Berggruen Prize Essay Competition

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The Berggruen Prize Essay Competition seeks to stimulate new thinking and innovative concepts while embracing cross-cultural perspectives across fields, disciplines, and geographies. By posing fundamental philosophical questions of significance for both contemporary life and for the future, the competition will serve as a complement to the Berggruen Prize for Philosophy & Culture, which recognizes major lifetime achievements in advancing ideas that have shaped the world.

The inspiration for the competition originates from the role essays have played in the past, including the essay contest held by the Académie de Dijon. In 1750, Jean-Jacques Rousseau's essay Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, also known as The First Discourse, won and notably marked the onset of his prominence as a profoundly influential thinker. Similarly, our competition aspires to create a platform for groundbreaking ideas and intellectual innovation.

The annual Berggruen Prize Essay Competition will accept submissions in two languages: Chinese and English. Each language category will have a prize of $25,000 USD and intends to recognize one winner, though there may be multiple winners in any given year.

The Berggruen Institute will host an award ceremony and convene the authors of the winning essays in dialogue with established scholars and thinkers at one of our global centers. We plan to publish the winning essays in our award-winning English-language magazine Noema and Chinese-language magazine Cuiling, giving readers insight into perspectives of both East and West.

We are inviting essays that follow in the tradition of renowned thinkers such as Rousseau, Michel de Montaigne, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Submissions should present novel ideas and be clearly argued in compelling ways for intellectually serious readers. We are not seeking peer-reviewed academic work. Below is a selection of exemplary essays that epitomize the genre and style we look for. While some of these pieces are authored by already distinguished thinkers, we have chosen them primarily for their exceptional embodiment of genre and style.

• Chomsky, N. (1967). The responsibility of intellectuals. The New York Review of Books.
• Frankfurt, H. G. (1971). Freedom of the will and the concept of a person. Journal of Philosophy, 68(1), 5-20.
• Fukuyama, F. (1989). The end of history? The National Interest, 16, 3–18.
• Huntington, S. P. (1993). The clash of civilizations? Foreign Affairs, 72(3), 22-49.
• Nagel, T. (1974). What is it like to be a bat? The Philosophical Review, 83(4), 435-450.
• Sontag, S. (1966). Against interpretation. In Against Interpretation and Other Essays (pp. 3-14). Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
• Walker, S. (2023). AI is life. Noema Magazine.
• Zadeh, J. (2021). The tyranny of time. Noema Magazine.

Award

Each language category will have a prize of $25,000 USD. If there is more than one winner in any given year, the amount will be distributed evenly among the winners.

Key Dates

• Submission opens: February 21st, 2024
• Submission closes: June 30th, 2024

Theme

Humans live on a finite planet on which we depend to survive. Earth operates as an integrated, intricate, and fragile ecosystem, containing myriad layers of interdependency between nature’s systems and living beings – both human and non-human. These systems are geochemical, biological, social, and computational. For the first time in human history, a rapidly developing, planetary-scale technostructure of sensors and supercomputers is enabling us to perceive, monitor, and predict this vast and complex system. In so doing, technology is making the world seem smaller, and our collective belonging to it and each other more undeniable.

In short, the planetary technostructure that humans have created and in which we are embedded is revealing our condition of planetarity — that is, the inescapability of our embeddedness in an Earth-spanning biogeochemical system in which humans cannot thrive unless the ecosystems we inhabit are themselves thriving.

This emergent condition demands a novel framework to parse philosophical, institutional, and political realms.

To date, most ideas about our shared future on this scale have centered on the global (an extension of the traditional nation-state), the international (politics, economics and infrastructures of the global), and the human (other than and dominant over nature). The nation-state is a type of sociopolitical architecture that has historically tended to foster self-interest and encourage competition. The planetary, which represents conditions and ways of being that exceed the human and our anthropocentric categories, is an opportunity to recast both the players and the play.

The Berggruen Institute proposes further developing the concept of the planetary. Framed as an invitation to a deepening understanding of the planet and our shared fate with all living beings, as well as our emerging ability to shape it, it invites us to reevaluate our relationships to each other, to nonhuman others and to the planetary whole. We are looking for new frameworks and categories to understand life on Earth, new ideas that decentralize the human as the premise for understanding the world and building institutions that effectively manage it.

Here are some examples of topics that could be tackled:

• Philosophical conceptions of the self in a planetary context;
• New or adapted models of governance that would be optimized for planetary thriving;
• The definitional instability of the category of "life" as it relates to the planetary;
• The limits of the sovereign liberal subject codified by Western philosophy to understand planetary interconnectedness and embeddedness;
• The concept of planetary citizenship as it relates to issues of inclusion and agency;
• Novel theories of technology in the age of AI, social media and computation that disclose the condition of planetarity;
• Models of governance optimized for multispecies flourishing and whole-planet thriving;
• The extraplanetary: Earth as a particular planet that has evolved life of one of many planets that might or might not host life;
• Ideas from non-Western philosophy that inform the planetary;
• Simulations, virtual environments and AIs that transform traditional perceptions of the planetary;
• Nomos of the cloud: New political geographies in a digital world.

We invite you to conceive of and select your own topic related to the planetary as well.

Eligibility Criteria

• Degree: Entrants must have a formally accredited undergraduate degree or equivalent.
• Publication: Entrants must have at least one publication in a reputable literary, journalistic, or academic outlet.
• Length: Submissions may not exceed 10,000 words in English or 15,000 characters in Chinese. This excludes diagrams, tables of data, endnotes, bibliography, or authorship declaration.
• Submission Limit: Entrants are limited to one submission per year, either in English or Chinese.
• AI Usage: The use of any artificial intelligence tools, including but not limited to ChatGPT, Ernie, or similar AI systems, is strictly prohibited.
• Originality: Submissions must be original content that has not been published in any form or in any publication.
• Creative Writing Exclusion: Currently, creative formats such as fiction, poetry, and drama are not accepted.

Evaluation

A jury will lead the blind evaluation of submissions and deliberate on the winner(s). Essays will be judged on originality, the quality of argumentation, clear writing, and persuasive force. The best essays are likely to be those that would be capable of changing an individual's mind. Our determinations in all such matters are final.

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