Abstract
Can we keep relying on sources of values dating back to the Axial Age, or do cognitive changes in the present age require a completely new foundation? An uncertainty arises with the crisis of values that can support the human in the age of artificial intelligence. Should we seek contemporary access points to the archaic origins of the species? Or must we also imagine new Anthropocenic-Axial values to reground the human event? In his most recent work, Habermas affirms the continuing importance of the contemporary access to the First Axial values, but before him Jaspers anticipates that a second cognitive revolution opens areas that may be receptive to new value foundations. Habermas’ justification of the postsecular turn may not be thinkable without Jaspers’ discovery of the postaxial imaginary.
Can we keep relying on sources of values dating back to the Axial Age, or do cognitive changes in the present age require a completely new foundation? 1 After World War II, Jaspers named by the Axial Age the simultaneous but parallel and autonomous rise of great systematic religious and philosophical thinking between 2800 and 2200 BP. Among the shared Axial values have been transcendence, universality, individuality, cosmic and human order, and infinite otherworldliness. 2 The new global cognitive revolution in infobiotech may not be easily supported by these inherited values. There is a growing consensus among scholars in sciences and the humanities that we are no longer living in the climactically stable Holocene era that marked the last 12,500 years BP but rather in the geological epoch of the Anthropocene – the age of the human. 3 Jaspers who coined the term Axial Age also anticipated the possibility of a new Axial turn. Habermas (2008, 2017, 2019) adopts Jaspers’ term in his new turn to the sacred complex of ritual and myth. This complex provides a single source of human origins with two branches. Supervening the narrative translations of rituals into myths were the first Axial religions, traditional ethics and autonomous morality. But Habermas does not think that the accelerated evolution of the Anthropocene may require a new Axial imaginary.
The question that interests me lies in the margins between Jaspers and Habermas and among the host of Anthropocenic thinkers who recognize that the new problem is not just a climate change but the future of the human event. Jaspers and Habermas share a sense of the vanishing event horizons of history and future. An uncertainty, I argue, arises with the crisis of values that can support the human in the age of artificial intelligence (AI). Should we seek contemporary access points to the archaic origins of the species? Or must we also imagine new Anthropocenic-Axial values to reground the human event?
Drawing on their different views of the First Axial Age, I will examine how Jaspers and Habermas reflect on the spiritual situation of the present age (1). I argue that in his most recent work, Habermas correctly affirms the continuing importance of the contemporary access to the First Axial values, but before him Jaspers anticipates that the second cognitive revolution opens areas that may be receptive to new value foundations (2). Habermas’ justification of the postsecular turn may not be thinkable without Jaspers’ discovery of the postaxial imaginary (3).
1. Jaspers and Habermas on the ‘spiritual’ situation of the present age
Habermas adopts Jaspers’ notion of the Axial Age but with a new emphasis. The key difference between them resembles the Kuhnian distinction between normal and revolutionary science. Habermas is most interested in mainstream institutionalized liturgies surviving to the present age because they were formed out of the values that emerged during the Axial Age. Jaspers highlights the crisis, insecurity and openness of the very Axial shifts. Jaspers revisits the Axial contexts of discovery and searches for their possible markers in the present. Habermas justifies the access points to Axial achievements that stabilized and survived to the present.
Habermas’ critical philosophy of religion
Habermas turns to religious topics as an outsider and observer: Often calling himself ‘religiously tone-deaf’ (2017, 76; also 2003), he drives home that he lacks refined spiritual senses to speak from within religious experience. He studies the Janus face of contemporary religions: the stubborn return of religions after the wave of modern secularization sweeping the West and the stabilizing role of religious solidarities performatively alive in the mainstream liturgies. Habermas takes over Jaspers’ discovery of the Axial Age as a way to justify the persistence of the ‘religious’ in postsecular societies. Habermas is unpersuaded by Jaspers’ anticipation of new Axial crises and shifts. The Axial Age took place between 800 and 200 BCE, there is no ‘First’ Axial Age for Habermas. On this reading, the ‘spiritual’ situation of our age is not primarily a crisis of Axial values. Habermas (1984, 2019 and 2017, 218) concludes that we suffer from twofold one-sidedness: secular and religious fundamentalism.
