- Dr. Pius V Thomas.
The theme of the 2026 Berggruen Prize Essay Competition was on the global discourse on the new Axial Age. The Axial age as conceptualized by Karl Jaspers, is popularly understood as spanning from 800 to 200 BCE, was a series of inter-civilizational efforts to intuit and negotiate claims of purposeful creation and life. Though their global intents were largely involuntary, they all shared a unitary ethical purpose. As Hans Joas observes, the best shorthand characterization of the Axial Age, is from the American Sinologist Benjamin Schwartz, who called the Axial Age “the age of transcendence”.
The suggestive power of the Axial age is its placing of certain significant phase of Human History in a horizon of liberative hope. The concept of the Axial Age is enormously important and significant in our age of post-truth and post-civilizational uncertainties and conceptual ambiguities. The code of New Axial Age seeks to mediate on what are the immediate contexts and principles of coexistence, social justice and democracy. Further, it stimulates an organic cultural dialogue that is meant to enliven the dimensions of intercultural communication and intercultural ethics. The significance of evoking the interaction between cultures, where the agents of a particular culture intend to recognize and accept the reciprocity of the other’s culture is immensely life affirming. It involves a communicative and ethical commitment to interact with and understand the other cultures. As the reality called multitudinous cultural differences and the need for a more visible constructive principle of life to coexist in a time when our principles of love, cultural dialogue and action for peace fall apart, egalitarian cultural encounters invent dialogical democracy as the most vital action for of emancipatory action for justice, equality, right to be heard and speak.
The recent efforts to redefine grass root democracy in India which has created an unavoidable binary between Cockroaches / Non-Cockroaches, is deeply coupled with our effort to look forward to the grammar of a new Axial Age. The binary of Cockroaches / Non-Cockroaches makes a new domain of dialogical democracy. Also, the term cockroach brings in to our dialogical imagination bio-spherical egalitarianism and tosses up an environmental metaphor of humility.
Though our sensitive understanding for the future of the Earth inspires different conceptual conglomerations, one of the core issues of the survival of the Earth is related to the broad ethical concerns that scrutinise the nexus among the natural environment, the cultural environment, and the technological environment. The central concerns that we have to be aware of in retrieving creatively the Earth, our living spaces, cultural affinities are in refashioning the ethics of the ‘nature-humans’ relationship, inspired by the bio-spherical equality and care. In the broad sense, it takes into account the moral status of humans, non-human living organisms, and the non-living members of nature, ecosystem, and biodiversity and more importantly the ecology of thought and active democracy. According to some critical eco-sophists, theorists and the futurologists, where humanity has reached by its dominating rationality and the resultant eco-crises, is the biggest crisis of democracy. It seems to be a point of no return and knotted with certain social stages of evolution. Due to capitalism, globalization and many other social interactive stages of growth induced by the technological civilization and its global environment, our social matrix and imagination have transformed into a middle-upper middle-class sense of instrumental and strategic sense of progress and well-being: A ‘technology forced – compelled’, embodied living. Our bodies have been metamorphosized into technological need extensions and gadgets. Our bodies as embodied ‘techno-needs’ pre-define and pre-fabricate our life expectations, pleasure and goals. Quite curiously, in the technological environment that makes systemic colonization of the embodied being, forces us to abhor organic waste, but to be indifferent to plastic, energy, electronic and nuclear waste; it makes us intolerable to temperature increase, water shortage/scarcity, but to silently accommodative to global warming and carbon emission; makes us feel fuzzy about new viral and microbial ailments, but feel cool about both the irresponsible encroachment of the natural and cultural environments of life and human brotherhood and so on. Can such an imminent crisis lead to the self-imploding spirit of triggering an organic life style and vision that can hint at a new Axial Age?
The recent efforts to redefine grass root democracy in India which has created an unavoidable binary between Cockroaches / Non-Cockroaches, is deeply coupled with our effort to look forward to the grammar of a new Axial Age. The binary of Cockroaches / Non-Cockroaches makes a new domain of dialogical democracy. Also, the term cockroach brings in to our dialogical imagination bio-spherical egalitarianism and tosses up an environmental metaphor of humility. The non-cockroaches are strong, mighty and powerful. Cockroaches are seemingly weak but will survive. To use an idea from Karl Jaspers, the moral geniuses of the axial period were all cockroaches and big failures. Jesus, the Buddha, the Threerthankaras, the Upanishadic Seers, Socrates, Old Testament Prophets were all rejected and made failures by the then non-cockroaches. But the Cockroaches came back vigorously a few years or centuries later. The failures of Jesus, the Buddha, Gandhi and Ambedkar are all counterfactual/countercultural ideals to civilizational concepts of aggressive victories. The destiny of India is in mutual critique and dialogue between these groups of people to strike the logic of a new Axial Age of deliberative democracy and freedom.
(The Author is Professor, Department of Philosophy, Assam University, Silchar).
