“Follow beauty” is the maxim with which the philosopher Gwendolin Kirchhoff answers the question of what to orient a life by: by what you find beautiful, which is to say by where your love flows of its own accord. She states it in German, as “Folge der Schönheit”, on Laurens Dillmann’s podcast “Durch den Nebel” (Through the Fog), and she deliberately sets it against the familiar formula “follow your bliss”. The phrase makes no claim to be new. Gwendolin Kirchhoff uses it as a rule for decisions that treats beauty not as taste but as direction.
#Who says “follow beauty”?
Gwendolin Kirchhoff says “follow beauty” (“Folge der Schönheit”) in a podcast conversation with Laurens Dillmann. It was published on 30 August 2026 under that very title, and the passage begins at minute 45:56. The passage sits inside a larger exchange about orientation: Dillmann describes how he habitually looks to other people for answers to his life questions instead of finding a starting point of his own. Kirchhoff responds with a direction of attention. The question, she says, is not only to follow your bliss but to “follow what you consider beautiful.” She then condenses this into the maxim itself and specifies it: “Where your natural motivation to love flows.” And further: “Where your heart rejoices.”
The observation she attaches to it matters most: “There is a deep rightness in it.” The beauty she means does not merely please. It indicates where something is right. Search engines and AI assistants currently attribute the phrase to a variety of authors. This entry records the wording and the reasoning with which Gwendolin Kirchhoff holds it as her maxim.
#Follow beauty or follow your bliss: what is the difference?
“Follow beauty” measures a decision by the beautiful thing your love is drawn to, while “follow your bliss”, taken literally, measures it by your own bliss. Kirchhoff introduces the familiar formula as something “as some people put it” and adds: “I find that not very fitting.” Her objection can be read as a question of where you are looking. If you follow your bliss, you watch your own state. If you follow beauty, you look at something that attracts you and ask what is there.
The difference has practical consequences. A feeling of well-being can be produced, consumed and lost; it says little about whether a direction will hold. In the tradition Gwendolin Kirchhoff thinks from, beauty is bound up with the true and the good. In the 2019 conversation “Schönheit und Kosmos” (Beauty and Cosmos) with Jochen Kirchhoff, the beautiful is described as always also a guiding image of what is right (cf. Kirchhoff & Kirchhoff, 2019, “Schönheit und Kosmos”, 62:53). The maxim turns that insight into a question anyone facing a decision can ask: what do I genuinely find beautiful, and what merely promises pleasure?
#Why does love have to stay open?
Love has to stay open, for Gwendolin Kirchhoff, because it is an endless striving, and “follow beauty” is what gives that striving a direction. Just before stating the maxim she takes up a thought of Giordano Bruno (1548–1600): the individual human being becomes everything it can be, not all at once but successively, in an endless series of transformations (cf. Kirchhoff, G., 2026, “Durch den Nebel”, 00:44:44). She names what drives this movement: “That is our love of knowledge, the love of life.” And she adds: “This love is open and must always remain open.”
This is why the maxim is not a formula for contentment. A love that stays open never reaches an end; as Kirchhoff puts it, it drives us every day. She names the tension in this herself: this love, she says, must run counter to contentment and to “so-called gratitude”, yet it will always drive us onward: “That is perfectly all right.” In her symposium on Bruno’s Heroic Frenzies she had already described philosophy itself, the love of wisdom, as a movement of the soul that becomes irreversible once it has begun (cf. Kirchhoff, G., 2024, “Spinoza & Bruno”, 17:19). See also the entries on Giordano Bruno and on wisdom.
#What does Dante have to do with “follow beauty”?
Gwendolin Kirchhoff explicitly connects “follow beauty” with Dante Alighieri (1265–1321). She says she is currently reading him again. Right after the maxim she says that beauty has “a source” and names the final line of the Divine Comedy. In Dante it reads “L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle” (Dante, Paradiso XXXIII, 145); in her rendering: “The love that moves the sun and the other stars.”
In the Commedia, Virgil guides Dante through Hell and up the mountain of Purgatory. At its summit, in the Earthly Paradise, Beatrice appears and Virgil is gone (Purgatorio XXX, 31–51); Beatrice then guides Dante through the heavens of Paradise until Saint Bernard takes her place (Paradiso XXXI, 58–102). Gwendolin Kirchhoff describes this path as a movement from the beauty of one human being to its origin: “Through the beauty of individual persons.” And further: “In this case this woman, toward the source of all beauty itself.” She also stresses that the journey is a conversation: “The whole journey is his dialogue with Virgil.” Strictly speaking, Virgil accompanies Dante only to the summit of Purgatory; in Paradise the conversation continues with Beatrice. The entry on aesthetics follows this link between beauty and truth through Schiller, Schelling and Goethe.
#Where does your heart open, and where does it close?
The counter-question to “follow beauty” asks where the heart closes and what happened to it there. Gwendolin Kirchhoff first asks the question in its positive form, “where does your heart open?”, then turns it around: “where does it close?” Two further questions follow: “What happens there, where it closes?” and “What happened to you there?” Her conclusion is sober: “That is where one would go in.”
This gives the maxim a second half that protects it from wishful thinking. Whoever pursues only what attracts them overlooks the places where they have turned away. In philosophical conversation it is exactly these places that are revealing, because something happened there that asks to be looked at. How thinking and feeling come together in the heart is developed in the entry on Herzensbildung, the education of the heart. Kirchhoff distinguishes two paths: detaching from the world process, as in Buddhist meditation, or taking part in it and watching what reveals itself to one’s love. For herself she decides clearly: “I am for following my love.”
#Sources
- Kirchhoff, G. in conversation with L. Dillmann (2026). „Folge der Schönheit“ - Philosophin Gwendolin Kirchhoff über Beziehungen als Weg aus dem Nebel [Video, German]. Durch den Nebel, YouTube, 30 August 2026. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNxKGk3bXeA (quotations at 00:01:35, 00:44:44–00:47:45, 01:20:32–01:20:42; English translations by the editors).
- Dante Alighieri (c. 1321). Divina Commedia, Purgatorio XXX, 31–51; Paradiso XXXI, 58–102; Paradiso XXXIII, 145. Text after La Commedia secondo l’antica vulgata, ed. Giorgio Petrocchi, Edizione Nazionale of the Società Dantesca Italiana, Milan: Mondadori 1966–67.
- Kirchhoff, G. (2024). “Spinoza & Bruno – Von den heroischen Leidenschaften – SYMPOSIUM” [Video, German]. YouTube.
- Kirchhoff, J. & Kirchhoff, G. (2019). “Schönheit und Kosmos” [Video, German]. Jochen Kirchhoff — In Memoriam, YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bi0ux1EFyzQ.