The context for Habermas’ critical philosophy of religion lies in conflicts among religions as well as in their sparring with secularism. To sustain the global cosmopolitan world order, he argues, secular citizens must more than externally tolerate religious communities that are participating in the public. The secular mind, while observing an enviable religious solidarity of fellow citizens, needs to apply postmetaphysical thinking to reflective faith. This charitable observation of the present religious life forms cannot rest satisfied with benign concession to coexist with them. Secular mind needs to appreciate what it cannot achieve alone: religious autonomy with its specific ability to access ritual performatives and so translate these with new meanings into the public sphere. It is not only that the archaic ritual-springs have not dried up, Habermas admits. Without fresh waters of imaginative and semantic resources for human solidarity, the secular mind has barred epigenetic and transgenerational paths to its own origins. AI is sterile when it comes to rebooting creativity for the present age. Machines learn new discoveries only insofar as humans are creative.
For these reasons it cannot be enough to observe and tolerate the faithful from outside while under breath judging them to be retrograde fossils soon to be extinct. The secular mind can borrow from the religious mind only insofar as the latter refines its received traditions. Such refinements engender reflective faith and postsecular interfaith. Even though secularized senses had lost their ability to know what genuine performance of ritual or faith taste, sound, smell and feel like, there are those among us who have honed their archaic competencies to grant them access to religious experience from within. As sons and daughters of the age of reflection, these coreligionists can smell what is spiritually fake. Habermas concedes that those who, unlike him, are not tone-deaf to spiritual tonalities serve as bridges to semantic meanings that might otherwise be lost to the human race.
Habermas supports his postsecular, critical philosophy of religion with several key claims. First, he distinguishes secularism from secularity. This distinction parallels that between scientism and scientific method. The first term in each pair represents modernity’s bias for its unfinished project. An unfinished project of reflective faith is also part of history of philosophy. Both projects are part of the history of philosophy (Habermas 2019). By elevating rationalization of the lifeworld to be de facto an absolute perspective of the age of reflection, both scientism and secularism practice a brand of ‘Enlightenment fundamentalism’ (2017, 218).
Second, Habermas (1987, 2017, 2019) revises his thesis of linguistification of the sacred. Before revision, he affirmed that the vanishing point of modern Western rationalization yields a thorough reduction of the interpretive gap between the sacred and secular. He now admits a twofold genealogy of the modern. Postmetaphysical thinking and reflective faith are coequal at their origins in the sacred complex of myth and ritual. Rationalization facilitates the translation of ritual into myth. The process of critical reflection does not exhaust the resources of spiritual semantics. We do not know whether or not the translation could complete itself. It seems that the ideality of thorough rationalization, just as that of total phenomenological reduction, is at best an impossibility and at worst a prejudice.
Third, there is nothing to take place of the ritual mind that alone is able to create and nurture archaic sources of solidarity when those distilled through rationalization have become devalued. Access to the ritual solidarities might be necessary for the renewal of democratic meaning and will formation when the motivational illocutionary force of the better argument, normative law and ethical solidarity all suffered exhaustion and systematic distortion. This need to nourish communicative competencies at a gestural, ritually performative and presymbolic levels, from whence language emerges in the first place, might be one reason why Habermas turned to the archaic sacred complex. When reflective faith collaborates with postmetaphysical thinking, some dangers posed by ideological forms of understanding and the mythical rave forms of fanaticism may be mitigated from both sides, reason and faith.
Newly, Habermas grants critical religiosity a unique ability to exercise its own self-reflection. Reflective faith affords a more robust critique of religious ideology than postmetaphysical thinking alone. Religious critics of religion – Kierkegaard, Douglass Dostoyevsky, Buber, Heschel, Tillich, but also someone like Buddha – are more effective than atheistic theorists looking at religious institutions and practices as outsiders. One-sided secularism is itself an ideological form of understanding that, because it reigns summarily victorious over religious formations, fails to unmask its own self-apotheosis. Moreover, it has forever banished access to deep meanings preserved at the species level of the ritual mind.
