Essays

Education in the AI age needs an analog basis before the tool can become a tool. A manifesto against digital front-loading — and for a sequence that puts AI to work only after a trained mind is in place.

What is anger, and what happens when you neither suppress it nor turn it against others? Gwendolin Kirchhoff describes how the anger she lets run through her as a process brings clarity, and asks about the office of wrath. With Bert Hellinger, Laozi and Jochen Kirchhoff.

Feeling guilty does not always mean you are guilty. With Bert Hellinger, philosopher Gwendolin Kirchhoff distinguishes the guilt that is your own, which you face, from the burden you took on out of love and may hand back: on carrying a parent's fate, on daring to say no, and on the sentence “it was me, I did it”.

What separates philosophy from spirituality is not a subject but an attitude: openness towards the phenomena. Gwendolin Kirchhoff on spiritual bypassing, pop spirituality, yoga as a testable phenomenology of mind, and what comes after a spiritual experience.

Consulting the I Ging is more than tossing coins. The inner attitude, the formulation of the question, and the willingness to receive an answer you cannot control make up the actual practice. A philosophical guide.

The I Ging describes a leadership model centred on the figure of the Noble (Junzi) that overturns Western assumptions about strength. Yielding at the right moment, acting at the right moment — this is not weakness but the highest form of leadership.

C.G. Jung's concept of synchronicity and Richard Wilhelm's I Ging translation opened a bridge between Western psychology and Eastern wisdom. This essay shows why their encounter was more than a cultural coincidence — and what it means for natural philosophy.

What does Nietzsche's sentence “God is dead” mean? Where it stands in The Gay Science and in Zarathustra, who speaks it, how Nietzsche himself explains it, and what Jochen and Gwendolin Kirchhoff say about what came after.

Language works not just to communicate, but to conjure. AI chatbots industrialize this old function — and produce a new diagnostic term: AI psychosis.

What is the meaning of the Odyssey? Gwendolin Kirchhoff reads the Odyssey through Christopher Nolan's film as the story of a homecoming that has a price: Odysseus loses everything, at the end it is like a kind of surrender that the homecoming takes, and he is willing to pay. With Penelope, the law of Zeus, the inner Ithaca and Plato's myth of Er.

What is envy, what does it think, and whom do we envy? Gwendolin Kirchhoff describes envy as blindness to your own place. An essay in her words, with Jochen Kirchhoff on ressentiment, and with Spinoza, Max Scheler and Goethe.

What does the fear of death fear? Gwendolin Kirchhoff has described her own childhood fear of death phenomenologically: time running out mechanically, a dark room, being buried alive under a block of granite. This essay follows her description, the error in thinking she recognised in it at around fifteen, and what came after, with side glances at Jochen Kirchhoff, Schopenhauer and Plato.