Anyone who ascribes consciousness, will, or interiority to nature encounters a charge in scientific discussion that is meant to settle the matter once and for all: anthropomorphism. The charge can be summarised in a single sentence: you are projecting your own qualities onto something that does not possess them. The anthropomorphism objection has served, since the seventeenth century, as the standard instrument by which mechanistic natural science rejects any talk of an ensouled nature. What goes unnoticed is that the opposing position is also a projection. Whoever denies nature all interiority is projecting the properties of a machine onto the cosmos. The question is not whether we think in analogies, but which source of analogy we choose. When you gaze at the night sky and feel something that goes beyond biological wonder, that is not projection. It is a response to something that meets you.
#The Real Problem: De-humanising the Cosmos
The true scandal lies not in anthropomorphising nature but in de-humanising it. Jochen Kirchhoff (1944—2025) put this sharply in Die Anti-Geschichte der Physik (1991): modern natural science has eliminated both the world-will and the world-soul, because a cosmos with a will of its own gets in the way of the reductionist method (cf. Kirchhoff, J., Der Weltenwille, 2023, 22:24). First nature is de-souled, then anyone who speaks of ensoulment is accused of projecting.
That is not a discovery but a stipulation. Jochen Kirchhoff formulates the counter-thesis: he seeks to restore the human being’s cosmic dignity, to reintegrate them into a comprehensively living and ensouled cosmic whole (cf. Kirchhoff, J., Anti-Geschichte der Physik, 1991, foreword). This restoration presupposes that dignity was first withdrawn — not from the human being, but from the cosmos. The de-humanisation strikes both.
#Cosmomorphy and Anthropomorphy
Gwendolin Kirchhoff clarified this connection in a conversation about yoga and knowledge of nature: the human body is cosmomorphic just as the world is anthropomorphic, and through the cosmomorphy of the body, insights into the web of nature become possible (cf. Kirchhoff, G., Jenseits des Materiellen, Manova, 2024, 34:47). The thought runs in both directions: not only may one reason from the human being to the cosmos, the cosmos also manifests in the human being. Microcosm and macrocosm are not metaphor but ontological structure. What you experience in yourself — will, sensation, relatedness — is not your private affair but the expression of a cosmic constitution.
Novalis (1772—1801) puts it in a formula in the Pollen fragments (1798): The world is a macro-anthropos. Jochen Kirchhoff develops from this the thesis that the human being is a source of analogy for the cosmos, which presupposes that the world has something human about it (cf. Kirchhoff, J., Novalis: der Dichter als Philosoph, 2023, 13:06). The choice of analogy-source is not a matter of style but an epistemological prior decision. Whoever takes the machine as analogy-source — as has been done from the clockwork through the steam engine to the computer (cf. Kirchhoff, J., Wissenschaft auf dem Prüfstand, 2021, 20:39) — can only find what machines have: function, calculability, dead regularity. Whoever takes the living human being as analogy-source finds will, interiority, and creative power.
#Schelling and Bruno: The Tradition of Ensouled Nature
The philosophical grounding of anthropomorphism reaches far back. Giordano Bruno (1548—1600) argues in the dialogue On the Cause, the Principle, and the One (1584) that the excellence of the cosmos is diminished by those who refuse to acknowledge that the world with its members is ensouled (cf. Bruno, Von der Ursache, dem Princip und dem Einen, 1584, Second Dialogue). When asked whether all things are ensouled, he replies: Who could deny it with good reason?
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775—1854) develops this thought systematically in his Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature (Breitkopf und Hartel, 1797) and On the World Soul (Friedrich Perthes, 1798). His finding, repeatedly taken up in the dialogues of Jochen Kirchhoff: the principle of life is omnipresent in the cosmos, everything is ensouled (cf. Kirchhoff, J., Schelling: Genie der Naturphilosophie, 2021, 43:23). This is neither a metaphor nor animism in the primitive sense but a philosophical position: spirit and nature are not separate; the organising and the organised interpenetrate.
#The Anthropomorphism Charge as Defence
In the Everlast AI debate (Kirchhoff vs. Bach, 2026), the structure of this charge becomes particularly visible. Joscha Bach asserts that the view that a magical force ensouled the cells is an expression of superstition (cf. Kirchhoff, G., Everlast AI Debate, 2026, 43:17). Gwendolin Kirchhoff counters: the reductive description that would shrink consciousness to control models and information processing covertly reintroduces exactly what it wishes to strike out — namely intention, will, and relatedness (cf. ibid., 44:06). The game engine, the simulated organism, the computational model — all these analogies originate from human constructors with will and intention.
Gwendolin Kirchhoff names, in the same debate, what matters: this real humanising is the actual project we should be concentrating on, because systems will not save us (cf. Kirchhoff, G., Everlast AI Debate, 2026, 145:14). Anthropomorphism here does not mean the anthropomorphism charge but its opposite: the deepening of the human itself, a deeper intimacy, a closer connection between human beings that arises from a cosmic anchoring (cf. ibid., 152:26).
#Body Analogy Instead of Machine Analogy
Anthropomorphism, philosophically understood, is the decision in favour of the body analogy over the machine analogy. Gwendolin Kirchhoff observes that we primarily use a machine analogy rather than a body analogy, and that through the analogy of the body one can arrive very far (cf. Kirchhoff, G., Jenseits des Materiellen, Manova, 2024, 34:47). The body analogy presupposes that the human being is not merely an observer of nature but is itself nature, and that its inner-outer relationship provides insight into the inner-outer relationship of the cosmos. The cosmic anthropos is the figure that sustains this connection.
Whoever understands anthropomorphism as a charge has already decided that the human being and the cosmos have nothing to do with each other. Whoever understands it as an epistemic practice follows a tradition that extends from Bruno through Schelling and Novalis to Jochen Kirchhoff — a tradition in which thinking and nature are not separate domains but expressions of the same living whole. Natural philosophy is where this question is philosophically engaged.