Abstract
The cultural evolution of introspective thought has been recognized to undergo a drastic change during the middle of the first millennium BC. This period, known as the “Axial Age,” saw the birth of religions and philosophies still alive in modern culture, as well as the transition from orality to literacy—which led to the hypothesis of a link between introspection and literacy. Here we set out to examine the evolution of introspection in the Axial Age, studying the cultural record of the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian literary traditions. Using a statistical measure of semantic similarity, we identify a single “arrow of time” in the Old and New Testaments of the Bible, and a more complex non-monotonic dynamics in the Greco-Roman tradition reflecting the rise and fall of the respective societies. A comparable analysis of the twentieth century cultural record shows a steady increase in the incidence of introspective topics, punctuated by abrupt declines during and preceding the First and Second World Wars. Our results show that (a) it is possible to devise a consistent metric to quantify the history of a high-level concept such as introspection, cementing the path for a new quantitative philology and (b) to the extent that it is captured in the cultural record, the increased ability of human thought for self-reflection that the Axial Age brought about is still heavily determined by societal contingencies beyond the orality-literacy nexus.
Highlights
The period in human history ranging from 800 BCE to 200 BCE marked a radical transformation in world civilizations, in particular those that constitute the Western tradition
Studying two foundational texts of Western civilization, the Bible and the Homeric saga, Julian Jaynes (2000) argued that the change in conscious life that took place during the Axial Age is part of a larger introspection-increasing arc explicitly expressed in the textual narrative
We decided to analyze two relatively self-consistent cultural traditions: the Judeo-Christian, anchored by the Biblical texts, and the Greco-Roman, whose foundational text is the Homeric saga, but include the classical Greek and Latin writings up to the second century CE, encompassing among others Plato and Aristotle’s extant oeuvre. We extended this analysis to modern times, by measuring the evolution of introspection in the Google n-grams database (Michel et al, 2011) during the twentieth century
Summary
The period in human history ranging from 800 BCE to 200 BCE marked a radical transformation in world civilizations, in particular those that constitute the Western tradition. Termed the Axial Age by Jaspers (1953), this period produced world religions and philosophies that are still pillars of modern culture. Many scholars have argued that one of the most prominent consequences of this transition was a change in consciousness, from a “homeostatic”, living-in-the-present form, to a self-reflective and time-expanding inner life (Schwartz, 1975; Eisenstadt, 1986; Armstrong, 2006). Studying two foundational texts of Western civilization, the Bible and the Homeric saga, Julian Jaynes (2000) argued that the change in conscious life that took place during the Axial Age is part of a larger introspection-increasing arc explicitly expressed in the textual narrative. The impulsive, irreflexive heroes of the Iliad, driven by passions insufflated into them by the gods, give way to the wily, cunning Odysseus who outsmarts Polifemo and leads his men to Scylla with a bad conscience
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