Promoting Human Rights and Human Dignity in an Axial Age

• Pages: 49-59
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-78973-821-620191005
• Date: 18 November 2019
• Published date: 18 November 2019
• Author: Michael L. Penn,Tri Nguyen

Chapter 4

Promoting Human Rights and Human

Dignity in an Axial Age

Michael L. Penn and Tri Nguyen

Introduction

In his book, The Origin and Goal of History, German philosopher Karl Jaspers

(1953) described the period between 800 and 200 BCE, which he called the “Axial

Age,” in the following way:

In this age were born the fundamental categories within which

we still think today, and the beginnings of the world religions, by

which human beings still live, were created. The step into univer-

sality was taken in every sense. As a result of this process, hitherto

unconsciously accepted ideas, customs and conditions were sub-

jected to examination, questioned and liquidated. Everything was

swept into the vortex. In so far as the traditional substance still

possessed vitality and reality, its manifestations were claried and

thereby transmuted (p. 2).

During the Axial Age, there appeared, on the horizon of human conscious-

ness a series of reverberations that were to shake, dismantle, and recongure the

foundations of human thinking in various parts of the world.1 This period of his-

tory saw the appearance of such extraordinary gures as Confucius and Lao Tze

in China; the Buddha in India; the prophets of Israel in Mesopotamia; Socrates,

Plato, and Aristotle in Greece; and Zoroaster in Persia.

The Axial Age was remarkable because it was a time of great upheaval and

suffering, a time of tremendous violence, instability, and social disruption. The

violence was facilitated by new technologies of death associated with horseman-

ship and the invention of the chariot. But, it was also a time when humanity, as a

species, acquired the conceptual tools and the social pressures that would compel

1For a discussion of these themes, see Bellah and Joas (2012).

Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Human Dignity and Human Rights, 49–59

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doi:10.1108/978-1-78973-821-620191005