Jurgen Habermas ’s pronouncement that we have entered a postsecular age runs a grave risk of philosophical distortion of its basic motivations (Habermas 2008b). Habermas outright rejects the potential misunderstanding of a postsecular age as bringing about a miraculous resurgence of spiritual commitments in the most secularized of European and Western states. He maintains in his Dialectics of Secularization that neither the modern state in its original form nor the many emergent transnational political regimes require faith-induced sources of moral solidarity. However, his ultimate rejection of any thick pre-political moral basis as the grounds for legitimacy does not thereby preclude foreclosure of the rational legitimacy of opting for or against faith in making contributions to public debate.

On the one hand, the achievements of modernity have rapidly spread species-wide through globalization (Eisenstadt 2003b, pp. 937–52). The global spread of state neutrality to religion necessarily entails the steady de-confessionalization of the nation-state. On the other hand, this secular achievement of neutrality becomes the very condition for the possibility of spiritual contributions to public debate. The growing recognition of the potential moral contributions of the great axial traditions to social solidarity also opens innovative epistemic, moral, and ethical inputs to shared problematic circumstances. The enigma in understanding the full import of Habermas’s position rests upon the simultaneous opening of ethical and epistemic options for or against faith as equally rationally justifiable positions.

The ensuing problem with deriving a truly polycentric, multi-vocal, and inter-Axial politics of communicative action that begins with his Western-oriented and—nonetheless avowedly transcendentally ideal—theory is twofold (Habermas and Ratzinger 2006). Primarily, when dealing with non-Western traditions, we may be at risk of building into the pragmatic presuppositions of the discourse theory the sorts of Western outcomes we want them to produce. In order to alleviate some of the inevitable parochial biases of readers trained in critical theory and contemporary Western political theory, I will begin in critical theorist fashion with reconstructing the pragmatic presupposition of communicative action internal to the non-Western Axial traditions. The hope would also be to prevent reading the Abrahamic traditions into what ideally would constitute an impartial mode of analysis.

Secondly, while the program of cosmoipolitan justice may disclose innovative species-ethical justifications that contribute to the legitimacy of non-Western social orders, when moving from genealogy to transcendental implementation, they may fail pragmatic tests for rational universality originally cherished as a primary epistemic virtue. If misconstruing the cognitive motivations of those described as taking up these practices, we are left with a series of gaps between our expert transcendental theorizing and the more locally inscribed social imaginaries. In its worse forms, this could constitute yet another continuation of a hegemonic Westernization of not really taking up these alternative civilizational discourses on their own terms. Imposed transcendental justifications from the outside would lend further credence to the warranted bias that objectively impartial theorizing becomes another mode of surreptitious neo-colonialization. The dubious portrayal of law and universal morality as neutral will ultimately fail tests of legitimacy if not subjecting expert discourses to the rational assent or rejection of those most immediately affected by both our descriptive facts and prescriptive norms (Asad 1993).

On behalf of Habermas’s increasing openness to imbue the universal with more localized ethical and cultural content, practical indeterminacy in the face of novel global problems can itself be turned into an epistemic virtue as a wellspring of species creativity. For instance, normative learning and ongoing reflexive redaction can be reconciled with compelling contemporary research into neonate and infant capacities for second person participation. An enriched contemporary understanding of our unique capacities to participate in another person’s stance toward problematic circumstances can thereby heighten our sensitivity to providing more accurate rational reconstructions of how these universal capacities have been and continue to manifest themselves in non-Western communicative practices. In particular, the neonate practical capacity for joint attention precedes the later emergence of capacities for linguistic and propositional understanding (Pinsent 2012, p. 56). We will search for non-Western iterations of these practical capacities behind healthy cognitive flourishing and moral maturation as a means to encourage prolonged second-personal experimentation with both disclosing and resolving newly emergent species-wide problematic circumstances. In most general terms, the micro-level discourse analysis feeding into the project of cosmoipolitan justice presupposes neonate counterfactual experimentation with multiple realities as the very precondition for healthy individual and species moral maturation (Gopnik 2009, pp. 19–46, 86–91; Buber 1970/1923, pp. 75–79; Bellah 2011, pp. 1–11, 91–97). The collective learning process of ascribing shared propositional understandings for problems itself must always already include a reflective component when facing novel problems that yet require vocabularies for fully capturing their common species ramifications. I argue that such a dispositional comportment necessary for successful joint attention requires constant re-socialization as cognitive, moral, and affective buffers to our increasingly intense pressures to engage only in instrumental comportments to a shared social world. Without second person reflexive testing, we risk lapsing into either instrumental or objectivigating orientations of civilizing persons into linguistic practices that may do more cosmic, psychological, moral, and cognitive harm than good (Donald 2012; Bellah 2011).

