The drive toward consciousness poses a question that Darwinism cannot answer: why does higher complexity arise at all? The best-surviving organism on this planet is the single-celled one. It can occupy every ecological niche, reproduce under the most extreme conditions, and has existed for billions of years. For its survival, no further step would have been necessary. But things went further. From the single cell came the multicellular organism, from the multicellular the animal, from the animal the human being with the capacity for language, music, and self-reflection. Anyone who takes this movement seriously stands before a question that Darwinism cannot answer: what drives development beyond what is necessary?
Drive toward consciousness names the answer formulated in the natural-philosophical tradition: the cosmos harbours an inherent urge toward awareness — an inner dimension that ontologically underlies the cosmos as a whole. It is not a mechanism, not an external impulse, not a plan. It is a will, comparable to what Schopenhauer described as world-will — only not blind and aimless, but directed toward knowledge, toward the self-knowledge of the cosmos through the beings that live within it.
#Why Survival Is Not Enough
The functional explanation of biology claims that all complexity is the result of mutation and selection under the pressure of survival. Gwendolin Kirchhoff pointed to the gap in this explanation in the debate with the cognitive scientist Joscha Bach: aesthetic preferences in birds, where females choose their partners by how well they dance, sing, or look, cannot be reduced to a survival advantage. The peacock with the magnificent tail is easier to catch, not harder. Musicality, the creative drive, beauty as a formative force in nature — all of this points to something beyond mere adaptation (cf. Kirchhoff, G., Everlast AI Debate, 2026).
The simple solution of admitting only the survival instinct as the inner dimension of the living falls short. Perception takes place, thought, musicality, creative shaping. This world-immanent interiority is more complex than it is represented by the reductive metaphysics. The drive toward consciousness describes this complexity as an ontological ground-fact, not as a by-product of mechanical processes.
#Schelling’s Nature That Wants to Become Mind
The philosophical foundation comes from Schelling. In the Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur (1797) and Von der Weltseele (1798), he formulates the thought that inverts the mechanistic worldview: nature is not dead matter onto which mind has been externally impressed. Nature is the visible mind, mind the invisible nature. The external world lies spread open before us so that we may find in it the history of our own mind. In the System des transcendentalen Idealismus (1800), this becomes a systematic claim: the system of nature is at the same time the system of our mind — which is why knowledge is possible at all.
What Schelling describes is a cosmos that is oriented toward consciousness — not as the endpoint of a mechanical process but as its innermost tendency. The inorganic is only the negated organic, the dead is only repressed life: locked in rigid bonds, it lies before us in the dead remains of the true substance. There is nothing absolutely dead; everything is primordial germ or nothing (cf. Schelling, Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur, 1797). The living is ontologically primary; the mechanical is derivative. And within the living there is a direction: toward higher self-apprehension, toward consciousness.
#The Human Being as Privileged Site
Jochen Kirchhoff (1944-2025) translated Schelling’s approach into a cosmological anthropology. In Was die Erde will (1998) and Die Erlösung der Natur (2004) he describes the human being as the privileged site at which the cosmos knows itself. The human being is not the only consciousness-bearing instance, but the one in whom the capacity for self-reflection is laid. The human being is a source of analogy for the universe: because they have consciousness, they may infer from their own interiority to the interiority of the cosmos.
Consciousness is, in this tradition, a living effective force in the cosmos. Thoughts are not merely subjective events but forces that are fed into the cosmic field of consciousness and produce real effects. This presupposes that the cosmos itself is a space of consciousness (cf. Kirchhoff, J., Novalis: the Poet as Philosopher, 2023). The drive toward consciousness is what carries this movement: not an external god running a program, but a force inherent in the cosmos itself that comes to awareness in the human being and presses beyond the human being.
#Against the Mechanistic Projection
Whoever denies the drive toward consciousness must explain why the living arises from dead matter, why consciousness arises from the living, why self-consciousness arises from consciousness. The materialist answer is: chance and necessity, mutation and selection. It has a gap. It cannot solve the Hard Problem of Consciousness — the question of why it feels like something to experience anything. And it cannot solve the Boot Problem — the question of why subjective experience exists at all if it is supposed to play no role in physical events.
Gwendolin Kirchhoff frames the point in the Everlast AI Debate (cf. Kirchhoff, G., Everlast AI Debate, 2026) as a choice between two metaphysics: either the cosmos is a machine and consciousness an epiphenomenon, or the cosmos is a living organism and consciousness lies at its root. The first metaphysics produces a Hard Problem and a Boot Problem. The second does not. Whoever attributes life and consciousness to the cosmos as a whole — because they themselves live and are conscious — makes a legitimate analogical inference. Whoever, conversely, infers from a machine — a human tool — that everything is a tool of nothing, makes a far greater metaphysical leap.
Materialism, in Kirchhoff’s own thesis, is the result of an existential depression. The depression comes first and then projects a worldview. The loss of contact, the experience of betrayal, the alienation — the disheartening that takes from the heart something to which it had its clear inner anchor — this experience precedes the materialist ontology and generates it. This is not a polemical exaggeration but a diagnostic observation about the genesis of a worldview.
#Becoming Conscious as Cosmic Birth
If the cosmos is a being of consciousness and the human being the site at which this consciousness knows itself, then every act of becoming conscious is a cosmic event. Not in the sense of an esoteric inflation but as a consequence of the ontology: what appears in the individual as personal insight enacts a movement that is laid out in the whole. The birth process becomes cosmological here: every genuine insight is a birth, preceded by a phase of constriction — a not-yet-seeing that first makes the passage possible.
The Cosmic Anthropos describes the image of the human being that corresponds to this thought: the human as a high being of consciousness, not a biological machine. Natural philosophy provides the ontological foundation: a cosmos in which mind and nature are not separated but expressions of the same reality. And full humanism formulates the civilisational consequence: the future of the human being lies not in technical augmentation but in the becoming-conscious of what they already are.
#Sources
- Kirchhoff, G. (2026). Everlast AI Debate: Gwendolin Kirchhoff vs. Joscha Bach.
- Kirchhoff, J. (1998). Was die Erde will. Bergisch Gladbach: Gustav Lübbe Verlag.
- Kirchhoff, J. (2004). Die Erlösung der Natur. Klein Jasedow: Drachen Verlag.
- Kirchhoff, J. (2006). Räume, Dimensionen, Weltmodelle. Klein Jasedow: Drachen Verlag.
- Kirchhoff, J. (2023). Novalis: der Dichter als Philosoph. YouTube conversation.
- Schelling, F. W. J. (1797). Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur. Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel.
- Schelling, F. W. J. (1798). Von der Weltseele. Hamburg: Friedrich Perthes.
- Schelling, F. W. J. (1800). System des transcendentalen Idealismus. Tübingen: J.G. Cotta.