “way” (dao) for human society; the disciples of Confucius, for example, argued that the dao consisted in promoting a humane civilization, while the disciples of such thinkers as Zhuangzi took the Cosmic Dao as a guide for life. The Hebrew Prophets came to view the god of their nation, Israel, as the God who created heaven and earth and who shaped the destiny of all people. The tradition of Zoroastrianism (so named for Zoroaster [Persian name Zarathustra]) conceived of human history as a microcosm of the cosmic struggle between good and evil and each human life as a constant living out of the struggle to choose good over evil. Yet, in all cases, the representative thinkers saw themselves as postulating solutions to life’s questions and problems not only for themselves or even for their cultures but for humankind as a whole. As local and tradition-specific as their investigations may have begun, their concerns were global, even universal.

It occurred roughly in the 1st millennium BCE. The rough date range provided by Jaspers was 800 BCE to 200 BCE. Since the mid-20th century some scholars have suggested earlier dates for “Axial” figures, such as Zarathustra (who may have lived slightly before or even five millennia before the Axial Age). Furthermore, even those figures—such as the Buddha, Confucius, and Socrates—who may be more certainly placed within Jaspers’s time span did not necessarily live at the same exact time or within close proximity of each other. The extent to which there may have been cross-pollination of ideas across geographic distances can only be speculated upon.

We may be on the verge of a new one now. There is no doubt that technology has radically transformed the ways that people, both individually and communally, live their lives, interact with culture, communicate, and perceive the world around them. Meanwhile, individualized forms of religiosity and spirituality have become more prevalent, particularly as traditional institutionalized religions have declined in membership and prominence in many industrialized nations since the mid-20th century. Some scholars have expressed concerns about the implications for human society and culture of those “disruptive” transformations, especially given the trend toward secularism in many countries. Others express hope and even confidence that the next transformative period of human life will prove to be as lively and creative as the previous one.