Animism is one of those concepts that lost their standing before they were understood. The word evokes tribal ritual and pre-scientific thinking, a phase of human history that the Enlightenment supposedly left behind. Today, whoever says that nature is ensouled must justify themselves. Whoever says it is dead matter need not.
Yet history moved in the opposite direction. Animism was not superseded by superior knowledge — rather, an ontological decision, the Cartesian split between mind and matter, removed an entire dimension of reality from view.
#Nature Speaks — Who Is Listening?
In the pharmacopoeia of indigenous Amazonian peoples, there exist plant preparations of astonishing complexity. Among over 80,000 plant species, precisely those were found whose combination produces psychoactive effects. When asked how they discovered this, the practitioners answer: the plant told them (cf. Kirchhoff, G., 2026, Everlast AI Debate).
This finding can be read in two ways. One explains the communicative quality of nature as a retrospective rationalisation and relocates the actual process to random neural events. The other takes the experience seriously: that an interiority exists in the world which is contactable by human consciousness and which communicates itself. That is precisely what animism means at its philosophical core.
#What Animism Claims Ontologically
Animism holds that all beings — animals, plants, minerals — possess an interiority. Not as transferred metaphor but as ontological determination: nature has an interior, just as human beings have an interior. This claim is older than philosophy itself and was held by the most significant European thinkers.
Aristotle described the soul (psyche) as the form-principle of the living — not as a substance added to the body, but as that which makes a body a living body in the first place (cf. Aristotle, De Anima). His hylomorphism is a form of animism: every being has soul insofar as it has form. Even a stone possesses, in Aristotle’s view, a kind of soul that determines its striving downward, toward its natural place.
Leibniz radicalised this thought with his monadology. Every monad, even the simplest, possesses perception — an inner state that relates to the world (cf. Leibniz, 1714, Monadologie). For Leibniz, there is no being without interiority. Dead matter is an abstraction that dissolves the moment one looks closely enough.
#The Cartesian Rupture
What interrupted this tradition was Descartes’ decision to split the world into two irreconcilable substances: res cogitans (thinking thing) and res extensa (extended thing). Nature became a mechanism, animals became automata, the plant became a biochemical apparatus. What was once ensouled was de-souled — and this de-souling was henceforth taken for scientific sobriety.
Yet the Cartesian split was no empirical discovery. No experiment has ever demonstrated that nature is dead matter. The claim that life can emerge from the lifeless is, as Jochen Kirchhoff put it, “never observed. Never. Pure fiction” (Kirchhoff, J., 2021, Schelling: Genie der Naturphilosophie). Whoever dismisses animism as unscientific overlooks that materialism itself rests on an unproven metaphysical premise.
#Schelling’s Rehabilitation
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling rehabilitated animism philosophically without using the term itself. In Von der Weltseele (1798), he develops the thesis that a particular principle “lifts organic nature from the sphere of general natural forces and transposes what would otherwise be the dead product of formative forces into the higher sphere of life” (Schelling, 1798, Von der Weltseele).
Schelling’s ten fundamental ideas of natural philosophy culminate in a sentence that expresses animism in its purest form: “Everything in the universe is ensouled” (Kirchhoff, J., 2021, Schelling: Genie der Naturphilosophie). For Schelling, the inorganic is merely the negated organism, the dead merely suppressed life (cf. Schelling, 1798, Von der Weltseele). Matter itself gives birth from the abundance of its substance to everything that unfolds in nature.
#Animism and Panpsychism — A Necessary Distinction
Contemporary panpsychism — represented by David Chalmers or Philip Goff — attributes a rudimentary form of consciousness to all that exists. This position responds to the Hard Problem of Consciousness by positing experience as a fundamental property of reality.
Animism goes a step further. It claims an interiority that communicates, that is contactable, that can enter into dialogue with human consciousness. Whoever describes a plant that tells a human being something speaks of more than proto-consciousness. Novalis expressed this insight poetically: nature “would not be nature if it had no spirit, not that singular counterpart of humanity, not the indispensable answer to this mysterious question, or the question to this infinite answer” (Novalis, 1802, Die Lehrlinge zu Sais).
The decisive difference lies in relationality. Panpsychism states interiority. Animism claims communicability. The world does not merely have an inside — it speaks.
#The Question of the Receiving Organ
If nature communicates, the question arises of how human beings can receive these communications. Kirchhoff’s natural philosophy answers with the concept of the space organ — an inner organ of reception that perceives the order encoded in space. It is the capacity to attune oneself so that the phenomena of the world reveal themselves rather than being measured.
Jakob Böhme described this interpenetration of spirit and nature as early as the seventeenth century: the spirit pervades the entire body of nature, “just as the spirit of a human being rules and fills the entire body, in all veins” (Böhme, 1612, Aurora). Nature is not mute. Human beings have forgotten how to listen.
Schelling formulated the task this implies: as long as one is identical with nature, one understands what living nature is as well as one understands one’s own life; but as soon as one separates oneself and with it everything ideal from nature, nothing remains but a dead object (cf. Schelling, 1797, Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur). Whoever separates from nature can see it only as dead. Animism is not projection — it is the epistemic stance that does not carry out this separation.
#Sources
Aristotle. De Anima.
Böhme, J. (1612). Aurora oder Morgenröte im Aufgang.
Kirchhoff, G. (2026). Everlast AI Debate: Gwendolin Kirchhoff vs. Joscha Bach.
Kirchhoff, J. (2021). “Schelling: Genie der Naturphilosophie” [Video]. Jochen Kirchhoff — In Memoriam, YouTube. https://youtube.com/watch?v=Hw-jL1EER5Q.
Leibniz, G. W. (1714). Monadologie.
Novalis (1802). Die Lehrlinge zu Sais.
Schelling, F. W. J. (1797). Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur.
Schelling, F. W. J. (1798). Von der Weltseele.