Berggruen essay competition closes on the question 'A New Axial Age?'

Entries for the Berggruen Institute's essay competition closed on 17 August. The results are awaited.

The competition is among the most richly endowed writing prizes in philosophy: 100,000 dollars in all. Entries are accepted in English and in Chinese; English texts may not exceed 10,000 words, Chinese texts 15,000 characters.

There is one innovation this year. For the first time, the competition also accepted works of fiction.

This year's subject: "A New Axial Age?"#

The question rests on a concept drawn from the history of philosophy.

In The Origin and Goal of History, published in 1949, Karl Jaspers gave the name Axial Age (Achsenzeit) to the period between 800 and 200 BC.

What struck Jaspers was a coincidence — or a simultaneity that was no coincidence at all.

Within those few centuries, a similar rupture occurred in regions that knew nothing of one another:

• Confucius and Lao Tzu in China
• The Upanishads and the Buddha in India
• Zoroaster in Iran
• The Hebrew prophets in Palestine
• The pre-Socratic thinkers, Socrates and Plato in Greece

Something held in common took place in this period, according to Jaspers. For the first time, human beings made their own existence a problem to be considered as a whole. Myth and tradition gave way to critical thought; the individual gained a position from which to step outside the order into which he had been born and put questions to it.

Jaspers's claim was this: the basic categories we still use — the individual, transcendence, universal morality, the search for truth — were established then. Ever since, humanity has lived inside the horizon that the Axial Age opened.

The competition's question#

The Berggruen subject this year translates Jaspers's concept into the present.

The competition text puts the question thus: is civilisation once again on the hinge of history? Will what is happening at this particular moment fix the direction of the future for good?

The question is not idle speculation. There are concrete reasons behind it: artificial intelligence is redefining human cognition and human labour, the climate crisis has turned human beings into a geological agent, biotechnology has made the species itself something that can be intervened upon, and the global political order is coming apart.

Each of these alone is a great transformation. The question being asked is whether, taken together, they amount to a rupture on the scale of the Axial Age.

The concept itself is contested#

Part of the philosophical interest of the competition lies in the fact that the concept is itself contested.

The objections to the Axial Age thesis fall under three heads.

Chronology. The span from 800 to 200 BC is too broad and too arbitrary; centuries separate the thinkers on the list. To speak of a single "moment" may be an anachronism.

Scope. Why does the list contain these five regions? Egypt, Mesopotamia and the Americas are left out. The selection has since been criticised as Eurasia-centred.

Commonality. Is there really a shared "axis" running between Confucius's conception of social order and the Buddha's teaching of liberation, or is the resemblance an artefact of our reading back?

For all these objections the concept has not been abandoned. Robert Bellah and Charles Taylor, among others, have published work that reopened the argument. Perhaps that is precisely where its power lies: the answer is uncertain but the question is unavoidable.

The Berggruen Institute#

The California-based institute is a think tank working in philosophy and political theory. It is also known for the annual Berggruen Prize, worth a million dollars; previous recipients include Charles Taylor, Onora O'Neill, Martha Nussbaum and Peter Singer.

The essay competition is a younger programme with a different purpose. Being open to writers without an established academic career, it aims to widen the field in which philosophical thought circulates.

The decision to accept fiction this year points the same way. It rests on the assumption that the difference between analysing a civilisational rupture and narrating one may be philosophically fruitful.

The results#

Entries have closed; no timetable has yet been announced for naming the winners. Philosophers News will report the results when they are made public.