With these moves, Habermas introduces a novel hypothesis that contemporary mainstream liturgies that developed by mainstream historical religions provide us today with access points to the sacred complex of ritual and myth. Because the sacred complex contains an uncut umbilical cord to our prehistoric species-origins (whereby Homo Ritualis became Homo Sapiens), such access, when rejuvenated, becomes vital in the present age that is suffering from the fatigue of inherited values. These foundational human values articulate the inherited Axial insights into the universality and singularity of the human event. Such insights are now continually devalued. Can the present age reground the human species at the subliminal level wherein, from the fount of ritual awareness, new myths originate? Translation of ritual performance into narratives would create fresh points of accessing these foundational insights. Enter Habermas’ privileging of contemporary liturgies that hold the surviving keys to the scared complex of the human origination in ritual and myth.
There are two metatheoretical caveats Habermas brings into this thinking: One, human historical origins are shrouded beyond 7000 years BP. Two, contemporary crisis of the Axial values requires us to transvalue the future which we cannot comprehend ahead of living it. On the first, prehistorical trajectory, ritual consciousness grounds the original forms of human solidarity and coordination prior to the emergence of symbolic and linguistic competencies. Communicative interaction strengthened those liminal solidarities through ongoing translations of ritual into myth. From myths arose cultural narratives, developed religions, emerged systems of thought, matured normative thinking.
On the futuristic trajectory, Habermas turns to rituals at the basis of the ongoing sacred complexes because therein we continually dream, as if from within, the sources of semantic meanings and value-orientations for as yet undiscovered problems. If we secularize our thinking to the degree that we neither can dream nor imagine other worlds beyond the disenchanted ones that we have distilled from technological modernity, then access to the archaic future of our origins becomes unthinkable. On the vanishing horizons of the past and the future, Habermas seeks access to the reservoirs of meanings that have not been rationalized by linguistification and algorithmizing of the mind.
Jaspers’ conjecture about the origins and ends of the human event
Jaspers (1953, 34) frames the human event by the vanishing horizons of what we cannot know. Both human origins and the future are inaccessible to us. From Jaspers’ framework, I can ask Habermas: Even if the sacred complex is preserved in the institutional religions shaped by the Axial values, how is our access to the archaic ritual solidarities possible after ‘the death of G-d’, that is, devaluations of those very Axial values?
Habermas agrees with Jaspers (1953, 2): The Axial Age established the event horizon of the Homo Sapiens as we know ourselves today. ‘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 universality was taken in every sense’. Dogmatic and ideological formations that also issue from the Axial shifts misconstrue these values as a static. The human awakenings to personal, ethical and transcendent meanings are dynamic for Jaspers. Yet the ‘spiritualisation’ of human awareness through Axial values does not stabilize in a paradigmatic state akin to normal science. ‘With the leap to history transitoriness becomes conscious’ (47). Axial values mark an opening outside of human self-enclosure. ‘The great break-through was like an initiation of humanity’ (55). ‘The break itself is the fresh great enigma’ (75).
That opening announces creativity characterizing revolutionary discoveries rather than normal periods of interpretive justifications. ‘Man is no longer enclosed within himself. He becomes uncertain of himself and thereby open to new and boundless possibilities’ (3). The hallmark of Jaspers’ take on the First Axial Age is thus not a closed system of thought or completed revelation of faith but, on the contrary, human awareness of the historical present, awakening to the revolutionary nature of the human project. The axial period stands out for its revolutionary rather than stabilizing features. ‘It was an age of simultaneous destruction and creation’ (5). 4
Just as we cannot fathom what we were before we became historically aware of our journey, that is, what human Genesis means, so also, we fail to glean the future of the human. ‘The one origin of mankind at the beginning of prehistory is as obscure as the future world of humanity dominating the globe, when it has entered into the unity of its legally ordered existence, whose spiritual and material horizons are infinite’ (26f.). Jaspers speaks about human evolution in geological terms of tectonic shifts. In this he anticipates the connection of the Axial Age to the Anthropocene. ‘Only the geological strata in which the finds were made permit the formulation of a temporal sequence which does coincide, in some measure, with the order of age conjectured from the nature of the finds themselves’ (33). Sapiens’ origins in self-awareness are just as obscure as the project of Homo Deus (Harari 2016) in our future transformation. ‘The moment of becoming completely human is the deepest enigma of all, up to now utterly impenetrable and beyond all comprehension’ (Jaspers 1953, 34).
