What is least material most endures. Power changes hands, buildings crumble and people die. But ideas, paradigms, worldviews and narratives live on. They shape the world by cultivating the soul, organizing the intellect and animating the will.

This has been understood from Plato and Confucius up through W.H. Auden who eloquently noted at the founding of UNESCO in the wake of WWII that peace, like war, “is born in the minds of men.” In his recent best-selling book, “Sapiens,” Yuval Noah Harari argues that what distinguishes humankind from all other species is its ability for large-scale cooperation based on mental abstractions such as human rights, money or gods.

Throughout history new conceptual frameworks have arisen in the imagination and taken hold in the physical world when circumstances of the human condition warrant. Democracy. Daoism. Confucianism, The Reformation. The Enlightenment. Marxism-Leninism-Mao-tse Tung Thought. The New Deal. Existentialism. The Washington Consensus. Structuralism. Ecology.

Unfortunately, today, universities have too often become islands of wisdom separated from the mainland of society. They are then further divided within among the silos of disciplines that rarely communicate with each other. As the late Paul Samuelson lamented, economics has too often been reduced to mathematical formulas that calculate stock market movements. Philosophy has been whittled down in so many departments to formal logic, leaving media pundits and novelists to address the grand civilizational issues that arise from the new challenges of synthetic biology or artificial intelligence. Obversely, the biosciences, combined with Big Data analysis, are speeding up biological evolution to the pace of social change, transgressing the boundaries of what it has meant for millennia to be human – all with precious little philosophical reflection on the path humanity is heedlessly taking.

Outside the hard sciences, and especially in the humanities, this disconnection extends beyond to a lack of interaction and communication across cultures. The essential reason the first university in the world, at Nalanda in India has been refounded is to help resurrect this spirit of cross civilizational learning in a center where the great Asian philosophies and religions first crossed each other.

One of the world’s most inveterate travelers and literary journalists, Pico Iyer, echoes this concern. “Forty years of criss-crossing the world,” he says, “ has led me to suspect that the world isn’t growing smaller; if anything, the differences, the distances between us are growing greater than they’ve ever been, in part because of the illusion of closeness or familiarity . In the Age of Information, many of us know less about other perspectives and other cultures than ever before.”

A One Million Dollar Prize for Philosophy

With this kind of summons in mind, the Berggruen Institute is creating a Philosophy and Culture Center that is uniquely dedicated to breaking through barriers to understanding and cross ideas across civilizational realms. The new Center will collaborate with existing teaching and research institutions, both in the West and in Asia, among them Harvard, Stanford, Tsinghua and Cambridge universities.

In addition, for ideas that matter to rise above the cacophony in our age of democratized information, fractured elites and hidebound scholarly disciplines, they need a midwife. The Berggruen Philosophy Prize hopes to be such a midwife.

Nobel Prizes cover everything from the hard sciences to literature and peace. There is the Pritzker Prize for architecture and so on. But there is no prize that focuses on the contributions of thought per se, on the grand, foundational ideas that impact all our lives.

And certainly, there is no such prize that is global in scope, crossing boundaries and civilizational spheres between East and West --  a perspective itself only now possible in a world tied together by commerce, linked in real time by the Internet and the planetary reach of the media, and when the species as a whole faces the common challenge of preserving that narrow band of livable climate that has so far enabled our species, among others,  to flourish.

Humankind is heading into a world where conflicts in the faraway Middle East precipitate the mass migration of hundreds of thousands of refugees to the heart of Europe; where the pace of China’s growth, the volatility of its fledgling stock market or the rate of its carbon emissions impact all economies and their environment. A world where highly-productive robots may well supplant gainful employment.  It is high time to focus our minds on our fate in a more expansive and imaginative way than the hallowed confins our institutions of learning at present generally allow.