When people undertake to consider their entire history from animal beginnings to modern social organizations, they must not only examine when they began to walk upright and learned to use fire. With this huge topic, it is also important to focus on the question of when that which is often referred to in philosophical discussions as the human spirit awoke.
Historical anthropology, with its analysis of Homo sapiens, i.e. the wise being, has focused on a proposal by the psychiatrist and philosopher Karl Jaspers, who, after much preliminary work by colleagues from various disciplines, was able to identify what has been called the Axis period in human development since the 1950s. Around three thousand years ago - according to Jaspers and his contemporary followers - people discovered that, in addition to the earthly here and now, there is a heavenly hereafter, for which there is a separate word in English, namely Heaven with gods and angels, which is enthroned above the Sky with birds and clouds. In addition to this division, people in pre-Christian times also began to replace their old mystical, oracular and unfathomable thinking with rational analyses and logical arguments, which led specifically to the attempts that were made within the framework of the then new science to explain the phenomena that could be observed.
While in mystical times it was assumed that the gods had placed spheres in the sky with and in which planets rotated, the rational analysis of the movement of celestial bodies offered insights into mathematically formulable laws of movement and their driving forces. Since the Enlightenment, the goal of mankind has been to demystify the world.
A few hundred years after Immanuel Kant, this should have been accomplished. But the opposite is the case. The explanations offered by rational science for the properties of matter have long since gone mad. An electron in a crystal, for example, transforms into a particle with new properties, which is classified as a quasiparticle. This is discussed among experts as the emergence of states that cannot be traced back to anything, i.e. they are just themselves and simply there. It is curious: rationality has led to the realization that there are realities that defy rationality. Science is returning to mysticism.