The associated linguistic and communicative remedies I propose would be to render as a normative project Eisenstadt’s empirical descriptions of both the tradition-preserving and revolutionary components common to the salvation impulse of all the axial traditions (Eisenstadt 2006). The initially unsuccessful Axial Age social movements projected disparate hopes for alternate civilizational orders. As the concomitant traditions have still survived, I will recast them more optimistically as the major drivers in realizing cosmoipolitan justice as an ongoing species vision of communicative experimentation with multiple potential realities subject to constant redaction. While the revolutionary movements were originally localized and elite-driven, the pragmatic presuppositions behind all the axial social imaginaries presumed potential communicability to a universally encompassing audience. Any person could be taken as at least a potential participant in communication, not just in reference to common objects of joint attention, but also in presuming the shared capacity to reshape a world of common reference as always already socially constituted. These revisionist emendations will draw upon Habermas’s theory of communicative action as the best available template for this experimental syncretism of comparative analysis.

Learning by redaction through social protest and through creative extensions of millennia of tradition will also be transposed upon the initial species-wide rite of passage that Jaspers associates with the advent of the Axial Age . Instead of Habermas’s original TCA-informed Weberian abstraction to a linguistification of the sacred that slowly progresses toward the methodogical atheism of a more fully mature modernity, upon reconstructing the basic pragmatic presuppositions of the axial period, we will actually find the richer genealogy (to follow in the next two chapters) to comprise opposite trends away from convergence. Again, allowing for some degree of necessary abstraction, we will instead presume (along with Eisenstadt, Taylor, and Casanova) the pre- and post-Axial linguistic/theoretical social imaginary as always already mimetic, inherently ritualistic, and politically constituted, via institutionalized transmissions of tradition and social protest in their performative address as second-personal.

We must therefore concur with Voegelin (and Bellah 2011), that while from hindsight we may execute rational reconstructions that delineate stages of enhanced reflexivity , ‘nothing is ever lost’ as the ritual stages of tradition can just as easily become cognitively imbued with new rational content when transmitting their originally embodied habitus. As communicatively transmitted, they may also become reflectively redacted via protest to give voice to the novel problems of the present. Pre and post-axial remnants of ritual socialization are thereby indelibly bent toward enduring degrees of prolonged reflexivity upon transcendence-immanence tensions from the outset. In the final analysis, I will construe each axial breakthrough as proposing a particular species-ethic fully embedded within the historicity of its mimetic and mythic ciphers . On this side of the particular, the performative attitude of a second-personal social imaginary must allow the first-person articulation of either transmitting prior socialized content or initiating axial protest—pairing both together as shared movements that belie too subjective of a construal of historical change. Here, while trading off the Axial Age simultaneity of distinct cultural transformations for his conventional stance of methodological atheism, we need not reinvent all aspects of Habermas’s communicative ethic. Since we must allow for an adequate contextualization for our first-person articulations of responsible subjectivity, we can still follow the general spirit of Habermas’s twofold linguistic turn laid out in TCA. First, we can provide even more detailed and tradition-specific rational reconstructions of the Durkeimian organic genesis of solidarity from the residues of the religious imaginaries. Secondly, we can also commit ourselves to adopting Mead’s pragmatic maxim that ‘individuation proceeds through processes of socialization’ by applying neonate and adult linguistic capacities to the learning mechanisms required to reach mutual understanding. However, under the wider axial rubric of cosmoipolitan justice and the entailed project of presuming multiple modernities, we need not presume a single monolithic or hegemonic narrative of species maturation and must at least proffer the notion of never achieving convergence of background justifications and/or legal juridification when faced with the prospect of multiple world histories.

In recasting the communicative impetus of Habermas, we also must readdress the most likely critical query to arise. In proposing such an experimental overhaul of the critical theorist affinity for a methodologically atheist theory of communicative action , why revisit the positions of Jaspers? Why resuscitate his existential leanings from philosophical and social scientific obscurity—indeed if not ever as an all out replacement—but as among the foremost to consider as a viable emendation to social science traditions stemming from Weber?¹

In response, since our capacities for second personal comportment are potentially unlimited, Jaspers had the keen insight to argue that a truly universal project of species communication must be presumed to have always already been intra-axial and inter-axial. In ascribing the present perfect sense to its theoretical warrant in On the Origin and Goal of History, his multi-vocal and decentered social imaginary presumes having always already started as an experimentally pragmatic project owing ultimate origin to the simultaneous emergence of an elite-driven republic of republics of letters from multiple civilizational sites. However, now, via globalization , the initially elite-driven process of inter-axial borrowing has truly become a live option for the wider public in both William James’ and Taylor’s senses. The practical efficacy of an alternative vision of social order rests upon breaching the elite horizon. Reaching the common understanding of realizing innate capacities for unlimited communication can only come about through the critical theorist hope for an educated and properly socialized global public. In reply to the ‘why Jaspers?’ question, we can also trace a clear line of development of insights taken to be found in Jaspers originally—inspired by his own explicitly anti-imperial rejection of an institutionally imposed Eurocentric global order to correct the myopic excesses of the original Eurocentric world histories found in both Hegel and Weber. As contemporary confirmation of the nascent global philosophy originally prognosticated by Jaspers, we can now appeal to the non-Eurocentric works of Eisenstadt, Bellah, Talal Asad , Onuma Yasuaki , Sen, and others to continue the realization of his social imaginary as a project that he also correctly predicted would create healthy empirical and normative dissonance in its development rather than ideological uniformity.

