Atheism in Axial period
By nemo | July 28, 2009
History of atheism
Students of Axial Age forget that atheism and monotheism both appear in the Axial period.
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Armstrong’s distortion of the eonic effect
By nemo | July 14, 2009
Karen Armstrong’s The Great Transformation is a disguised rip-off of World History And The Eonic Effect, transposed and reinterpreted to grease the wheeels. Note how Armstrong slips in the ‘great transformation of modernity’, but has changed the terms of discourse complexity.
In our current predicament, I believe that we can find inspiration in the period that the German philosopher Karl Jaspers called the Axial Age because it was pivotal to the spiritual development of humanity. I From about 900 to 200 BeE, * in four distinct regions, the great world traditions that have continued to nourish humanity came into being: Confucianism and Daoism in China; Hinduism and Buddhism in India; monotheism in Israel; and philosophical rationalism in Greece. This was the period of the Buddha, Socrates, Confucius, and Jeremiah, the mystics of the Upanishads, Mencius, and Euripides. During this period of intense creativity, spiritual and philosophical geniuses pioneered an entirely new kind of human experience. Many of them worked anonymously, but others became lumi¬naries who can still fill us with emotion because they show us what a human being should be. The Axial Age was one of the most seminal peri¬ods of intellectual, psychological, philosophical, and religious change in recorded history; there would be nothing comparable until the Great Western Transformation, which created our own scientific and techno¬logical modernity.
Armstrong speaks of four Axial regions, but that misses the point. There may be dozens. Something is acting across Eurasia in a manner we can’t easily understand.
Armstrong restricts the case of Greece to rationalism, totally misunderstanding what is going on. The Greek Axial interval is chock full of massive innovations in all directions, and it is a total transformation of culture.
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Higher powers
By nemo | July 13, 2009
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God idea stillborn in Axial religions?
By nemo | July 12, 2009
‘God’ idea stillborn in Axial religions
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Conspiracy of silence
By nemo | June 13, 2009
Conspiracy of silence on the Axial Age
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The greeks and the irrational
By nemo | May 29, 2009
E.R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational’, and the relationship of the Greek Enlightenment to the Axial Age.
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The Axial transformation vs the cultures in the Axial period
By nemo | May 23, 2009
We have already discussed the confusion in Armstrong’s book over Axial peoples, a phantom category: Armstrong’s confusion over Axial Spirituality/Axial Peoples
This type of confusion shows why people have such a hard time with the data of the Axial Age: they can’t figure out what they are ’seeing’, or what the phenomenon is. Armstrong goes into the question of the Aryan migrations and the different mythologies that diverge from some unknown prior ‘Indo-European’ culture. And then starts to find a theme of non-violence in the Axial ‘ethos’, and castigates Zarathustra for not fitting in.
Does anyone fit in? The Old Testament is no Gandhian tract. The great beginning of Axial Greece is the Iliad, a poem about war. And perhaps a tragedy in embryo.
This is typical of Armstrong’s wrong approach and its dangers. We are forced to point to the exceptions to a theme of non-violence, making plain the falseness of her generalizations.
The subject needs a different approach: what we are seeing is a series of diversities in a set of snapshots, not a unity of thought.
We could just as well say the era of monotheism that comes into being gave birth to the ‘holy war’.
In any case, a look at the eonic effect, and its generalization of the Axial Age will correct the distortions that Armstrong brings to here subject, and also show that the idealism we aspire to in invoking a religious thematic is amply illustrated by the action of ‘eonic evolution’ as a whole, without projecting our current concerns on the past.
In any case, the Axial phenomenon is not directly related to the issues of its exemplars, in this case the tribes of the Aryan migrations and their mythologies.
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Karen Armstrong and WHEE
By nemo | May 7, 2009
Darwin propaganda machine and whee
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Israel and Archaic Greece
By nemo | May 1, 2009
the Axial interval in the Greek world can be seen in itself without the confusions of theology grafted onto it, and the basic dynamic stands out. We can then return to the Israelite case and see the way that the theology which the ‘output’ of the transformations is confusing us.
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‘Axial’ ages, vs ‘The’ Axial Age
By nemo | April 24, 2009
The question of the rise of modernity has an ironic meaning for students of the Axial Age: Blaut, modernism, and the ‘European Miracle’
Topics: The Axial Age, modernity | No Comments »
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