ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by noting a curious transcultural historical phenomenon. As some culturally diverse scribal societies develop what has been called “axial” worldviews—that is, come to regard everyday, material, temporal experience and the forms of significance tied to it as disjunctive with a higher, better, spiritual-divine realm with its own order of significance, value, and truth—highly influential elite intellectuals within those societies begin to insist that inherited and widely revered “pre-axial” literature should be read in ways that confirm axial philosophical-theistic premises. Such interpretative protocols, exemplified by poetics associated with Plato and Confucius, insist that correct conceptual-metaphysical frameworks regulate any legitimate bringing together of ethical sense and literary significance. This study argues, on the contrary, that much imaginative discourse, in early societies as well as recent ones, brings ethical sense and literary significance together in ways that reveal their intricate but non-harmonized internal entwinement. Imaginative discourse thus becomes transculturally affiliated with divine or spiritual inspiration in non-axial societies, and with compelling insight or inner persuasiveness in modern or “post-axial” ones. Wary of the effects of such agency, axial intellectuals devised interpretative proscriptions limiting what poetic or imaginative discourse could be understood or allowed to say.