Jaspers raises questions about the Axial framework of present age that do not seem to interest Habermas. What are the questions inherited from the Axial Age? If those values suffer radical devaluation to the point of willed nihilism of all value positing, must new Axial-like questionings occur in order for the human event to continue as recognizably ours? What are the ends of the human event? Jaspers intuits in the human origins something irreplaceable. And for this reason, contemporaries who are losing access to the first Axial happenings harken to establish ‘…rapport with the authentic origin of another humanity – a humanity that is not ours in actuality and yet is ours potentially, and that represents an irreplaceable historical entity’ (69). Habermas would agree with Jaspers that we are not in the Second Axial Age but for different reasons. Unlike Habermas, Jaspers contends that we live through the devaluation of the First Axial Age: ‘we are now in a position to say with certainty: the present is no second Axial Period’ (96). What are the conditions of the possibility of the Second Axis? Indeed, can such conditions be likened to a species grammar of human preunderstanding? Jaspers allows for a weak postulate of the new Axial shifts that are not yet available to us today: If there is to be a new Axial Period it can only lie in the future, just as the first Axial Period followed, after a long interval, the period of foundation-laying discoveries…This new Axial Period, which perhaps stands before us and which would constitute a single, world-embracing reality, is beyond our powers of imagination. To anticipate it in phantasy would mean to create it. No one can know what it will bring. (97f.)
This reading of the original human revolution carries twofold significance for our time: One, the Axial Age has established imaginary, narrative and normative frameworks that have more or less underwritten every major civilization up to now, they have become global consciousness. Two, with the birth of modern science and technology, the First Axial values have been under tremendous pressure to provide meanings for new species-development. Global acceptance of technology and AI is unavoidable for peoples who are to shape the future of the species. Those secular and religious cultures that remain agitated by outdated problems (conflicts among received axial values) will be bypassed if new Axial values become mainstream.
Homo Sapiens retained the same biology through its cultural evolution; we stand at the threshold of possible historical changes to our species-being: ‘the fundamental features of humanity must have been fixed as inheritable biological qualities that are still present. In historical times, on the other hand, man has not undergone any demonstrable biological metamorphosis’ (35). How do human transitoriness and insecurity become apparent now that we begin to enhance and change the very genesis of who we have been? The biological and historical trajectories may soon forge a new singularity. ‘What came over man that he stepped out of unhistoricity into history’ (46)? What came over modern humans that we emerged out of evolution into self-creation?
Some answers may be told by today’s biotech equivalents of tools and fire. ‘If we seek an analogy for our epoch, we find it not in the Axial Period, but rather in another technological age, of which we have no transmitted knowledge: the age of the invention of tools and the use of fire’ (97). Creation and evolution accelerate towards conscious self-design. ‘Man himself becomes one of the raw materials to be purposefully worked over’ (123). How do we defend the human event against becoming dominated by technology? ‘Are all the potentialities of man as an individual to cease, is meditation to vanish from the earth’ (124–25)? Or: How would Homo Deus meditate? ‘The question is, what kind of man will take possession of it, what sort of creature will man prove himself to be through the use he makes of it’ (125).
We are seeking dividing lines of pre- and post-technological age (135). There is no outside in our awareness of space-time, which means, neither afterlife nor world transcendence. ‘There is no longer anything outside. The world is closed. The unity of the earth has arrived’ (127). The present age is marked by global awareness as well as by the rise of spiritual nihilism. ‘[C]ontemporaneously with and already prior to the emergence of the Age of Technology, a spiritual and psychical retrogression took place all over the world (139). Why then the present age of technology looks like but is not heaven? ‘Technology is a means and requires direction: There would be no technology in Paradise. Technology serves the purpose of ridding man of the burden of want’ (118). These new Axial ways of posing theological and spiritual questions are forced upon us out of the domains of technological enhancement, longevity and enjoyment.
