A Historical Comparison of Intellectual Transformations in Greece and India in the Axial Age

大约在公元前500年——从公元前800年到公元前200年——人类的精神基础在中国、印度、波斯、犹太和希腊同时独立地奠定了。这些都是人类今天赖以生存的基础。”卡尔·雅斯贝尔斯（Karl Jaspers）在1951年写道，他把这一时期称为“轴心时代”（Achsenzeit）。近年来，轴心时代宗教和智力平行发展的论点引起了越来越多的兴趣。例如，2008年在埃尔福特举行了一次关于“轴心时代及其对后来历史和现在的影响”的会议。会议的网上记录指出，“直到最近几年，对这篇论文的兴趣才吸引了人文社会科学各领域学者的广泛关注。”尽管有如此大的兴趣，我们在轴心问题上取得的进展却少得可怜：为什么同样的智力转变在世界不同地区几乎同时发生？这种缺乏进展可以主要归因于两个缺陷，这两个缺陷在埃尔福特会议的在线记录和对轴向问题的总体研究中都很明显。第一个缺点是，尽管轴心文化的专家有时会讨论轴心时代，但他们之间在这个问题上没有持续的有组织的合作。第二个错误是忽视了社会经济因素。我们对社会经济和智力（包括形而上学）发展之间可能存在的关系有一个大致的理解，但这种理解从未应用于轴心问题。这两个缺陷是相互关联的，因为对古代社会经济和知识变革之间关系的比较研究需要专家之间的持续合作。我们的项目将开始弥补这两个缺陷。但是轴心的问题不能一下子全部回答。该项目是第一步，其重点是两个轴心文化，印度和希腊的早期哲学宇宙学的惊人相似之处。我们希望这个项目的成功将激发同样的探索扩展到其他轴心文化。首席研究员的金钱和早期希腊人的思想（剑桥大学出版社，2004年）是第一次持续尝试解释希腊在公元前6世纪和5世纪的知识革命，考虑到所有因素，社会经济以及宗教和文化。现在有人提议将这种调查扩展到大约同一时期的印度，并与一位同样受过古典学家训练的印度学家持续合作。早期印度和早期希腊哲学宇宙观之间的显著相似之处如下。(a)与先前存在的拟人化多神论传统形成鲜明对比的是，一个单一的无所不包的无形实体高于形式的多样性、变化和特殊性。(b)这种趋向抽象的单一实体与个体自我（或灵魂）之间相互同化。(c)人们相信，通过良好的行为，我们可以摆脱不分青红皂白（从我们可以变成任何有生命的东西的意义上说）和痛苦的轮回。这种共同的信仰，在印度和希腊之外并不存在，在这个历史阶段，无法用两种遥远文化之间的影响假说来合理解释。即使有影响，它仍然需要解释为什么以及如何接受者文化对它所接受的东西有中心地位。因此，从公元前6世纪开始，北印度经历了城市化、商业化和货币化的过程，这在当时除了希腊城邦（或许在中国除外）之外是没有类似的。

'In the years centering around 500BC - from 800 to 200 - the spiritual foundations of humanity were laid, simultaneously and independently in China, India, Persia, Judea, and Greece. And these are the foundations upon which humanity still subsists today.' Thus wrote Karl Jaspers in 1951, calling the period the Axial Age (Achsenzeit). The thesis of parallel religious and intellectual developments in the Axial Age has in recent years attracted increasing interest. For instance, in 2008 a conference was held in Erfurt on the 'Axial Age and its Consequences for Subsequent History and the Present'. The online account of the conference notes that 'it is only in recent years that interest in the thesis has attracted intensive attention from scholars from across the full spectrum of the humanities and social sciences'. Despite such considerable interest, we have made pitifully small headway on the Axial question: why did the same kind of intellectual transformation change occur at about the same time in various parts of the world? This lack of headway can be attributed largely to two failings, both of them apparent in the online account of the Erfurt conference and generally in research on the Axial question. The first failing is that - although specialists in the Axial cultures sometimes confer on the Axial Age - there has been no sustained organised collaboration between them on the issue. The second failing is neglect of the socio-economic factors. We possess a general understanding of the possible relationship between socio-economic and intellectual (including metaphysical) development, but this understanding has never been applied to the Axial question. The two failings inter-relate, because comparative study of the relationship between ancient socio-economic and intellectual change requires sustained collaboration between specialists. Our project will begin to remedy both these failings. But the Axial question cannot be answered all at once. The project is a first step, which focuses on the remarkable similarities in the earliest philosophical cosmology of two of the Axial cultures, India and Greece. It is hoped that the success of the project will inspire extension of the same kind of enquiry to the other Axial cultures. The Principal Investigator's Money and the Early Greek Mind (Cambridge University Press, 2004) is the first sustained attempt to explain the intellectual revolution of Greece in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE by taking into account all the factors, socio-economic as well as religious and cultural. It is now proposed to extend this kind of investigation to India of approximately the same period, in sustained collaboration with an Indologist who is also trained as a classicist. Among the remarkable similarities between early Indian and early Greek philosophical cosmology are the following. (a) In striking contrast to the pre-existing tradition of anthropomorphic polytheism, a single all-embracing formless entity is elevated above multiplicity, change, and particularity of form. (b) There is mutual assimilation between this single entity, which tends towards abstraction, and the individual self (or soul). (c) It is believed that through good actions we can escape from a cycle of reincarnation that is both indiscriminate (in the sense that we may be transformed into anything living) and painful. This shared set of beliefs, which does not occur outside of India and Greece, cannot in this phase of history be plausibly explained by the hypothesis of influence between two remote cultures. And even if there was influence, it still has to be explained why and how the recipient culture had a central place for what it received. It may well therefore be relevant that from the sixth century BCE northern India underwent a process of urbanisation, commercialisation and monetisation that at the time had no parallel outside the Greek polis (except perhaps in China).