Is There Life After Death? Jochen Kirchhoff's Clues to an Otherworld

Life after death is not proven, and Jochen Kirchhoff, whose conversation with Gwendolin Kirchhoff this essay follows, claimed no proof either: he argued for an Otherworld on the basis of clues. Perhaps the question of death feels close to you right now: because someone who meant a great deal to you has died, or because you sense that your own time is limited, and none of the ready-made answers convinces you. Some of these answers sound as certain as if the matter had long been settled. This essay takes a different path: it follows the clues Jochen Kirchhoff named, without turning them into proof.

#What happens after death?

What happens after death is an open question, and an honest answer starts by separating what we know from what we assume. It is certain that the body dies and that a person you loved can no longer be reached in the visible world. It is uncertain whether consciousness ends along with the body. Three answers are on the table. The first says that everything ends with death: consciousness is a product of the brain and its neurons and ceases to exist with them. This position has a strong core: no one has come back from death to testify otherwise. The second answer is religious; in the conversation, the Tibetan conception of the bardo comes up. Jochen Kirchhoff describes it as a conception in which consciousness develops further after death rather than being extinguished (cf. Kirchhoff, G. & Kirchhoff, J., 2024, 27:06–27:38). The third answer is a philosophical one, and it is the subject here: the assumption of an Otherworld which, as Gwendolin Kirchhoff summarises her father’s teaching, is the true home of the dead and yet seems continually to interpenetrate the physical, sensory world.

Jochen Kirchhoff (1944–2025), a philosopher of nature and Gwendolin Kirchhoff’s father, worked out the idea of an Otherworld in his book Die Anderswelt (The Otherworld, 2002). In a joint conversation published on Gwendolin Kirchhoff’s channel in 2024, father and daughter pursued it. In it, Kirchhoff argued for the existence of an Otherworld while distinguishing clues from proof (cf. Kirchhoff, G. & Kirchhoff, J., 2024, 03:42–04:05 and 05:31–07:05). How you can live with your own mortality is a different question; the essay Reflecting on Death takes it up.

#Is belief in an afterlife just wishful thinking?

Whether belief in an afterlife is wishful thinking is a question Gwendolin Kirchhoff put to her father herself at the start of their conversation: she asked him whether concerning oneself with an out-of-body beyond was not “wishful thinking and altogether completely unknowable, speculative by its very nature and perhaps even self-deception” (Kirchhoff, G. & Kirchhoff, J., 2024, 02:00–02:06). She then read out Nietzsche on the subject. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he says of the “afterworldsmen”, the inventors of worlds beyond:

Nietzsche presents the afterworlds as creations of suffering and incapacity. Jochen Kirchhoff did not dodge the argument. “What Nietzsche says there, I can follow well,” he replied (ibid., 03:19), and he conceded that people often fantasise themselves into an otherworldly make-believe world (cf. ibid., 03:30–03:41). He still spoke up for the Otherworld, “quite simply, because there are many clues” (ibid., 03:52): empirical clues that the physical, sensory world cannot be the only thing that exists (cf. ibid., 03:52–04:05). There is, he said, an endless wealth of reports of experience that suggest the human being is more than the physical and sensory alone, and this is a basic experience in all cultures (cf. ibid., 04:03–04:20). The challenge is to face this question “without slipping into speculative fantasy” (ibid., 04:54).

#What did Jochen Kirchhoff mean by the Otherworld?

In Jochen Kirchhoff’s teaching, as Gwendolin Kirchhoff summarised it at the start of the conversation, the Otherworld is the true home of the dead: death in the physical, sensory world corresponds to a birth in the Otherworld, and the other way round (cf. Kirchhoff, G. & Kirchhoff, J., 2024, 01:12–01:26). Gwendolin Kirchhoff connects the word with the Celtic Annwn (cf. ibid., 01:13–01:17). And yet, she went on, the two worlds seem to interpenetrate continually, in the mystery that Jochen Kirchhoff, with the philosopher Helmut Friedrich Krause, put into the formula that world space equals world soul (cf. ibid., 01:26–01:36). His book on the subject bears the subtitle Eine Annäherung an die Wirklichkeit (An Approach to Reality) (Kirchhoff, J., 2002). In another conversation with Gwendolin Kirchhoff, he described it as a book about space, time and self in altered states of consciousness, in which the question of what reality is gets asked again and again (cf. Kirchhoff, G. & Kirchhoff, J., 2025, 36:07–37:01).

What matters is the status of this view. Kirchhoff does not claim he can prove the Otherworld. Of dreams, his first example, he says: “I would speak of clues, to begin with.” (Kirchhoff, G. & Kirchhoff, J., 2024, 07:03–07:05) How Jochen Kirchhoff thought of the mythical as a layer of reality that is always present is taken further in the essay The Mythical.

#Which experiences does Jochen Kirchhoff connect with the Otherworld?

In the conversation, Jochen Kirchhoff discusses intense dreams, becoming aware of oneself, and an unusual perceptual experience of his own; grouping these three together is this essay’s arrangement, not his. Dreams are what he explicitly called a clue. According to Kirchhoff, intense dreams are so consistent, so alive and so strange that they could suggest something is being touched that cannot be explained from the physical; he was explicit that this is no proof of the ontological reality of dreams (cf. Kirchhoff, G. & Kirchhoff, J., 2024, 05:31–07:05).

Another thought concerns becoming aware of oneself, which Kirchhoff called a quite essential and elementary question (cf. ibid., 07:47–07:52). At some point every person wakes up to themselves and finds themselves there, and Kirchhoff called this a deeply mysterious process that science cannot explain (cf. ibid., 07:43–08:15). He drew a sharp conclusion from it: “narrowing existence down to the span between birth and death is actually grotesque” (ibid., 08:43). Whoever assumes no Otherworld, neither before birth nor after death, must in Kirchhoff’s view assume that the individual in their existence rose up out of nothing, and he considered that extremely improbable (cf. ibid., 09:25–10:13). He put one principle like this: “Consciousness can only arise from consciousness.” (ibid., 12:35–12:38) Against this he set the claim that dead matter simply brings forth life, and called it a pure claim of science that has never been proven (cf. ibid., 12:40–13:00). Both are philosophical positions, not measurements.

Later, Kirchhoff reports an unusual perceptual experience of his own in 1976: fully awake and with a clear mind, he saw everything around him very clearly, and he added at once that this was “no proof that there is another world, but it is at least strange” (cf. ibid., 26:02–26:27; quotation 26:24–26:27). Gwendolin Kirchhoff classed it as out-of-body (cf. ibid., 26:27–26:30). The entry Near-Death Experience describes what near-death experiences (NDEs) are about, and why Kirchhoff held them to be only a special case of nearness to death.

#Why does space matter to the question of death?

Space matters because Jochen Kirchhoff held consciousness to be something spatial, not something that floats beyond space and time. The idealist philosophers, he said, acted as if the human being in their consciousness were beyond space and time, and spiritual people and esotericists, too, liked to speak of spacelessness and timelessness; Kirchhoff found this strange, since they live in space and in time, and he held against it that everything speaks for consciousness being something spatial (cf. Kirchhoff, G. & Kirchhoff, J., 2024, 17:19–18:05). He drew on the phenomenology of the lived body developed by Hermann Schmitz (cf. ibid., 18:05–18:15). According to Kirchhoff, a singer or a speaker expands atmospherically into the room, and in a depression, as Kirchhoff said of an experience of his own, one can instead become very small, as if shrunk to a point (cf. ibid., 20:58–21:52).

In the conversation, Gwendolin Kirchhoff turned this thought into a question. She described space as the medium through which things come into contact (cf. ibid., 22:32–22:53). Her first starting point, she said, was “to say that actually a substantial part of the human being is grounded in space itself” (ibid., 24:41), and from it came her question: if space is indestructible, eternal and infinite, how is death supposed to have the kind of reality people imagine it has (cf. ibid., 24:45–25:00)? She puts it as a question, not as a doctrine, and that is how it should be read. If you want to explore this spatial quality of experience, the entry Space Organ develops it.

Jochen Kirchhoff takes a further thought from Schelling, who, in his words, rightly says that the world is half-real (cf. ibid., 35:44–35:52). From the outset, he said, he assumed that the physical, sensory world is half-real (cf. ibid., 35:44–36:07), and he added: “And one grasps this in nearness to death, that it is in fact not really real.” (ibid., 36:09) This, too, is an assumption; Kirchhoff himself frames it as a premise he starts from. He thought it could be borne out empirically again and again, because in certain moments one feels very precisely that something is not real at all (cf. ibid., 36:55–37:10).

#Is the question of death the same as the question of birth?

For Jochen Kirchhoff, the question of what comes after death is the same as the question of what was there before birth, and this second question, as he observed, is mostly not asked at all (cf. Kirchhoff, J., 2021, “Was wollte Schopenhauer?”, 1:03:04–1:09:15). Arthur Schopenhauer put the connection like this in 1844, in the second volume of his main work:

In the same chapter, Schopenhauer remarks that the question of our state after death has been discussed far more often than the question of our state before birth, although both are equally legitimate, and whoever had answered the one would probably be clear about the other as well (cf. Schopenhauer, 1844, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, vol. 2, ch. 41). Jochen Kirchhoff read this passage aloud in a conversation about Schopenhauer and remarked that it had become clear to him many years earlier that the two questions are the same (cf. Kirchhoff, J., 2021, “Was wollte Schopenhauer?”, 1:03:04–1:09:15). Seen this way, anyone who thinks about life after death is also thinking about the human being’s existence before birth.

In her own lecture on death, Gwendolin Kirchhoff described how her childhood fear of her own mortality dissolved when she was about fifteen. In her picture of death as a dark space, buried alive as if under a block of granite, she noticed an error in her thinking: in this picture “I cannot have died at all, but am still alive”, and “that cannot be death” (Kirchhoff, G., 2024, 06:08–06:52 and 10:21–10:41). In place of the fear came what she calls the “inescapability of life” (ibid., 10:56). It is striking that she does not tie this insight to any particular idea of the beyond. She grew up in a household shaped by Buddhism, in which rebirth was taken for granted (cf. ibid., 04:54–05:02), and back then, too, the thought of rebirth came to her at once; but one could just as well hold a worldview in which it is simply over: “either way, life is completely inescapable” (cf. ibid., 11:01–11:42; quotation 11:39–11:42). The essay Reflecting on Death unfolds the phenomenology of this fear in detail.

#Are the dead still with us?

From a systemic point of view, the dead reach into the lives of the living. In her lecture, speaking of the systemic view, Gwendolin Kirchhoff says that the dead are “on a par with the living in their influence” (Kirchhoff, G., 2024, 34:28–34:30). For whether someone has an emotional effect, she says, it makes no difference whether they are alive or dead; one can, for example, resolve an entanglement at the level of the dead, a conflict between a mother and a daughter, and this has an effect down to those born later, even though the emotional movement took place between two people who are both no longer alive (cf. ibid., 34:29–35:00). She is speaking explicitly from the systemic point of view that also underlies family constellation (cf. ibid., 34:11–34:25).

If you have lost someone, you may know this presence without any theory: the person who died is no longer there, and yet they keep shaping how you feel, decide and remember. How grief unfolds is the subject of the essay on the stages of grief; what the death of your own mother can mean is explored in Losing Your Mother.

#Is death just a passage into another world?

For Jochen Kirchhoff, death is not a simple, plain step from one sphere into the other; it is also a deprivation. At the end of the conversation about the Otherworld, after a long path through dreams, the bardo and nearness to death, he set a counterweight: “death is also a tremendous deprivation” (Kirchhoff, G. & Kirchhoff, J., 2024, 48:38–48:40). “It can also be terrible for all the relatives and for the one who dies.” (ibid., 48:49–48:53) Many spiritually minded people, Kirchhoff said, tend to pull everything straight into a particular sphere (cf. ibid., 48:55–49:05). Against this he set the deprivation: the mystery of a person you saw die, who then lies lifeless before you, exactly as before and yet no longer ensouled (cf. ibid., 49:05–49:45).

Kirchhoff called death an elementary passage that has a great deal to do with suffering (cf. ibid., 50:05–50:25); Gwendolin Kirchhoff added that it also has to do with widening, into the space of life (cf. ibid., 50:26–50:31).

#What remains when the question stays open?

When the question of life after death stays open, what remains are the voices this essay has set side by side. Jochen Kirchhoff considered the materialist picture of a human being who comes out of nothing and goes back into nothing too short-sighted (cf. Kirchhoff, G. & Kirchhoff, J., 2024, 12:00–12:05 and 14:48–15:05); Nietzsche presented the afterworlds as creations of suffering and incapacity. Gwendolin Kirchhoff brought both voices together in one conversation, and in her own lecture she described an insight that she explicitly formulates for both cases, for rebirth as for a simple end: “either way, life is completely inescapable” (Kirchhoff, G., 2024, 11:01–11:42; quotation 11:39–11:42).

If the death of someone close to you is on your mind, or your own finitude raises questions, the essays on existential crisis and on life crisis offer thoughts that lead further. If grief for someone you have lost is weighing on you personally, here is how grief counseling with me works.

#Sources

• Kirchhoff, G. (2024). “Nachdenken über den Tod (1)” [Reflecting on Death, Part 1; video]. SYMPOSIUM, YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSltRJB88jg, 04:51–05:13, 06:08–06:52, 09:57–11:42 and 34:11–35:10.
• Kirchhoff, G. & Kirchhoff, J. (2024). “Die Anderswelt: Nachdenken über den Tod (2) – Ein Gespräch mit Jochen Kirchhoff” [The Otherworld: Reflecting on Death, Part 2; video]. SYMPOSIUM, YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-secv4Z-pM.
• Kirchhoff, G. & Kirchhoff, J. (2025). “Was ist der Sinn des Lebens? – Ein Gespräch mit Jochen Kirchhoff” [What Is the Meaning of Life?; video]. SYMPOSIUM, YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjDEu6-D0vg, 36:07–37:01.
• Kirchhoff, J. (2002). Die Anderswelt: Eine Annäherung an die Wirklichkeit. Klein Jasedow: Drachen Verlag.
• Kirchhoff, J. (2021). “Was wollte Schopenhauer?” [What Did Schopenhauer Want?; video]. Jochen Kirchhoff – In Memoriam, YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bf8BeB3mbwc, 1:03:04–1:09:15.
• Nietzsche, F. (1883). Also sprach Zarathustra [Thus Spoke Zarathustra]. Part One, “Von den Hinterweltlern” [On the Afterworldly].
• Schopenhauer, A. (1844). Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung [The World as Will and Representation], vol. 2. Leipzig: Brockhaus. Ch. 41, on death and the indestructibility of our true nature.