Our dangers lie in resignation to the total algorithmizing of the human world: ‘in the evil of docile readiness to accept mechanisation – and finally indifference that seeks peace of mind in the nearby and the present, and the passivity of impotence leading to resignation in the face of the supposedly necessary’ (149f.). What awareness must be developed for the new Axial Age to match the era of technology? ‘Man’s self-consciousness developed during the Axial Period. The compelling spiritual images and ideas appeared in the transition to the unmythological or at least no longer naïvely mythological ages’ (194).
After ‘the death of G-d’, there has been no new major revelation of spiritual sustenance: ‘no fresh content of faith exists, the emptiness of this faith seems rather to be a correlate of man’s loss of himself’ (218). Faith and hope cannot be programmed by AI, one can only become ready in emptiness. We have no idea what faith could get hold of the newly emerging species. ‘If in the future, however, faith is going to exist, communicate itself, and link men together, one thing is certain: We can do nothing to plan the future realities of faith. We can only be ready to receive it, and live in such a manner that this readiness increases’ (223).
As in the human origins so also if granted in the future, the Axial shifts represent ‘overall modification of humanity…spiritualisation’. ‘Man is no longer enclosed within himself. He becomes uncertain of himself and thereby open to new and boundless possibilities’ (3). ‘What was later called reason and personality was revealed for the first time during the Axial Period’ (4). How shall we grasp the new languages of faith? ‘[I]f it is true that faith is present at all times, even a public opinion which accepts [Nietzsche’s] proposition ‘God is dead’ as a believed truth cannot completely extinguish that which exists always. Then this residue, or the germ of this faith, will seek its language’ (223). Neither congregations nor states or revivalists or post-truth fanatics take away new insecurities of the present. ‘We may consider a transformation of the Biblical religion to be no longer possible, that it is likely to die out in benumbing creeds…’ (226). While Jaspers looks towards something like a new Axial Age, the unknown resembles neither theisms nor atheisms. Here is his incisive phenomenology of religion without religion: It is as though everyone were charged by the Deity to work and live for boundless openness, authentic reason, truth and love and fidelity, without the recourse to force that is typical of the States and Churches in which we have to live and whose insufficiency we should like to oppose. (228)
2. An Axial and Anthropocenic situation of the present age
We may quibble over the periodization and meaning of the Anthropocene and we may hesitate to announce an Axial renaissance. But we already grasp the character of this age’s uncertainty. There are not only climactic and biotech accelerations but also value shifts that hollow out gaps in human self-understanding. The established Axial forms of understanding no longer hold all keys to our self-renewal. How do we access pre-Sapiential reservoirs of meaning? Habermas defends the diversity of religious species necessary for our value renewal. Yet the established Axial forms might themselves conserve an increasingly devalued access to archaic rituals.
I turn to contemporary thinkers who develop Jaspers’ intuitions about our age. Szerszynski (2017) articulates what in our present situation calls for new Axial values: the cultures and religions of the Earth over the coming century are undergoing a ‘Second Axial Age’, a radical shift in thinking and praxis, involving a deeper awareness of being as conditioned by the dynamic material becoming of the universe on multiple spatial and temporal scales (36)…Is it possible to move beyond the orbit of the [First] Axial Age? If so, how might this help us to imagine alternative geo-spiritual futures – different constellations of human, planetary, and spiritual realities (39)?…[T]he contemporary dialogue between faiths – and with those who are spiritual but not religious – constitutes a new Axial Age, contributing to the growth of a global consciousness in which the world is approached in a shared, spiritual way (43).
These speculative distinctions between the first and second Axial trajectories undermine Habermas’ supposition that the established liturgical practices will or even can suffice for human species renewal. If there be new Axial Ages, we can already attest, they would not resemble transcendent theologies and universalist philosophies of the First Axial Age. ‘Instead, it is a different turning, based on a radically different metaphysics, and without the same commitment to distancing from the specificities of concrete religious traditions’ (51). Habermas thinks about Axiality as an institutionalist observing mainstream religions. As an institutional thinker of religion, he fails to apply postmetaphysical thinking to open uncertainties of reflective faith.
