Jaspers’ concept of the Axial Age and his idea of “elucidating existence” organize epochal mental shifts historically. We read this as resonance windows for monadic coherences across cultures. Where he saw breakthroughs of transcendence, we see field phases with unusually high coupling density.
The Axial Age (c. 800–200 BCE) names a period in which, independently, in China, India, Greece and Palestine, fundamental traditions emerged: Confucianism / Daoism, Upanishads / Buddhism, Greek philosophy, Israelite prophecy. Jaspers interpreted this as a shared source of new human orientation.
In the monad model these condensations are expressions of field coherence: monads couple in resonance patterns that generate similar structures across cultures. Religious intuitions and basic figures can thus be rationally reconstructed as coherence effects – without devaluing their existential depth (bridge to XDM).
We describe Jaspers’ Axial Age as a coherence threshold in large monad fields: once coupling density, bridge building and information flow cross critical levels, new forms of meaning (ethics, cosmologies, logics) appear. Mathematically this becomes visible in spectral gaps, clustering coefficients and diameter (VQM). The quality of the emerging orders is captured via IEQ trajectories.
Thus the Axial Age turns from an intellectual-historical narrative into a field phenomenon: recurring, measurable, even simulatable – for today’s digital publics as well.
Reporting: sliding windows over time, topology snapshots, IEQ evolution, event markers (reforms, schools, canonisations).
Seen from a field perspective, Jaspers’ break is part of a recurring pattern: when monad fields reach critical coherence, new forms of meaning, orientation and community arise. They follow logical coupling principles which we can model mathematically (XQM/VQM/IEQ).
Religions thus become early mirrorings of an underlying, universal field principle. Science can now reconstruct these structures without destroying their existential pull — a bridge between rational modelling and lived searches for meaning.
Karl Jaspers – Axial Age & elucidation of existence
These texts frame our reading of meaning condensations as field coherences.
Complementarity & context.
Uncertainty & observation.
Non-locality & correlation.
Implicate order & holism.
No. We expect recurring coherence thresholds once fields reach certain coupling densities (see XQM / VQM).
Via IEQ-based coherence / resonance metrics and comparison with baselines (e.g. noise model).
XDM evaluates actions by their contribution to field coherence — compatible with Jaspers’ orientation towards transcendence and meaning.