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

“在公元前500年前后的几年里--从800年到200年--人类的精神基础在中国、印度、波斯、朱迪亚和希腊同时独立地奠定了。这些是人类今天仍然赖以生存的基础。卡尔·雅斯贝尔斯在1951年这样写道，称这一时期为轴心时代（Achsenzeit）。近年来，关于轴心时代宗教和知识分子平行发展的论点引起了越来越多的兴趣。例如，2008年在埃尔富特举行了一次关于“轴心时代及其对随后历史和现在的影响”的会议。会议的在线账户指出，“只是在最近几年，对论文的兴趣才引起了来自人文和社会科学全方位学者的广泛关注。尽管有如此大的兴趣，但我们在轴心问题上取得的进展却少得可怜：为什么同样的知识变革几乎在同一时间发生在世界不同地区？这种缺乏进展的情况可以在很大程度上归因于两个失败，这两个失败在埃尔富特会议的在线账户和对轴心问题的研究中都很明显。第一个缺点是--尽管研究轴心文化的专家有时会讨论轴心时代--他们之间在这个问题上没有持续的有组织的合作。第二个缺点是忽视了社会经济因素。我们对社会经济发展和智力（包括形而上学）发展之间可能存在的关系有一个普遍的理解，但这种理解从未被应用于轴心问题。这两个失败是相互关联的，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。 我们的项目将开始纠正这两个缺点。但是，轴心问题不能一下子全部回答。该项目是第一步，重点是两个轴心文化，印度和希腊的最早哲学宇宙学的显着相似之处。希望这个项目的成功将激发对其他轴心文化的同样的探索。首席研究员的《金钱与早期希腊人的思想》（剑桥大学出版社，2004年）是第一个持续的尝试，通过考虑所有因素，社会经济以及宗教和文化，来解释公元前6世纪和公元前5世纪希腊的知识革命。现在有人提议将这种调查扩展到大约同一时期的印度，并与一位也受过古典主义训练的印度学家持续合作。早期印度和早期希腊哲学宇宙学之间的显著相似之处如下。(a)与先前存在的拟人化多神教传统形成鲜明对比的是，一个单一的包罗万象的无形实体被提升到形式的多样性、变化和特殊性之上。(b)在这个趋向于抽象的单一实体和个体自我（或灵魂）之间存在着相互同化。(c)人们相信，通过良好的行为，我们可以摆脱轮回，这是不分青红皂白的（在这个意义上，我们可能会变成任何生活）和痛苦的。这一套共同的信仰，在印度和希腊之外并不存在，在这个历史阶段，不能用两种遥远文化之间的影响假设来合理解释。即使有影响，也必须解释为什么以及如何接受文化对它所接受的东西有中心地位。因此，从公元前世纪开始，印度北方经历了一个城市化、商业化和货币化的过程，这在当时的希腊城邦之外（也许除了中国）是独一无二的。

'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).