As Taylor has shown in the meandering narrative that comprises A Secular Age, even the European movements of social transformation characteristic of Latin Christendom had roots in alternate modernities that were always already imbued with thickly divergent cultural contents (see also my Chaps. 3, 4, and 5 for a longer development of this theme). However, instead of the adapting a neo-Weberian (and lopsidedly Protestant) subtraction narrative of cultural content as already ideological—that is, if owing its genealogy to Latin Christendom—the second-personal orientation of both furthering tradition and stirring on protest instead presumes persuasive attempts at rational justification as legitimate grounds for communicative action . Taylor interprets these movements of protest as second person appeals to a species-wide capacity for the rational warrant behind inter-axial epistemic claims:

The background understanding which makes this act possible for us is complex, but part of what makes sense of it is some picture of ourselves as speaking to others, to which we are related in a certain way—say, compatriots, or the human race. There is a speech act here, addresser and addressees, and some understanding of how they can stand in this relation to each other. There are public spaces; we are already in some kind of conversation with each other. Like all speech acts, it is addressed to a previously spoken word, in the prospect of a to-be-spoken word. The mode of address says something about the footing we stand on with our addressees. The action is forceful; it is meant to impress, perhaps even threaten certain consequences if our message is not heard. But it is also meant to persuade; it remains this side of violence. It figures the addressee as one who can be, must be reasoned with. (2007, p. 174)

Regarded in light of continuing the initial calls for radical social transformation initiated by the collective rites of simultaneous protest that came with the Axial Age , cosmoipolitan justice as an institutional program for practical realization therefore need not draw its hope from capacities outside the scope of healthy species functioning. Insofar as they are always already latent to healthy individuation via processes of socialization, we instead need to reconstitute new public spaces that redefine the political in a manner that better conforms to our most enduring cognitive, affective, and moral capacities.

In light of a more comprehensive review of the micro-level philosophy of language that informs Habermas’s discourse theory, I will first briefly reconstruct how his defense of communicative action depends upon his rejections of strategic-instrumental and objectively-theoretical reason. Then, following his call for a multi-faceted purification in the West whereby secular and religious commitments are subjected to mutual critique, in the remainder of this chapter, I explore potential epistemic contributions of Eastern axial traditions to moving beyond myth to the more reflective employment of logos, particularly via Habermas’s growing interest in providing a discourse-theoretic account of the emergence of ritual at the onset of Jaspers’ Axial Age .

In initially focusing my attention upon the Eastern contributions to this process, I will provide a micro-analysis of the interaction of discursive subjects in four traditions: for Hinduism , epistemic authority (as presuming capacities for joint attention) when applied to social role differentiation; for Buddhism , right speech ; for Confucianism , the rectification of names; Taoism , truth disclosure . At the more macro-level of entire civilizational orders, I will also show how each overcomes various cultural manifestations of political crises by encouraging diverse forms of contestation, protest, and periphery to center critiques of the social distribution of coercive administrative power and material wealth.

Although Habermas’s theory of communicative action has undergone numerous amendments, revisions, and multi-disciplinary supplements over his prolific career, in these brief remarks I will restrict my focus in the first two sections to the enduring constant to his view: the paramount importance of achieving mutual understanding with a second person . Then, in the last part of this section will I take on his most recent engagement with evolutionary theory and the great Axial traditions in so far as these new developments bear the most direct significance to his critical theorist ongoing commitment to bringing historical materialist modes of assessment to bear upon the institutional challenges of the present.

The linguistic turn in Western philosophy has led to three major influences on the critical theory tradition that contribute to its overall materialist and moral goal of species-wide human emancipation. The first, macro-level trend, appeals to the explicitly democratic construction of regional, transnational, and cosmopolitan political institutions in light of the widening scope of the flows of communication of modern subjects that transcend the sovereign state, local markets, and nationally oriented popular media. The second—the analysis of the micro-level communicative interaction among discursive subjects—has typically fallen under the domain of discourse ethics, with much focus on pragmatically reconstructing and morally ensuring presuppositions of legitimate communicative action . The third, most recent effort has thus far received the least comprehensive development, initiated by Habermas’s attempts to deploy both the macro and micro dimensions of discourse theory via his reconstruction of the linguistic dimensions of Axial ritual.

My provisional attempt at laying out the discourse theoretic program of cosmoipolitan justice, while true to varying degrees to all three movements internal to critical theory , admittedly bears no theoretical precedent. My effort to embed the micro-discursive components of the Eastern traditions (and then, in Chap. 3, the Abrahamic ones) within his more transcendental rubric of the second-person perspective will thus flesh out the context and implications of an Axial ritualization of practices of joint attention among discursive subjects oriented to mutual understanding. While, on his view, the third approach—Axial ritual—assumes an evolutionary narrative, we will also embed it within a historical materialist framework of socialization. This material line of development ultimately confers legitimacy upon traditions as moral progress only when introducing reflexively learned innovations beyond prior modes of decadent, imperialistic, and war-torn modes of civilizational organization. Although I treat each distinctly, the abiding constants for comparative focus include the significance of social protest oriented toward extensions of more universal species justice, the unique role of the renouncer-philosopher in each, and the communicative dynamics of recasting Axial insights within their respective scriptural canon. These comparative scriptural hermeneutics are typically imbibed in some variant of formalized or informal scriptural tradition among elites. Competing schools gradually gain mobility in professing salvation impulses more universally—eventually spilling over into the common vernacular for the critique, assessment, and redaction from multiple, often internally heterodox, general publics.