We get guidance to imagining new Axial shifts by observing the visible contours of the infobiotech revolution. Turner (2017) examines three domains where differences between the First Axial Age and our accelerating Anthropocene are discernible: the body image, religiosity and transcendent values. ‘The radical question is whether any of this religio-philosophical civilizational formation can survive the changes being brought about by biotechnology’ (133).
Viewing body, indeed life, as suffering marks the essential teaching in all established religions, including Freudian psychoanalysis. Our earthly life is marked by the evils of illness, weakness and mortality. What humans do ritually with living and dead bodies defines this Axial domain by its transcendent values. The future worlds alone can be more just and satisfying (135).
We escape these natal afflictions through culture. Becker (1973, 1985) insightfully interprets all values, whether sacred or secular, as forms of immortality striving. Secularization only aggravates our inherited sense of life as suffering. Modernity is empty of imaginative ritual performances that would endow life with transcendent values.
What if the resurrection of the body arrives neither in afterlife nor in workers’ or market or even technological paradise? ‘But what happens if life is extended more or less indefinitely? What happens to religious habituation and practice if the human body begins to change in dramatic ways as a consequence of biotechnological inventions and applications? Will the legacy of the axial-age religions survive the emergence of the hybrid post-body?’ If the lived body-sense, personal and communal, is the heart of ritual and religious practices, then upgraded body inevitably engenders transformation of ‘the axial-age religions and the dukkha-quality of human existence’ (Turner 2017, 140).
Turner identifies three biotech projects with Axial implications: longevity, posthumanism, the Anthropocene itself. The first imagines indefinite extension of human life, the second envisions hybrid-like vastly improved posthumans, the third alters how humans are part of nature. ‘These three developments, in changing the body and our relationship to nature, have significant implications for the prospect of any axial-age religious continuity into the future’ (141). The transition will bring about unthought kinds of racism begotten along with human species variations, classism produced by split between enhanced and natural humans, and sexism catalysed by virtually stimulated multi-gender desires. Those humanoids who are left behind by biotech resurrections will experience new hells on earth that are unlike classical teachings about suffering and redemption. Only among the data-and-biotech-privileged in already redeemed societies, ‘there will be deeply aged humans living alongside a work force of intelligent computers and hybrid humans augmented by nanotechnological inserts’ (142).
Habermas safeguards for religions a vital role in rejuvenating modern secular democracies via access to archaic semantic meanings. Yet this vicarious role would be limited to those Axial religions whose liturgies still rely on the unhappy state of the human condition. These religious imaginaries, in classical as well as fundamentalist terror-forms, will soon be left behind by biotech race for longevity and enhancements. New Axial spiritualities may emerge with ‘drug-enhanced…consciousness’ in regions where life, suffering and short life can be significantly altered in enhanced and hybrid humans. ‘The end of unsatisfactory life conditions, the management of physical suffering and the gift of infinite existence must radically change the nature and role of religion in any future society’. The material conditions of scarcity and the scarcity of hope produced by humanly made evils required either rituals of religious redemptions or of material utopias. Political theologies imagined and then produced the First Axial solutions. And these solutions postponed happy life into indefinite future (afterlife or a just world-to-come). In ‘Anthropocenic theology, death and suffering would be eventually overcome by the applications of biotechnology and gerontological science…[T]he religions of the Anthropocene will be discontinuous with any axial-age foundations and consequently things are lost in the process of human evolution’ (143; cf. Matustik 2008).
3. Postsecular as postaxial
‘Is the rise of a ‘post-secular world society’ an anticipation or expression of a new Axial Period?’ (Mendieta’s question to Habermas 2017, 68; Mendieta 2018, 2019). The fundamentalist resurgence of the received Axial religions in the 21st century notwithstanding, the values that have been underwriting the First Cognitive Revolution no longer support dataism. The postsecular condition signifies coexistence of the first Axial values with nihilism and new Axial Age imaginary whose future origins and meaning we do not grasp yet. The difference between the first and second species-leap in cognitive competencies is not merely emergence of fictive languages and communication for the Homo Sapiens and algorithmic data-processing for Homo Deus. The creationist-evolutionary leap can be measured inversely against values of the First Axial Age and those required for the Second one.
