Philosophical Lexicon
Philosophical concepts that inform my work — not a reference book, but movements of thought. Each entry connects tradition with the present.
Foundations
- Encounter Encounter is what happens between two people when neither reduces the other to an object — a reality in the space between them that transforms both.
- Logic Logic encompasses formal validity and a content layer: the inner structure of a thought, the paradigmatic myth that determines a concept from within.
- Natural Philosophy Why the question about the nature of nature forms the foundation of all serious philosophy, and what it means to think the cosmos as living.
- Space-Organ The Space-Organ is the faculty for perceiving living space — the order encoded in space and its dissonance. An ontological claim, not a metaphor.
- The Analogy Model The analogy model is an epistemological principle: we always think in analogies, and the choice of analogical source determines what we can know.
- Tradition Overview Tradition overview is the knowledge of the great answers to life's fundamental questions, brought into the living encounter with a concrete person.
- Wisdom Wisdom is a living order-giving instance in which the human being participates. It orients action and non-action equally.
Consultation & Method
- Contextual Disclosure Contextual disclosure uncovers the invisible premises that determine how a person thinks, judges, and acts — making an epoch's dominant thought-forms visible.
- Judgement Judgement is the capacity to distinguish the essential from the inessential — not through more knowledge, but through a different way of seeing.
- Maieutics The Socratic art of midwifery conceals, behind an image of modesty, a philosophical seizure of power. Corrected maieutics restores the conditions under which knowledge as remembering can succeed.
- Order Work Order work makes the hidden orders within family and relationship systems visible — restoring them through recognition, not change, by naming what was silenced.
- Philosophical Accompaniment Philosophical accompaniment supports a process of understanding, not a process of healing. It works with the thought itself, not through the detour of a diagnosis.
- Recognition Recognition is the act of naming what has happened and giving it its rightful place — not approval, not forgiveness, but the precondition of every resolution.
- Thinking Empathy Thinking empathy is a form of knowing in which thinking and feeling operate as a unity — directed at what is actually at work in a person, not merely expressed.
Leadership & Relationship
- Confucian Relational Order The Confucian relational order describes five fundamental relationships sustaining every community — a 2,500-year-old insight constellation work confirms.
- Confucianism — The Five Relationships and Their Relevance Today Confucianism conceives of the human being through relationships, not as an isolated individual. Ren, Li, De, and the Five Relationships form an ordering framework that remains viable for leadership, family, and ethical action today.
- Daoism — Wu Wei, Laozi, and the Art of Non-Action Daoism rethinks leadership and action from the standpoint of letting go. Wu Wei, non-action in Laozi's sense, does not mean passivity but acting in harmony with the living order of reality.
- Entanglement and Resolution Entanglement is the unconscious bond to another's fate within the family system. Resolution comes through recognition, not understanding.
- I Ching — The Book of Changes as the Art of Decision The I Ching is the oldest book of wisdom in human history. Its 64 hexagrams describe situations in transition and cultivate the ability to recognize the right moment for action and non-action.
- Leadership Ethics — What Philosophy Knows About Good Leadership Leadership ethics does not ask about techniques but about the inner disposition of the one who leads. The philosophical tradition from Confucius through Mengzi to natural philosophy shows: good leadership is rooted in self-cultivation, not in methods.
- Mencius — The Optimistic Confucian and Innate Goodness Mencius (Mengzi, c. 372–289 BCE) taught that human nature is inherently good. His doctrine of the Four Sprouts and the cultivation of the heart provides a philosophical foundation for working with what is already present in a person.
- Succession Succession describes the systemic transition of responsibility between generations -- in families, businesses, and communities. Where predecessors are bypassed, a disorder arises that the entire system feels.
- The Uprooted Powerful The uprooted powerful describes the figure of the risen leader whose power has severed him from his roots.
German Intellectual Tradition
- Buber: I and Thou Martin Buber's I and Thou articulates the ontological foundation of encounter: the human being becomes an I through the Thou. Relation is primary.
- German Idealism — Fichte, Schelling, Hegel and the Freedom of Spirit German Idealism emerges after Kant as a philosophy of freedom. Fichte thinks the I as pure act, Schelling thinks nature as living spirit, Hegel thinks spirit as dialectical process. Why Schelling's natural philosophy is the most fruitful strand of this tradition.
- Nihilism — From Nietzsche to the Present What nihilism means philosophically, why Nietzsche did not preach it but diagnosed it, and what form the nihilistic impulse has taken in our time.
- Organic Organic describes a foundational principle of philosophical work: genuine next steps emerge from the process itself, not through planning or method.
- The Philosophy of Romanticism — Novalis, Schlegel, and the Poetic Experience of the World The philosophy of Romanticism is not a program of sentimentality but an epistemological project. Novalis' concept of Romantisieren means qualitative intensification: lending the ordinary an infinite radiance. Why early German Romanticism remains philosophically vital today.
Existence & Knowledge
- Birth Process The birth process reframes crises as passages: what appears as breakdown follows the pattern of a birth that wants to be accompanied, not repaired.
- Cosmic Anthropos The Cosmic Anthropos describes the primordial form of the human being in its full dignity and creative power, in whom all layers of existence are present.
- Critique of Science Philosophical critique of science asks not whether science makes mistakes, but what dimensions of reality its method excludes from the outset — from Goethe's participatory observation of nature through Kuhn's paradigm analysis to Jochen Kirchhoff's critique of materialism.
- Myth and Logos — Two Modes of Experiencing the World Myth and Logos are commonly treated as opposites, yet every concept carries a paradigmatic myth within it. What the Presocratics knew and the Enlightenment forgot.
- Pathogenesis, Not Progress Why the diagnostic gaze that recognises a symptom in progress is neither cultural pessimism nor hostility to technology, but philosophical method.
- Pre-Birth Pre-birth is the fundamental structure of all human emotionality: something always wants to be born. The question is what wants to come into being.
- The Layer Model The layer model describes cognition along two axes: vertical movement from surface to ontological depth, and the feeling-core as living centre of a situation.
- Transhumanism — Promise, Critique, and the Question of the Human What transhumanism promises, what image of the human being it rests upon, and why philosophical critique recognizes in it not evolution but a pathogenesis.
Bring philosophy to life
These concepts are not mere theory — they work in life. If you'd like to think them through in your own situation, I'm happy to accompany you.