Second Axial Age
Contextual Quote
Otto Scharmer:
"If the first Axial Age deepened interiority at the individual level, the present threshold calls for something structurally new: a deepening of collective interiority. As a facilitator of many group processes in local communities and international institutions, I have been struck by questions that I have heard more over the past year or two than ever before: What does it mean to be a human being? Who am I? What am I here for? What are we here for? These are, remarkably, the same questions that broke through during the first Axial Age — now arising in collective settings.
To meaningfully reckon with such questions, we need all three forms of intelligence in concert, with source intelligence as the foundation. We also need awareness-based social leadership technologies, methods, tools and support structures for cultivating the social soil from which collective agency arises."
(https://www.noemamag.com/we-may-be-entering-a-second-axial-age/)
Description
Ilia Delio:
"The theologian Ewert Cousins located a Second Axial Age at the opening of the twentieth century—in the new science, mass communication, air travel, and now the internet—and named its signature a new ecological immanence and the emergence of a new kind of person. Where the first axial age was the birth of transcendence, the second is the rebirth of immanence. The ultimate source is no longer found behind or above the cosmic order but in the depth of its becoming: what the first axial figures reached past the cosmos toward turns out to be the interiority of the cosmos itself, seen now through the lens of evolutionary depth. The God-quest does not disappear in the second axial age; it relocates. Transcendence is no longer vertical but, in Raimon Panikkar’s word, cosmotheandric—cosmos, God, and human woven into a single fabric. The depth is reached by going into matter, life, evolution, and consciousness rather than past them.
The mutational thinkers of the second axial age are familiar names—Teilhard de Chardin, Raimon Panikkar, and Thomas Berry, among others—yet their work remains marginal to mainstream thought, its transformative power largely untapped. My own work follows closely the vision of Teilhard de Chardin, whose great work is best known in English as The Phenomenon of Man."
(https://iliadelio.substack.com/p/why-ai-feels-like-grief)
Characteristics
Concrete Universality
Sean Kelly:
"In contrast to the abstract universals that dominated the first Axial traditions, the new Gaian identity exemplifies the real-ideal of concrete universality. The universality of Gaia consists most obviously in the fact that it is in and through Gaia that we live and have our being. Gaia is the ground of what we all share in common. For the same reason, this universality is concrete, to begin with, in the sense that the physical systems studied by Earth System science constitute the shared, living body of the entire Earth community. It is also concrete, however, in the specifically Hegelian sense that it, or She, is auto-poietic or self-organizing (the foundational insight of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis’ Gaia Theory), which is to say that Gaia is a Subject (as well as a communion of subjects, and not a mere collection of objects).
The actualization of concrete universality that I see as the guiding spirit of the Second Axial Age will depend upon the successful coordination of multiple initiatives, both theoretical and practical, across the full spectrum of human endeavor. Here I will focus on some key features of the theoretical.
If the First Axial Age was associated with the emergence of theoretic culture, with its second-order thinking, metacognition, and radical mytho-speculation, the Second Axial Age is marked by what could be described as third-order metacognition and a new (planetary) radical mytho-speculation.
Integrating the critical, reflexive virtues of first-Axial theoretic culture, the leading edge of theory in the Second Axial Age recognizes the destructive potential of the disembedded, disengaged subject (which reduces the world to a mere collection of objects). It re-embeds the human subject into the living Earth and cosmos — or rather renews consciousness of the fact, and mystery, of its ontological consubstantiality with Earth and cosmos — which are now seen, celebrated, and engaged with as a communion of subjects. More radically, we can say that the radiating center of the second Axial Age is constituted by an awareness — a third-order metacognition — in a growing network of individuals and communities, that ‘We live in that time when Earth itself begins its adventure of conscious self-awareness’.
This awareness is informed and catalyzed by many distinct, if overlapping, disciplines, including Earth System science, Big History, the various strands of ecological science and environmental studies, the field of religion and ecology, and the emerging transdiscipline of integral ecology. For our purposes, I would single out the generative contributions of Thomas Berry, one of the founders of integral ecology and, along with Brian Swimme, Mary Evelyn Tucker, and others, bard or prophet of a more coherent and inspiring Big, or better, Deep History."