The initial separation of the social roles of the priest and king offers a unique perspective from which we can assess the legitimation of both spiritual and political authority within a Hindu context (Shulman 1986, pp. 424–25). The ability to inhabit distinct social roles and still to engage in joint attention across statuses presumes the capacity for reciprocal role taking. The pragmatist tradition has historically associated this capacity with developing the empathetic and rational skills for the practical employment of the second-person perspective. Once a society begins differentiation of social roles towards more complex divisions of material and epistemic labor beyond the simplistic norms ties to a kinship model of organization, they attempt to overcome the initial estrangement accompanying the loss of a prior mode of socialization. Kinship bonds initially loosen as they extend openness to new bonds of trust species-wide by constructing a social order grounded upon learned capacities to take up new perspectives and roles. To retain a more abstract moral legitimacy outside the family context, these hypothetical abstractions necessarily require the practical agent to confer political authority on the basis of rational justification and not merely upon a pre-ordained cosmic order:

These theories reflect an increasing sense of alienation where it becomes necessary to enforce harmony, since the pristine natural harmony of society has disappeared. They also reflect the acceptance of the idea of authority based on power and not necessarily on kinship alone. The janapadas were coalescing into territorial states. By the fifth century B.C. competition for power had already developed among the stronger of the major janapadas, such as Kasi, Kosala and Magadha, where even close kinship ties were ignored to further political gains. (Thapar 1975, p. 122)

In accord with one of Kulke’s earlier criteria for granting Hindu traditions that status of axiality, we see this occurring within the wider context of a large shift from ranked tribal kinship orders to the more complex differentiation into agro-urban social roles. Here we also find the nascent origins of the political hierarchy of the caste system that eventually will become one of the major non-territorial cultural features of the emergent Hindu practices that allows its precedent of hierarchy by social roles to spread eastward to other non-Hindu regional contexts. On this front, we satisfy yet another of Kulke’s Axial conditions: the nomadic de-territorial drift of early Hindu patterns of socialization into a new homeland increasingly spreading eastward.

As these new Hindu practices eventually spread, the third-highest caste—that of the warrior administrative king—was eventually super-ceded by the priestly caste. On the one hand, originally, blood sacrifice in battles allowed for a prolonged period of perceived social legitimacy to imperial conquests eastward into less nomadic and more agricultural modes of social organization. However, we find that in the Hindu corpus of scriptures that carried quasi-historical narrative reconstructions of these conquests, the sacrificial nature of militaristic coercion eventually was overtaken by a symbolic rendition of ritual reenactment. As this constitutes yet a third of Kulke’s five criteria for axiality, this early habituation of spiritual leaders into an increasingly literature Hochkultur required the priestly authority to learn more complex cognitive and critical capacities to mediate access to the original Sanskrit scriptures. The steady institutionalization of learning transitioned from an oral mode of transmission and exegesis gradually to the written accumulation of recorded interpretive precedent that began to attribute symbolical meaning to these quasi-historical narratives. The de-territorial appeal to texts as objects of joint attention upon which to construct patterns of social order also offered a new mode of legitimation for authority behind sheer military might and coercive power. The concrete self-sacrifices of clashing warriors on the battlefield were replaced by the higher-order purely ritual reenactment of these same practices as a common locus of culturally conferred and socially legitimated objects of mutual understanding. This new elite-educated literate strata to the social order provided a cosmic disembedding of society through the reinterpretation of their original canon of sacred writings. By imbuing scripture with its mythic-historical rendering, a shared social order was continually redacted until the semi-historical battle sacrifices became purely symbolic through principled reasoning, competing schools of learning, and ritual reenactment by the priestly elite (Prbhupada 1997, pp. 55–59). While the third highest caste of political administrators still retained their pragmatic functions of this-worldly governance, the highest priestly caste that emerged—while not holding any this-worldly power—nonetheless played a co-participant function in the rational legitimation of the ongoing ritualized recreation of the social order.

What happened was that ultimate value and legitimation, as it was realized and activated in the warrior’s sacrifice, was taken out of the mundane sphere. Henceforth ultimate legitimation could only come from the transcendent ritual that took the place of sacrifice. For that reason the whole of dharma had to rest on or even had to be contained in the sruti—a necessary fiction, but a fiction all the same. For the sruti is patently devoid of use or meaning in the world’s affairs and it is so as a matter of principle. Closed upon itself it has no meaning other than the self-contained rationality of its system. (Heesterman 1986, p. 399–400)

Heesterman describes the beginning of a binary split to run from here forward in the Hindu canon of scripture as a necessary condition for the priesthood’s new role in the ongoing ritualistic maintenance of dharma, or better, presumed cosmic balance as an objective social order for focusing our joint attention. What becomes known as the sruti compilation of mythic-historical scriptures carried a new politicized meaning that owed its narrative origin to Voegelin’s ‘cosmion ’: the shared participatory realm of the cosmic gods, society, and individual mediators of competing statuses. These hermeneutic assumptions entail a confessional commitment on the part of the priesthood to the lack of human authorship ascribed to the sruti. The role of the priesthood thereby derived the legitimacy of its expert authority from the second person comportment of a participant role—taken up in ritualistic reproductions of a revelatory reception directly from an initially transcendent source.

