从“轴心时代”到“天下时代”——论沃格林《天下时代》中的核心问题

From “Axial Age” to “Ecumenic Age”: on Core Issues in Eric Voegelin’s The Ecumenic Age

18世纪初以来,欧洲的思想家开始面对和思考“中国精神”,典范人物可从莱布尼茨、黑格尔、韦伯一直数到沃格林。其中,沃格林算得上20世纪思考得最深的历史哲学家。他从世界政治史和政治观念史的双重角度思考人类的诸种“秩序与历史”之间的关系,用“天下时代”概念取代雅斯贝尔斯的“轴心时代”。在地理上和历史时间上,“天下时代”指西方从波斯帝国到罗马帝国的帝国更替,与此平行的是中华帝国在远东的崛起,西方和东方平行发展出两种不同的“天下意识”。“天下时代”还有形而上学的普遍含义,即寓指这个世界的恒在性质:世界因群体或政治单位之间的冲突永远充满暴力、不幸和灾变。“天下意识”意味着对天下征服的精神反应:人类政治体之多样性及其冲突这件事困扰着我们,同样困扰过早期天下的帝国时代。无论在帝国式的政治体还是希腊城邦或以色列式的政治体那里,关于政治体起源的思辨都与历史之域相关。这意味着政治秩序的思考受到历史之域的限制,史学带有神话时间与溯源式叙事的基本形式。宇宙论式的帝国秩序紧紧包裹着人类的观念,以色列的存在经验才让人类的观念突破了帝国式的宇宙秩序。东西方文明的根本差异因此在于:存在的飞跃没有像西方那样彻底打破宇宙论秩序。

Since the beginning of the 18th century,European thinkers began to face and think about the“Chinese spirit”,and the prominent figures include Leibniz,Hegel,Weber and Voegelin.Voegelin can be counted as one of the most thoughtful historical philosophers of the 20th century.He thought about the relationship between“order and history”of human beings from the perspective of world political history and the history of political ideas,and replaced Jaspers’“Axis Age”with the concept of“Ecumenic Age”.Geographically and historically,“Ecumenic Age”refers to changes from Persian Empire to Roman Empire in the West.In Parallel with this is the rise of Chinese Empire in the Far East.The West and the East developed two different“world concept”in parallel.“Ecumenic Age”also has a universal meaning of metaphysics,which refers to the perpetual nature of the world:the world is always full of violence,misfortune and disaster due to conflicts between groups or political units.The“world concept”reveals a spiritual response to the conquest of the world:The diversity and conflict of human polities has troubled us as much as they did for the early empires in human history.Whether in polities of empires or Greek city-states or Israelite polities,all speculations about the origin of polities are related to the field of history.This means that thinking of political order is limited in the field of history and historiography has the basic form of mythological time and traceable narration.The cosmological imperial order encapsulates human ideas,and it is Israel’s existence that allows human ideas to break through the imperial cosmic order.Therefore,the fundamental difference between Eastern and Western civilizations is that the leap of existence does not completely break the cosmological order as the West did.