Jaspers depicted the Axial Age as a short period during which most of the main world religions and philosophies were born. More than hundred years BP, Nietzsche (1974, para 125) prophetically announced will to power as biopower. ‘The G-d is Dead’ signifies that all values hitherto have been in the grind of devaluing and transvaluing. Heidegger took another step in clarifying what Nietzsche meant by vitality as source of value-positing: that humans would prefer to will nothing than not will anything at all. Heidegger (1977) unmasked the essence of the global Axial collapse of all metaphysics as an arrival of technological singularity. Jaspers’ thinking moves not only within this Heideggerian framework, he points ways out of technological hegemony. Habermas’ reaffirmation of the sacred complex (ritual and myth) surviving in the postsecular condition meets Jaspers’ Axial imaginary half way.
It is very timely to remind ourselves of our deeper and viable meanings that we can trace among ourselves to the First Axial Age values (such as universalism, ethics, transcendence, individual freedom) of Homo Sapiens. At the time when the received Axial values are devaluing themselves, the new human species-values must either offer some resistance to or fit creatively with the infobiotech singularity.
The Silicon Valley theologians celebrate the coming of only one mode of singularity, when all human events self-organize algorithmically as data. We can see this age dawning in modern China. Yet these data prophets also proclaim new faith: The body of pain, old age and death resurrects in its longevity with newly minted life cycles, such as second or third life. With hybrid, enhanced and long-living bodies, the opposition between prolife and prochoice morphs into synchronicity. Prolife-prochoice, what is the self-designing difference? Prolife-prochoice need not necessarily mean values associated with procreation, population growth, one long life of monogamy or even distinct gender lives.
These enhanced hybrid bodies could feel almost as good as otherworldly. By pleasing the gods and the One, humans always longed for sharing everlasting life with immortals. Now instead of emergency rooms, the last blessings and the burial rites, human longing for transcending this world of dukkha into afterlife or nirvana; humans begin to upgrade and intensify the present moment. Can humans be happy in learning, creating, making love, expanding awareness, living a long life free of pain? Dataism seems to take place of redemption. Algorithms generated by AI enshrine the classical divine Omnis of knowledge and power. The drug and nano-spiritualities infuse vital force into world-immanent religions without religions.
The Second Cognitive Revolution offers infobiotech singularity by absorbing its own awareness of the human event. Could unaware algorithms think, communicate, believe, meditate, love, create? They could be programmed to perform as if they performed all that consciously. Will machine-learning programmers programmed to behave as if they were self-aware and even meditating minds be recognizably human? What would differentiate the deep learning AI minds from mindful minds? If humans are still to be considered free to direct (rather than just be determined by or randomly related to) technological development, then the Second Axial Age must be thought of as a mind-state singularity that pivots at the inverse boundary of the AI’s technological singularity (Figure 1).
Singularity chart.
The most exciting about this revolutionary upheaval is the possibility that Homo Sapiens may not only come to know and design its species as Homo Deus (Harari 2016) but also anchor itself for the first time as a mindful species. I propose that this promissory revolution/evolution can be a harbinger of two inverse singularities:
The Second Cognitive Revolution accelerates the possibility of the Second Axial Age. Algorithmic AI and mindful non-dual states are two inverse modes of singularity.
If this can be shown as plausible, then humans may come to know themselves better not only algorithmically but for the first time also as a mindful event. Must we not think and act as if mindful non-dual singularity were always already a modal boundary that remains consciously accessible to humans in any technological singularity? Pace Habermas, what are contemporary resources with which we may access the archaic ritual origins of communicative action and human solidarity? Pace Jaspers, how do we renew the human event with that mindfulness which is requisite for surviving as recognizably human in the age of cybernetic synergy between infotech and biotech?
The future research will have to think, as if in a musical counterpoint, from data to the mind boundary, from the mind boundary to data, and in both directions to inverse accelerations towards singularity. Reflective faith and ongoing binding and bonding motivation of new rituals serve as spiritual remainders of the sacred complex not exhausted but still called on by postmetaphysical thinking that has not undergone linguistification.