The ideal brahmin, like the Veda, stands apart from the world and cultivates the Veda by himself. The world, on the other hand, could not remain unaffected. The brahmin’s standing apart illustrates how the world was impaired by the withdrawl of ultimate value and legitimation. Especially the king and the web of power relations he represents stand in need of the brahmin’s legitimizing services. But it is exactly the king who is singled out as the one whom the brahmin should utterly shun. The situation is the more contradictory for the fact that subsistence and survival would force the Brahmin to turn to the king for his support. (Heesterman, p. 401)

What thereby emerges requires an inherently social conferral of hierarchically differentiated social roles that places all affected in mutual ties of participatory interdependence. Unique to these legitimation structures would be the necessary function that the Brahmin-priest plays in the legitimation of authority. However, in sheer material and economic terms of the concrete conditions for such social legitimation would be the precarious co-dependence of the hierarchically superior Brahmin elite upon the lower-order function of the king-administrator-warrior caste. The equally necessary social role of the king-warrior—as mutual participant and subject in the wider social and cosmic orders—provided the administrative and material conditions for ongoing structural stability of Hindu societies from the bottom up to the top. By providing sacral legitimation of the coercive power kings held over the lower two caste groups, the servants and the laborers, the efficient functioning of social roles presumed shared species capacities for reflection upon the order manifest in the cosmic domain:

Accordingly, the political ruler achieved a high level of sacral or semi-sacral status, distinction and honor. The king was often portrayed as “king of the universe,” his rule extending to the four corners of the earth, his coronation ceremony and its accompanying horse sacrifice renewing his powers annually. The king’s claim to universal sovereignty, as “lord of all lords,” and the manifestation of his greatness through temples and monuments attested to the power and distinctiveness of political authority. The symbolic portrayal as king of the universe also reflected an ever-present desire to extend political domination and constant attempts to aggrandize mundane power, primarily through territorial expansion or, even more so, through the encompassing of loyalty of peoples in the area. Therefore, although the king’s symbolic authority was in principle derived from the overall cultural-religious vision and was symbolized through religious rituals, some degree of authority seems to have been attributed to him independently of religious legitimation. Yet, given the basic orientation of Hindu civilization away from mundane affairs, the political arenas maintained a certain, even if only partial, detachment from the “other-worldly” religious arena. (Eisenstadt 2003a, pp. 333–334)

In the wider world-historical context, we can justifiably extend these reflections in an inter-axial dimension, as an initial support for the plausibility of multiple world histories. To undergird our abiding commitment to multiple modernities, we see here the Hindu response to the historically under-determined role of the Persian Empire that comprised a common periphery to each of the axial settings. In this case, the administrative-warrior function of the Indian king(s) eventually also provided a necessary defensive military buffer against the impending rise of the Persian Empire that had begun at the leadership of the Persian Achaemenids. In addition, the functional differentiation of tasks also freed up the priestly leadership from tainting their ritual purity from too active of engagement in the pollutants of finite, mundane, and worldly affairs. In this respect, we have thus satisfied four of the five functions Kulke attributed to Axial orders, as this fulfills the fourth: the direct context of an Axial order with one or more of the imperial states to arise in the Near East—in this case, the Persian empire.

While it would seem that the general thrust of a sufficiently rational and universalistic axial breakthrough includes moving away from a ritualistic world-view, the Hindu rationalization of ritual offers us a unique case of the simultaneous preservation of ritual while also overcoming its mythic, revelatory, and enchanted functions. The nuances of the Hindu twofold distinction of its enormous canon of scripture into sruti (hearing) and smrti (remembrance) placed the Hindu priest in a setting that led to the ongoing rationalization of ritual practice, that for Heesterman, constitute the most defining quality of its Axial breakthrough.

That the Veda nevertheless goes under the name of sruti suggests that the age of the ecstatic seers is over and the revelation complete. The only thing that remained to be done was the painfully precise transmission of the revealed knowledge by hearing and learning it by rote. From then on the Veda became a fixed and bound body of texts, like the scriptures of Buddhists or Jainas. The point to be retained is the break between the revelatory vision of the seers and the sruti that purports to be the content of their vision….There is, then, a decisive gap between the revelatory vision and its ritualistic substance. It is in this gap—and not in the preceding age of the seers—that the Axial turning point is situated. This turning point does not lead to the exploitation of the revelation but is aimed at overcoming it. It replaces vision and revelation with something entirely different, namely the rational order of ritualism that by itself constitutes ultimate truth and leaves no room for anything so unsettling as revelatory vision. (Heesterman 1986, p. 395)

The prophetic revelations constituting the content of the sruti are taken by priests to have ended in order to facilitate the rational ordering of scriptural content. But, nonetheless, the insight and interpretations remained open for the priest to overcome the non-rational realm of visionary revelation with a hermeneutic deriving its legitimacy from the complex layering of rational principles. The interpretive precedent was super-added upon the sruti scriptures as they were transformed into the canonical body of texts from which the rationalized ritual was derived.

