Whoever wants to investigate consciousness faces a peculiar difficulty: the object cannot be placed outside. You can scan brains, measure neural firing rates, observe behaviour. You can describe everything that is visible from the outside. And you will still not have touched the decisive thing. For consciousness is first and foremost experience, and experience takes place in the first person. What it means to feel pain, to see a colour, to think a thought — only the one who does it knows. This insight is the core of first-person phenomenology, and its consequences reach far beyond academic consciousness research.
#The Explanatory Gap That No Data Can Close
Thomas Nagel posed in 1974 the question that every theory of consciousness must answer since: what is it like to be a bat? You can map the entire neurobiology of echolocation, describe every nerve impulse and every neural connection. You still do not know what it feels like for the bat to fly through the night by echolocation (cf. Nagel, 1974, What Is It Like to Be a Bat?). The not-knowing here is not a data deficit — it is structural. The third-person perspective of natural science and the first-person perspective of experience belong to different orders. One cannot catch up with the other because it is written in a different language.
Nagel later expanded this insight into a cosmological thesis: if subjective experience cannot be reduced to physical description, then the materialist worldview is incomplete — not merely in the details but in its approach (cf. Nagel, 2012, Mind and Cosmos). Conscious experience is not a marginal phenomenon that an otherwise complete physics would need to supplement; it is an indication that reality itself has a dimension absent from physical equations.
#The Subject-Blindness of Modern Science
Jochen Kirchhoff formulated the consequence for science sharply: “The living human being removes himself and turns himself as a scientist into a recording apparatus, an objective recording apparatus of reality” (Kirchhoff, J., 2019, What Is Knowledge? Scientific Method and Philosophy, 24:00). The concept of nature in natural science since Galileo presupposes that nature is an object, accessible to mathematics, without needing to include the consciousness of the knower (cf. Kirchhoff, J., 2020, What the Earth Wants — The Jewel Human Being, 22:10). In this construction, experience is not a research subject but an interfering factor to be eliminated in order to arrive at “objective” results.
The consequence is what Kirchhoff calls subject-blindness: science has, by its own admission, failed at the phenomenon of consciousness. It had to pass. “And consciousness is precisely what is primary. One must always begin from consciousness. That is the starting point, not the other way around” (Kirchhoff, J., 2021, Science Under Scrutiny, 40:07). First-person phenomenology reverses the direction of knowledge. It begins where the living human being actually stands: with one’s own experience.
#More Than Method: The Ontological Stakes
Edmund Husserl had founded phenomenology as a method: back to the things themselves, bracketing all metaphysical presuppositions, describing what shows itself to consciousness. Gwendolin Kirchhoff goes beyond this methodological approach in the Everlast debate (2026). Her argument: what we have here is not merely a method but an insight into the fundamental structure of reality.
All functional descriptions — second-order perception, coherence, substrate independence — fail to grasp the actual content of consciousness, which can only be captured from the first-person perspective. For consciousness is first and foremost evident in experience (cf. Kirchhoff, G., Everlast Debate, 2026, 45:34-45:41). The phenomenology of consciousness means this direct perceiving: how consciousness is experienced from the perspective from which we actually undergo it — namely the first-person perspective (cf. Kirchhoff, G., Everlast Debate, 2026, 60:40-60:58). This is not a normative claim but an observation: one can identify and build up contents of consciousness, but consciousness itself is not identical with this construction. Meditative practice, the contemplative tradition, and phenomenological self-observation converge in the experience that there is an awareness that runs deeper than any single content of consciousness (cf. Kirchhoff, G., Everlast Debate, 2026, 26:51).
#Nietzsche’s Phenomenology and the Insights of a Sufferer
First-person phenomenology is not an invention of the twentieth century. Friedrich Nietzsche practised it with a radicality that puts Husserl’s academic method in the shade. His greatest achievement, according to Gwendolin Kirchhoff, is the depth and precision of his phenomenology in the first person. He tracks down certain things within himself and on this basis makes predictions about societal developments that proved accurate (cf. Kirchhoff, G., Everlast Debate, 2026, 138:59-140:14). Nietzsche does not observe consciousness in general but his own, with a precision that elevates the private to a means of knowledge. The limit lies where love and relational experience are absent: what Nietzsche gains in phenomenological precision remains within the frame of pure autonomy, without incorporating the principle of connection.
#The Cosmos as First-Person Reality
If experience is irreducible, if no third-person description catches up with what a being experiences, then the question arises: where does experience come from? The materialist answer — consciousness emerges from sufficiently complex matter — contradicts the first-person insight because it turns consciousness into precisely what it is not: a third-person phenomenon derivable from something else.
Natural philosophy in the Schellingian tradition answers differently. Consciousness is not something that mysteriously joins matter. It is the way reality is given to itself. The cosmos is an absolute organism; to the organism belongs the organising principle of spirit, and the principle of life is omnipresent (cf. Kirchhoff, J., 2021, Schelling: Genius of Natural Philosophy, 43:23-45:00). Through selfhood, the human being is connected to the cosmic order; the world is pervaded by consciousness-energies, and the human being is part of this order — not its alien observer (cf. Kirchhoff, J., 2020, What the Earth Wants — The Jewel Human Being, 41:09).
Self-inquiry, as the Greek tradition understood it, leads through the exploration of one’s own self to deep strata of nature and the cosmos (cf. Kirchhoff, J., 2022, Heraclitus vs. Socrates — The Split in Philosophy, 45:30). This is the radical core of first-person phenomenology as understood in living philosophy: first-person knowledge is not a merely subjective limitation. It is the only access to a reality that itself possesses first-person quality.
#Sources
Kirchhoff, G. (2026). Everlast AI Debate: Gwendolin Kirchhoff vs. Joscha Bach [Debate].
Kirchhoff, J. (2019). Was ist Erkenntnis? Wissenschaftliche Methode & Philosophie [Video]. Jochen Kirchhoff — In Memoriam, YouTube.
Kirchhoff, J. (2020). Was die Erde will — Das Juwel Mensch [Video]. Jochen Kirchhoff — In Memoriam, YouTube.
Kirchhoff, J. (2021). Schelling: Genie der Naturphilosophie [Video]. Jochen Kirchhoff — In Memoriam, YouTube.
Kirchhoff, J. (2021). Wissenschaft auf dem Prüfstand [Video]. Jochen Kirchhoff — In Memoriam, YouTube.
Kirchhoff, J. (2022). Heraklit vs. Sokrates — Die Spaltung der Philosophie [Video]. Jochen Kirchhoff — In Memoriam, YouTube.
Kirchhoff, J. (2024). Außenwelt Innenwelt — Das Doppelwesen Mensch [Video]. Jochen Kirchhoff — In Memoriam, YouTube.
Nagel, T. (1974). “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”. The Philosophical Review, 83(4), 435-450.
Nagel, T. (2012). Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False. Oxford University Press.
Related entries: Qualia, Phenomenology, Consciousness Philosophy, Thinking Empathy, Cosmic Anthropos