(https://books.openbookpublishers.com/10.11647/obp.0186.18.pdf)
History
Sean Kelly:
While the idea of a Second Axial Age seems originally to have been proposed by Thomas Berry, the first extended treatment in print was by Ewert Cousins, who summarized his understanding as follows:
- Having developed self-reflective, analytic, critical consciousness in the First Axial Period, we must now, while retaining these values, reappropriate and integrate into that consciousness the collective and cosmic dimensions of the pre-Axial consciousness. We must recapture the unity of tribal consciousness by seeing humanity as a single tribe. And we must see this single tribe related organically to the total cosmos.
This means that the consciousness of the twenty-first-century will be
global from two perspectives:
(1) from a horizontal perspective, cultures and religions are meeting each other on the surface of the globe, entering into creative encounters that will produce a complexified collective consciousness;
(2) from a vertical perspective, they must plunge their roots deep into the earth in order to provide a stable and secure base for future development. This new global consciousness must be organically ecological, supported by structures that will ensure justice and peace.
In the Second Axial Period this twofold global consciousness is not only a creative possibility to enhance the twenty-first century; it is an absolute necessity if we are to survive."
The Future
Jim Kenney:
"In Crosscurrent, I argued that we are living in an age of dramatically accelerated cultural evolution. Such transitions— I call them ‘sea changes’—are powerful and progressive unfoldings, marked by the movement of humankind’s dominant values toward a closer fit with reality. Sea changes affect almost every dimension of human experience and endeavor and they are extremely rare. In riving, I suggest that the religious and spiritual expression of the current cultural evolutionary sea change can best be understood as a Second Axial Age. The First was marked by the emergence of individual consciousness, making it possible for humans to step forth from purely tribal existence.
The Second is giving rise to a new global consciousness. Still acutely aware of our individual existence, we begin to recognize our roles as global beings.
The great theologian Ewert Cousins, one of the first to explore the idea of a Second Axial turning, emphasized its global character. Karen Armstrong, one of the most respected chroniclers of the great religions, also sees the signs and calls attention to the continuity of the Second Axial with the First.
The flowering of a Second Axial Age could mean the most remarkable evolutionary advance in the human search for meaning since the birth of the great religions in the first millennium BCE.
But how can we be certain that such a transformation is actually underway, that ours is indeed a time on the cusp? Is there a cogent response to the new ‘cultured despisers’ of religion—those who imagine that uncritical dogmatism, rabid intolerance, rejection of science, and fanatical violence represent the authentic character of human religiosity? What might the critics discover if they responded to Schleiermacher’s gentle prompting and entered into dialogue with those who have real insight into the human spiritual quest? Might they begin to suspect that religion and spirituality truly do evolve?
The following section briefly outlines a possible answer to these several questions in the form of four organizing themes and sixteen emerging evolutionary dynamics. These Axial markers are already beginning to guide a new generation of religious and spiritual inquiry, expression and action. As we reflect on them, each one opens a new window onto our radically changing cultural landscape.
The Axial Markers
The old ‘nature or nurture?’ controversy points up one of the most e Axial Age was one of the most seminal periods 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 technological modernity.
Today we are amid a second Axial Age and are undergoing a period of transition similar to that of the first Axial Age… All over the world, people are struggling with these new conditions and have been forced to reassess their religious traditions, which were designed for a very different type of society. ey are finding that the old forms of faith no longer work for them; they cannot provide the enlightenment and consolation that human beings seem to need. As a result, men and women are trying to find new ways of being religious.
Like the reformers and prophets of the first Axial Age, they are attempting to build upon the insights of the past in a way that will take human beings forward into the new world they have created for themselves.
• awareness of the world, the cosmos, as a reality entire
• reflection on the transcendent and the nature of ultimate reality
• attention to a unitary God or core principle of the cosmos
• a new sense of the human individual as related to the overarching whole
• exploration of the self and consciousness
• engagement with human mortality and a new focus on salvation, liberation, or redemption
• emerging concern with compassion, empathy, ethics, individual responsibility for the other, and social justice important synergies in human social existence: the tempering of biology by culture.
Biological evolution equips us for self-defense against the stranger, altruism toward the kin group and exploitation of resources. Culture, on the other hand, expands our horizons and deepens our insight and, in the process, alters our behavioral patterns by changing our working understandings of ‘stranger,’ ‘kin’ and ‘resource.’ Since some of humankind’s earliest religious questions addressed our relationships to the outsider, the group and the environment, it’s unsurprising that any cultural evolutionary advance would produce new insights and new behaviors with respect to these critical dimensions of existence.
The First Axial Age, for example, gave rise to human ethical concerns, notions of social justice and reverence for the Earth. Appropriately, the first three Second Axial themes address these essential relationships. The first category of 21st-century evolutionary development has to do with our broadening and deepening relationships with ‘the other.’ The second is an extension of the first, shaped by new understandings of peace and justice as critical religious concerns. The third addresses our deepening understanding of our responsibility to the Earth and the entire planetary community.
The fourth theme has to do with the recognition of the vast global landscape of spiritual practice and possibility. Perhaps the greatest of the First Axial breakthroughs was the discovery of the personal spiritual path and the rich variety of its tracings. The Second Axial finds its sacred signature in what the late interfaith pioneer Brother Wayne Teasdale described as ‘interspirituality …an attempt to make available to everyone all the forms the spiritual journey assumes.’ e Second Axial reawakening of the inner life, it would seem, has a distinctively intercultural flavor.
The following list of Axial themes and markers is neither definitive nor exhaustive. Each theme represents one of the most important domains of 21st-century religious and spiritual advance; each marker points up a particular evolutionary shitf that is already well underway. It’s perhaps most useful to think of this compilation as a guide for reflection, a map of critical action areas, and—above all—an invitation to further exploration. Life in a period of powerful evolutionary advance is never easy but always energizing. And riding the new wave in is always preferable to washing out with the old."
(http://www.kosmosjournal.org/CustomContentRetrieve.aspx?ID=4359809)
Source: * Article: Another Turn on the Axis: Religious and Spiritual Evolution in the 21st Century. by Jim Kenney. Kosmos, Fall | Winter 2011
URL = http://www.kosmosjournal.org/CustomContentRetrieve.aspx?ID=4359809
Excerpt at Second Axial Evolution
Discussion
The Second Axial Age is an Age of Commons
James Quilligan:
'The first Axial Age led to the inclusive expression of common being through religion, the arts and culture. But it also resulted in the divisive rationality of privatization, property enclosures and utilitarian economics. If a new Axial Age is now dawning, a synthesis must emerge from the unity and division of the past. This new union can emerge only through a new expression of value. Yet we don’t have to cast about looking for it: this value is already here, needing only to be named, understood and practiced. The commons may now be seen, at least in part, as a rediscovery of the principles of freedom and equality which are idealized but imperfectly expressed through modern free markets and state-enforced justice. Unlike the Market State, however, the commons cannot be coordinated by some ultimate authority exercising control through a unified command structure. The commons are a third dynamic—arising from the shared values and meanings of people’s life-experiences—which includes but transcends the market and state."
The Differences between the First Axial Age and the Second Axial Age
Sean Kelly:
The dominant strands of first Axial traditions tended to emphasize the transcendent pole in the vertical dimension (as we see in Platonic and the later Cartesian dualisms; Christian otherworldliness; Hindu and Buddhist views of the ‘wheel of life’ as illusion or trap; in Chinese cosmology, the immovable Pole star as symbol of Heavenly power and virtue, or the Daoist immortals). In the extreme, according to Robert Bellah, these dominant strands involved ‘the religious rejection of the world characterized by an extremely negative evaluation of man and society and the exaltation of another realm of reality as alone true and infinitely valuable’.
At the same time, while the first Axial Age
involved a new consciousness of the universal in its noetic, cosmic,
and ethical dimensions, the several axial epiphanies of the universal
remained rooted in the exclusive (ethno-linguistic) particularities of
their respective culture spheres, and therefore in both of these senses
the universal was abstract. ‘Great as the major figures of the axial age
were’, as Bellah would note in his last and greatest work,
- and universalistic as their ethics tended to be, we cannot forget that each of them considered his own teaching to be the only truth or the highest truth, even such a figure as the Buddha, who never denounced his rivals but only subtly satirized them. Plato, Confucius, Second Isaiah, all thought that it was they and they alone who had found the final truth. This we can understand as an inevitable feature of the world so long ago.
A central task of the Second Axial Age, by contrast, involves the
articulation of new forms of universality which could mediate between
the particular culture spheres and help them confront their shared
predicament: the threat of planet-wide ecological and civilizational
collapse.
Despite the astounding synchronicity of first Axial Age, it was not global or planetary in extent, and its various representatives were largely unconscious of the parallel developments outside of their own culture spheres. At the same time, however — and as I have argued in detail in Coming Home — it was the destiny of one late, hybrid, shoot (Christianity) of this first axial mutation to become the symbolic catalyst or lure for the eventual emergence, some fifteen hundred years later, of the Planetary Era (more commonly designated as the modern period). It is with this specific genealogical line that we can discern an answer to the question of the relation between the two Axial Ages: the central symbols of Incarnation (of Spirit into matter, of the Logos into Cosmos, of the eternal into time) and of God as Trinity (the Absolute as internally differentiated) prefigure the deep structure of the movement from the first to the second Axial Age, with Modernity as the middle term between both Ages.
The first Axial Age sets up the conditions of possibility for the eventual emergence of the second. These conditions include the reflexive and critical consciousness associated with ‘metacognition/theoretic culture’ (M. Donald); the ‘disembedding’ (Charles Taylor) of culture from the cosmos and of the individual from the collective; and the lure of the universal (Eric Voegelin, Jan Assmann).
At a deeper level, both ages can and should be seen as the two poles of a single process, or rotating axis, moving from the abstract to the concrete in three broad phases:
(i) an initial identity (in this case, structured around the central myth/symbol of Incarnation wedded to the Greek intuition of the universal as logos/cosmos);
(ii) a movement of differentiation — and later, dissociation (leading to the birth of modern science, the modern disengaged subject, and the broader processes of secularization; all of which bring about the birth of the Planetary Era and the accelerating planetary crisis);
(iii) a new Gaian, or Gaianthropic identity in the making.
The cultivation of this new identity is a central task of the Second Axial Age, which itself can be seen as the ‘opportune moment’ (kairos) for the actualization of the deeper telos of the 2,500- year Axial Aion."
(https://books.openbookpublishers.com/10.11647/obp.0186.pdf)
From Individual Interiority (First Axial Age) to Collective Interiority (Second Axial Age)
"In the first Axial Age, the attainment of written language capacitated an inner life of reflection on the basis of abiding texts that created a platform for shared meanings. That critical self-distancing capacity for reflection, or “interiority,” enabled people to transcend their immediate circumstances, tribes and local narratives to become self-aware as individuals in the larger universe. The sociologist Charles Taylor called this process “dis-embedding.”
In this context, written language — the first cloud technology of stored information — fostered philosophical exchange, the codification of ethical systems and shared metaphysical notions of salvation from the earthly storm. The sense of ontological security these narratives promised amid perpetual turmoil spread the appeal among constituencies far and wide.
In our era, Scharmer sees a new axial shift toward “collective interiority,” in which a new consciousness of the relationality of all being as an indivisible unity conjoins the subjective inner world with the outer world. In a word, he sees the “re-embedding” of the individual back into the interdependence of community and nature, this time not out of narrow ignorance as in the ascribed past, but through an enlightened ecology of mind."
- Nathan Gardels [1]
The ‘Next Axial Age’ could be framed as a spirituality of co-creation rather than dominion
Nathan Gardels:
"Frontier scientific advances have made us humans realize we are embedded and entangled within Earth’s habitat. We are not above and apart from our biosphere, Kauffman says, but “co-creators” in its evolution. Like the poet Goethe, he sees a dynamic, creative universe as a continuous “divine” activity rather than a static set of laws for all time — creatio continua —in which humans are participants.
“What are the implications for the self-understanding and responsibility of human civilization in this undetermined unfolding?” I asked Kauffman.
He explained: “The spiritual consequence, I would argue, is a new sacredness of participation. If the world is not fully given in advance, then Creation is not only ‘back then’ but ongoing. The sacred is not merely a completed order; it is the act of becoming itself … [it is] reverence for the creative unfolding, not worship of a finished blueprint.
“A ‘Next Axial Age’ could be framed as a spirituality of co-creation rather than dominion. And crucially, this spirituality would not be anti-science — it would be a new science understood as careful participation in a living, creative world.”
(https://www.noemamag.com/what-might-the-next-axial-age-look-like/)
Periodization
Sean Kelly:
" My proposal for the periodization of the larger arc that encompasses the two Axial Ages is as follows.
- Axial Aion (c. 800BCE to present):
- First Axial Age (c. 800–200BCE)
- Planetary Era (c. 1500CE to present)
- Second Axial Age (Gaian epoch or Gaianthropocene) (c. 1945?–)"
(https://books.openbookpublishers.com/10.11647/obp.0186.pdf)
More information
- Article by Otto Scharmer at https://www.noemamag.com/we-may-be-entering-a-second-axial-age/