In terms of social differentiation of roles, the constitution of the caste hierarchy with its attendant elite-educated Hochkultur at the top of the social strata thereby led to the ongoing proliferation of canonical texts. The rationalized layers of interpretive precedent transformed the initial revelations into a means by which to secure the legitimation of the social order through rites and proprieties tied to the initial sruti. The ongoing increase of ritualized precedent was likewise catalogued and subsequently passed through processes of differentiation with competing schools of interpretation dependent upon the particular social strata in need of ongoing legitimation.

As for the five initial criteria listed by Kulke as conditions for the conferral of inclusion among the great traditions of the Axial Age , the only one not yet addressed would be the last to emerge historically within the millennia of traditions comprising Hinduism : the eventual emergence of the intellectual at odds with the status, proprieties, and authoritative hierarchy of an elite-priesthood. Yes, dismissals of the Hindu tradition often point to the enduring relevance of the caste system as proof that its insights had not truly attained the species-ethical universality. Moreover, the moral egalitarianism conventionally associated with the requisites of impartial justice call for the eradication of structural domination to ensure legitimate conferral of an axial breakthrough. However, the entry of the social role of the Hindu ascetic renouncer serves as an overt attempt to undermine the achieved legitimation of the authority conferred upon the caste structure by its participants—especially the spiritual and political leaders that had the most to gain from its ongoing maintenance.

At approximately the same time period as the historical transition from pre-Vedic to post-Vedic scriptures, the ascetic renouncer emerges on the scene as yet a fifth social role to introduce as an outsider (thereby fittingly labeled as out-worldly) to the original caste division of labor. These social roles had already been differentiated into four other social roles (in decreasing order of hierarchical authority) of the priest, warrior-king, skilled laborer, and servant. As yet an additional stratification to include within the axial rubric of an emergent Hochkultur (as according to Kulke’s opening criteria), instead of the elite-educated functions reserved for the priests, we find the emergence of another form of elite individual, perhaps closest to the axial breakthrough of the philosopher as critic of the prevailing social order. Despite the layers of hierarchy, the out-worldly status of the Hindu renouncer takes on the more universalistic role of primary orientation to the Weberian intellectual-spiritual pursuit of species salvation within the participants socialized into this new sect:

At the end of our period we find, correlatively with the beginnings of caste, a full-fledged and peculiar social role outside of society proper: the renouncer, as an individual-outside-the-world, inventor or adept of a “discipline of salvation” and of its social concomitant, best called the Indian sect. These sects were religio-philosophical movements transcending the Hinduism of the man-in-the-world. They were to be perennial in India and acted powerfully on this Hinduism. (Dumont 1975, pp. 162–163)

Along with this new social role, outside the caste strata proper, came the perpetuation of this new mode of spiritual, moral, and philosophical discipline that thereby required the formation of hierarchical, but nonetheless second-personal, mentor-mentee relationships. These led to organization in disaggregated sects committed to overcoming the finite constraints imposed by the impure profane social order.

Hinduism , most fully articulated in the Brahminic ideology and symbolism, was based on what was, among the Axial Age civilizations, the most radical recognition of the tension between the transcendent and mundane orders—derived from the perception that the mundane order is polluted in cosmic terms, because its very creation constituted a breach of the original cosmic harmony. This pollution can be overcome in two different ways, which are at the same time complementary and contradictory. One way is the faithful performance of the ritual and mundane activities ascriptively allocated to different groups—above all to caste and subcaste groups—which signify different degrees of social and ritual purity and pollution. Closely related is the arrangement of social ritual activities and nexuses in a hierarchical order that reflects an individual’s standing in the cosmic order and the performance of his duty with respect to it. At the same time, however, the stress on the pollution of the world also gives rise to attempts to reach beyond it, to renounce it: the institution of the renouncer (Sannyasa) has been a complementary pole of the Brahmanic tradition at least since the post-classical period. (Eisenstadt 2003a, p. 331)

According to Eisenstadt, while the renouncer did offer an alternative to the status-hierarchy of the priestly mode of ritual purification, the intra-axial parallel competition between priest and renouncer remained enduring constants throughout the history and ongoing development of Hindu practices.

In addition, these differentiated modes of reciprocal role taking continued further into the bifurcation of the renouncer of the pollutants of worldly-engagement into two principle functionaries. On the one hand, that of the jnana yogi entailed reflective philosophical study upon the presumed principled unity of scriptures (with supreme reason as object of joint attention within a particular sect). On the other hand, the disciplined labor of the bhakti yogi called for renunciation oriented strictly to devotional service to a personalized supreme deity (with Krsna as object of joint attention in a practicing sect). In Hindu scriptural canon, the Bhagavad-Gita presents in dialogical and narrative form Krsna’s allegorical advice to warrior-devotee Arjuna that ‘[Both t]he renunciation of work [jnana yoga] and work in devotion [bhakti yoga] are good for liberation. But, of the two, work in devotional service is better than renunciation of work’ (Prabhupada 1997, p. 174). In decided preference for this second-personal devotion over third-personal contemplation of God as an object of intellect, the Weberian salvation impulse embodied in the Bhagavad-Gita expresses an inherently communicative, affective, and relational ideal for liberation:

Therefore, jnana (or knowledge that one is not this material body but spirit soul) is not sufficient for liberation. One has to act in the status of spirit soul, otherwise there is no escape from material bondage….One who knows that everything is Krsna’s property is always situated in renunciation. Since everything belongs to Krsna, everything should be employed in the service of Krsna. This perfect form of action in Krsna consciousness is far better than any amount of artificial renunciation by a sunnyasi. (Prabhupada 1997, pp. 175–176)

In this respect, in response to objections to its caste hierarchy as obstacle to axiality, Hinduism owes its species-universality to out-worldly liberation in a double sense. The renouncer role allows for freedom from the proprieties of status ultimately regarded as a shackle, pollutant, or hindrance. In addition, the renouncer as devotee calls for a positive form of liberation as a means for full realization of empathetic capacities for participation within and eradication of the suffering of another.

I would be fair to concede that in a tradition as enduring as Hinduism, the rendition of the devotee-renouncer offered in the Bhagavad-Gita does not carry the final verdict on the necessary and sufficient conditions for renouncer salvation. Since reflective, meditative, and work-orientation modes of renunciation still fall under continued sect schools as legitimate disciplined practices, for Eisenstadt, Hinduism evinces this unique quality of having retained perhaps an unrivaled internal core-to-periphery heterogeneity that he and other theorists of multiple modernities characteristically ascribe to all axial traditions. Of all of them, Hinduism perhaps manifests this core-periphery tension to its highest extremes, in particular, as it belies intellectual and historical attempts to reduce its multi-faceted traditions to a set core of basic principles common to all self-ascribed practitioners.

Nonetheless, while Eisenstadt would agree that any principled effort to exhaust the contents of the Hindu tradition would certainly falter, he does find that it still retains a basic common core focus of joint attention of practitioners upon out-worldliness. With a background justification and legal form quite distinct from its Western counterparts, the Hindu tradition offers a common normative commitment to the de-confessionalized state, since the political realm itself could corrupt the spiritual and cosmic order.

Given this strong articulation of the tension between the cosmic and mundane orders, Hindu civilization, like all the Axial Age civilizations, developed a distinctive centre. The major centre of Hinduism was not, however, political. Louis Dumont, in Homo Hierarchus and other works, and Jan Heesterman have pointed out how Indian conceptions of the political realm differed from the European. They both stressed that in India the political realm was not seen as a major arena of ‘salvation,’ where the tension between the transcendental and mundane orders could be bridged fully. According to Dumont, it constituted a secondary arena in relation to the realm of the sacred, as represented by the Brahmin; Heesterman pointed out that it constituted one of the major manifestations of the degeneration of the given world of ‘artha’—against the absolute state of Dharma. According to both interpretations, the political arena did not command a high degree of transcendental commitment, even though kings were often seen as having sacred or sacral attributes and although kingship constituted a central and necessary organ of society. (Eisenstadt 2003a, p. 332)

As retaining its core outside of the political realm, we could also qualify Hinduism as embracing the transcensus introduced in the opening chapter as a philosophical-practical constant running across each of the Axial traditions. This distinctive out-worldly mode of Hindu transcensus would best be described as the salvific effort to overcome the finite, temporal, and fleeting nature of the profane world.

With an apolitical center to its shared social practices, either the priestly-route of purification through ritual praxis or the renouncer route of sanctification through concerted efforts at willful withdrawl, each lead to liberation from attachment to an inherently perishing world. Eisenstadt confirms this distinction as two fundamentally different orientations to the achievement of a singularly common axial goal of transcendence:

The two approaches to the mundane were based on two distinct value orientations, on two ‘axes of sacred value’—those of auspiciousness and purity. These two distinct value orientations were always closely interrelated; although purity was hierarchically higher, it could never be concretely realized without auspiciousness. The concrete working out of the tension between these two axes constituted one of the major motive forces of the dynamics of Indian ideologies, institutions, and history. (Eisenstadt 2003a, pp. 331–332)

At risk of over-generalization, given the inherent interconnectedness of the two values, the path of auspiciousness would be closer to the priestly role in performing rituals that carry the promise of most adeptly bringing one in accord with the pre-ordained but tragically lost cosmic balance. As for the renouncers, the path of purity would be the closer identification here insofar as conscious efforts, affective dispositions, and even meditative endeavors all would share the common aim of purity by willed withdrawal of oneself from the pollutants of the profane world to attain salvation.

Even if one were to object to the caste hierarchy on strictly moral grounds, the attendant culture to constitute the axial social order serves as its civilizational constant and became an object of joint attention for all affected, even when from widely divergent social perspectives. The politicization of a shared understanding of how one might participate proved reflective of a hidden cosmic order. The socialized participation in the cosmic order deeply impacted the Indian region and owed much of its success to the relative ease of transmission of such proprieties independent of local confines.

