Eco-imagination Beyond the Verticalization of Life

Prima facie, the concept of the “Axial Time” [Achsenzeit] by Carl Jaspers seems to be non-Eurocentric. However, it follows a Hegelian dualism, polarizing East and West, Orient, and Occident. Jaspers juxtaposes logos with myth, the latter characteristic of preaxial thought. Logic, self-reflection, and autonomy are understood in a teleological ascending line. An apparently coherent historic line from Greek philosophy to Scholasticism and finally the so-called modernity as a teleological conception of history remains trapped in Eurocentrism. If we follow the Jaspersian concept, then Aristotle is certainly central for the reception and inculturation of a hierarchical understanding of being. A fall back behind the moral and justice-oriented Ma’at philosophy in ancient Egypt. Among others, Pythagoras continued the harmonic, balanced, and reciprocal philosophy in his number philosophy, which was further developed and applied to a system of unity of all life by the sincere brothers and sisters (Ikhwan as-Safa) in the tenth century AC. Here, morality—justness—is conveyed reciprocally along animal fables. The heritage lines of Ma’at, Pythagoras, and Ikhwan al-Safa, which focus on justice as a moral value, are traced to the symbiotic ontopoiesis of life of Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka. Reciprocal moral sentience encompassing everything-there-is-alive and expanded to eco-imagination offers a way out of the destructive Imperiocene.