Earlier this year, the TLS published my review of two books by the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas. In the recently translated first volume of Also a History of Philosophy (2023), Habermas discusses a paradox in the genealogy of post-metaphysical thinking, that is, contemporary philosophical thought that is concerned with the character of our knowledge of the world, but which has abandoned any ambition to imagine, describe, or know anything beyond our world. The paradox is this: despite the secular character of modern Western thought, its origins can be traced back to early Jewish theology and ancient Greek metaphysics. In this respect, modern Western thought shares features common to other major intellectual traditions which also draw upon ancient religious texts, notably, Buddhism and the Vedic teachings of ancient India, and Taoism and the Confucian teachings of ancient China. These traditions all experienced a gradual but decisive revolution in character during in the period known as the Axial Age (roughly, the eighth to the third centuries, BCE).
Habermas’s argument is that during the Axial Age, previously well-established forms of reasoning ceased to provide convincing explanations for what was observed in the natural world, and that core religious beliefs and ritual behaviours ceased to provide effective forms of communal integration in the shared social world. These failures, or blockages, provoked the intellectual revolutions associated with the teachings of Buddha, Moses, Laozi, and Plato. The collective learning processes that overcame these blockages – which took different forms in each context – provide the template for Habermas’s theory of philosophical and social progress. As a species, he argues, we are able to learn, to solve problems, to improve our knowledge of the world around us and the arrangements by which we organise our society. While progress has taken different forms in the East and the West, there is an underlying continuity of shared learning and its application across the whole range of human thought.
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