Whatever the special roles of the Brahminical intellectuals, whether they were priests or court-priests, chaplains and advisors, whether they were lay intellectuals, they did nevertheless provide the theological doctrine which turned their ethnically and occupationally extremely variegated societies into a more or less unitary caste-bound society. They did not do this through the power of the state but by their acknowledged monopoly of the power to promote correctness of ritual behavior. Brahminical Indian intellectuals created in India a society which withstood many centuries of foreign rule and of many small states. They did this by creating a culture which spread beyond the boundaries of any single India polity. (Shils 1986, p. 444)

Insofar as political rulers sought legitimation from Brahmin priests for both strategically instrumental and for sincerely moral aims, since the cultural praxis was a condition of legitimacy conferral, this led to the ongoing longevity of the Hindu tradition.

We could also say that the universal transferability, while not fully embodying modern norms of freedom and equality, could also hint at its axial universality in as much as the transmission of this cultural nexus need not presuppose any particular political form. Its other-worldly salvational impulse could tolerate any number of concrete political institutions.

The major centre of Indian civilization was the religious-ritual one. In close relation to its other-worldly emphasis, its wide ecological spread, and its being strongly embedded in ascriptive primordial units, this centre was not organized in a homogeneous, unified, organizational setting. It rather consisted of a series of networks and organizational-ritual subcentres—pilgrimage shrines and networks, temples, sects, schools—spread throughout the continent and often cutting across political boundaries. (Eisenstadt 2003a, p. 333)

In potential response to critics too, given the ascribed statuses conferred with this complex hierarchical nexus, one might deflect claims to suggest that the ascription of particular statuses had any direct bearing as a reflection of the moral and salvation-oriented capacities of the participant.⁴ The non-territorial conferral of particular social roles allowed for a great deal of flexibility that also contributed to ongoing political instability. In this manner, the reflexive interdependence of the priestly ritual code upon a stable social-political nexus seems to strengthen the need for the member(s) of the administrative-warrior caste to provide a this-worldly anchor to balance the other-worldly emphasis of the priests (and renouncers).

[T]he political arena was characterized by a relatively high degree of political instability and turnover, manifested among other things by the continual changing of boundaries and in the expansion and contraction of political units. Despite their political distinctiveness and the drive for civilizational expansion, few polities achieved anything near unity of the sub-continent. Although India knew states of different scope, from semi-imperial centres to small patrimonial ones, the overall Indian cultural tradition was never identified with any of them. Kingdoms of various sizes were in constant competition, especially in the fringe areas, resulting in an instability temporarily overcome only by exceptionally strong rulers who formed strong networks of personal ties and espionage. The segmental nature of the political collectivities fostered the fluidity and instability of the political structure. (Eisenstadt 2003a, pp. 335–336)

These circumstances also reinforce Voegelin’s observation that one feature of the ecumenical longevity of Axial traditions over millennia and into the present would be the long and growing empirical record of constant failure in forcing potential species-wide universality into an imperialistic institutional form. However, Voegelin (as we will see frequently arise in this chapter and in the Abrahamic Axial traditions) resolves these tensions endemic to transcensus by his normative mandate that no Axial order ought coercively to ascribe to an imperialistic/bureaucratic model of expansion by coercion of subjects as though they were merely third-personal objects of administrative power. For Voegelin, the universal-spiritual versus political-particular conflict endemic to transcencus runs in the other direction too. Political orders imperial in potential scope must, for Voegelin, remain void of enforcing a particular cultural content, and only in doing so do they evade self-imposed institutional and spiritual corrosion. When institutional conditions become ripe for any one of the great Axial traditions to crystallize into an imperial core, the call to seek salvation in this-worldly terms leads invariably to their demise. However, since it is also true that distinct Axial traditions have experimented with providing the cultural content for one or more imperially-oriented institutional scheme—not only has that contributed to their ongoing longevity—but has also been the institutional condition to make possible their communicative transition to cultures far from their original lands, territories, and regions of initial axial breakthrough.

According to Dumont, there are inexplicable narrative gaps in the emergence of modern individuality in the West that cannot be exhaustively explained by the prevalent scholarly practice of tracing Western modernity back to strictly Hellenistic roots. On the one hand, socialization leading to individuality seems problematic when the Greek polis (and even Greek view of species) seems to err on the side of an overt focus on the common good of the aggregate at the cost of the individual. He also notes that the Western philosophical leap to the Christian notion of subjectivity as a narrative shift super-added to the Greek person also seems at best to provide only a patchwork account of the emergence of modern subjectivity. The Western self-understanding improves little by merely amending the earliest phases of Christianity as having already emerging in Judaic contexts also deeply influenced by Hellenistic practices and ideals. In addition, Dumont notes that even if the onset of Western individuality cannot fully be understood without also acknowledging our Western-centric reconstructions as informed by additional Stoic influences, this genealogical leap presupposes that the early Christian understanding of the subject had roughly the same referent for individual identity as its Stoic counterpart.

While he does not pretend to put to rest these historical quandaries, he does introduce an intriguing revisionist strand that would further complicate conventional reconstructions. In particular, the emergence of Western individuality from the conventional inter-Axial triangulated borrowing from Hebrew, Christian, and Greek sources seems, to Dumont, incomplete. While we need not drop the modern conception of healthy individuation proceeding through processes of socialization, the inter-axial and inter-civilizational may need to become more, rather than less, complex: