Consciousness is one of those words everyone uses and no one truly fathoms. Modern neuroscience can measure neural correlates, localise brain regions, document activation patterns, and yet stands before a riddle it cannot solve with its own means: why does it feel like anything at all to have an experience? Subjective experience — what philosophy calls qualia — resists every attempt at reduction.
The Question Science Cannot Pose
Reductionist neuroscience proceeds from a premise it cannot itself justify: that consciousness is a product of material processes in the brain. Theories such as Integrated Information Theory (IIT) or Global Workspace Theory attempt to describe consciousness as an emergent property of neural networks. They measure information integration, model cognitive architectures, identify correlates. The fundamental question remains unanswered. David Chalmers formulated it as the hard problem of consciousness (Chalmers, 1996): no amount of knowledge about neural processes explains why it feels like something to see red or to feel pain. This is the explanatory gap at the heart of the mind-body problem — the same dualism between mind and matter that has haunted the philosophy of mind since Descartes.
The reason lies deeper than a methodological deficit. The materialist premise itself is, as Jochen Kirchhoff argued, “bad metaphysics” (Kirchhoff, 1998): a metaphysical decision that passes itself off as empirical self-evidence. That dead matter gives rise to consciousness has never been proven. It is an assertion repeated so often that it appears as fact.
Living Nature: Schelling’s Counter-Vision
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling already advanced the counter-thesis in 1797, and it has lost none of its force: nature is not dead matter organised by external laws but a living whole in which spirit inheres (Schelling, 1797). “Nature is to be visible spirit, spirit invisible nature” (Schelling, 1800, p. 12). In his real-idealism, Schelling overcomes the Cartesian dualism: the material world and the spiritual world are not separate spheres but expressions of the same reality.
For Schelling, there is no consciousness that first arises from matter, because matter itself is already an expression of spirit. “All rigid being in nature is an illusion. Things as such are illusions, expressions of arrested forces.” What modern physics treats as dead matter is in truth a living, fluctuating occurrence — arrested impulses of will that merely give the surface appearance of thinghood.
This insight has consequences for the understanding of consciousness. If nature is alive and spirit-shaped, then consciousness is no anomaly in an otherwise unconscious cosmos. It is the fundamental feature of reality itself. Whoever falls silent finds that nature speaks. Even in metals and stones the drive toward determinacy is unmistakable, yet only those who grow silent within themselves can perceive it.
The Cosmic Anthropos: Human Dignity as a Cosmic Category
Jochen Kirchhoff carried Schelling’s natural philosophy further and condensed it into the concept of the cosmic anthropos (Kirchhoff, 2002): the human being is not the accidental product of blind evolution on a planet at the edge of an insignificant galaxy. It is a microcosm of the macrocosm — a being in whom the consciousness of the cosmos recognises itself.
“If I have consciousness, then the cosmos also has consciousness” (Kirchhoff, 2007). This statement is not a poetic assertion but follows from the analogy model, which assumes structural correspondences between all levels of being. We know ourselves as inner-outer beings: our hands, our feet belong to the outer world, yet at the same time they are inwardly experienceable. If this dual nature operates in the human being, it must in principle operate everywhere.
The laws of nature are spirit-shaped, and because the human being is itself spirit-shaped, it can recognise them. Without this kinship, knowledge would be impossible; the human being would forever move within a hall of mirrors made of its own projections. The cosmic anthropos describes this deep kinship: behind the damaged, the disfigured countenance of the human being there exists a primordial form in full dignity and creative power. “In every human being, in principle, this quality of the cosmic anthropos resides” (Kirchhoff, 2002).
Perinatal Matrices: Consciousness as Birth Process
Stanislav Grof opened a third perspective (Grof, 1975) that has been taken up and developed further in the Kirchhoff tradition: consciousness has a perinatal structure. The way a human being is born — the oceanic shelteredness, the constriction, the expulsion, the arrival in an expanded space — repeats itself in every genuine act of knowledge and in every essential transformation.
Life is a series of births, not a series of deaths. Behind what Freud described as the death drive (Freud, 1920), there stands, according to this view, an unconscious wish to be born anew. The search for the womb can unconsciously lead to self-destruction, but consciously it can lead to the birth of a higher self. The inner structure of human pre-birth never loses this character: something always wants to be born. The birth process is the fundamental structure of consciousness itself.
What Neuroscience Overlooks
The reductionist position overlooks three dimensions that are decisive for a comprehensive understanding of consciousness:
The inner dimension of nature. Neuroscience considers consciousness exclusively from the outside — as a measurable phenomenon, as a correlate of neural activity. The layer model shows, by contrast, that truth always lies one layer deeper than what can be measured. Consciousness has an inner side — subjective experience, qualia, the first-person perspective — that eludes quantification but is accessible to experience.
The space organ. The human being possesses an inner capacity for perception that reaches beyond the physical senses: a receptive organ for the order encoded in space. This organ does not operate mechanically but presupposes ethical preparation: openness, the willingness to let go of the need to be right, and thinking empathy as method.
The cosmic dimension. In the natural-philosophical tradition, consciousness is not an island-experience of an isolated brain. It takes place within a shared world-interior. “Outer space is world-soul,” as Helmut Friedrich Krause formulated it (Krause, 1988). All beings are inwardly suspended within the same psychic-energetic whole. Extra-sensory perception, near-death experiences, and the phenomenology of constellation work all bear witness to the fact that the bodily is transcended by a subtler level.
Philosophy of Consciousness as Practice
The philosophy of consciousness described here does not remain at the level of theory. It has immediate consequences for philosophical work with people. Whoever takes seriously the cosmic anthropos as a latent potential in every human being accompanies differently from someone who reduces the human being to neurobiology. The question shifts: not “How does your brain function?” is the starting point, but “What wants to be born in you?”
In philosophical accompaniment, processes of consciousness follow their own logic — the logic of the organic. Genuine insights cannot be forced. They crystallise when the conditions are right. The path slides under your feet as you walk.
Epistemology, philosophical cosmology, the question of myth and logos, the critique of science, reflection on death and the meaning of life, the confrontation with transhumanism and the pathogenesis model: all these fields belong to the terrain of the philosophy of consciousness. They are facets of a fundamental question that cannot be reduced to any single discipline: what does it mean to be a conscious being in a cosmos that is itself alive?
Sources
- Chalmers, D. (1996). The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. New York: Oxford University Press.
- Freud, S. (1920). Beyond the Pleasure Principle. London: International Psycho-Analytical Press.
- Grof, S. (1975). Realms of the Human Unconscious: Observations from LSD Research. New York: Viking Press.
- Kirchhoff, J. (1998). Was die Erde will. Munich: Diederichs.
- Kirchhoff, J. (2002). Die Anderswelt. Munich: Diederichs.
- Kirchhoff, J. (2007). Räume, Dimensionen, Weltmodelle. Drachen Verlag.
- Krause, H. F. (1988). Kosmosophie Band 1. Bietigheim: Turm Verlag.
- Schelling, F. W. J. (1797). Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature. Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel.
- Schelling, F. W. J. (1800). System of Transcendental Idealism. Tübingen: Cotta.
Related entries: Cosmic Anthropos, Natural Philosophy, Space Organ, Pre-Birth, Birth Process, Layer Model, Epistemology