Materialism is widely taken to be what science has found out: that the world is made of matter and everything else — consciousness, sensation, spirit — is a by-product of material processes. What few notice: materialism is not a discovery. It is a presupposition repeated so often that it appears as fact.
#The Premise That Disguises Itself
Materialism rests on a premise it cannot itself justify. Arthur Schopenhauer named this circular reasoning in 1844 with remarkable clarity: “The inevitably false thing about materialism consists in its proceeding from a petitio principii, namely the assumption that matter is something absolutely and unconditionally given, hence actually a thing-in-itself” (Schopenhauer, 1844, The World as Will and Representation, vol. 2). Matter is posited as that which cannot be questioned further, from which everything else is to be derived. That the knowing subject who performs this positing cannot itself be derived from matter remains systematically unconsidered.
This finding is not outdated. Contemporary neuroscience in large part tacitly presupposes what it claims to prove: that consciousness is a product of neuronal activity. Correlation is confused with causation; the accompanying phenomenon is taken for the cause (cf. Kirchhoff, J., 2023, Was ist Erkenntnis?). The mind-body problem remains fundamentally unsolvable within the materialist framework, because the framework itself generates the problem.
#Methodical Reduction and Ontological Short-Circuit
When you distinguish between methodical reduction and ontological materialism, the decisive error becomes visible. Methodical reduction is a legitimate tool: one breaks a system into parts in order to investigate them individually. Ontological materialism goes a step further and claims that the whole is nothing but the sum of its parts. This step is not an empirical result but a philosophical short-circuit.
Schelling saw as early as 1797 where this confusion leads: the mathematical description of nature offers accuracy but no genuine insight. It is like trying to describe Homer’s works by counting the letters (cf. Schelling, 1797, Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature). Of the inner movement one knows nothing at all. “Nature should be visible spirit, spirit the invisible nature” (Schelling, 1797, Ideas). In this formula the alternative becomes visible. Nature is not a dead object registered from without, but a living whole in which spirit inheres. If you admit this possibility, what changes is not science but the gaze with which you practise it.
Natural philosophy does not dispute the utility of empirical methods. It disputes the claim that these methods are the sole access to reality.
#What Materialism Cannot Explain
Nietzsche counted the materialist atomism “among the best-refuted things” (Nietzsche, 1886, Beyond Good and Evil). Even the physics of his day no longer knew solid material particles, but extensionless centres of force after Boscovich — non-material starting points of a continuous force-field (cf. Kirchhoff, J., 2022, Nietzsche als Wissenschaftskritiker). The matter upon which materialism relies does not even exist in the form claimed by physics.
Jochen Kirchhoff calls this the “subject-blindness of natural science”: the living human being excuses himself as a scientist and makes himself into a “registering apparatus” (Kirchhoff, J., 2023, Was ist Erkenntnis?). He operates with methodological atheism, as if there were no spirit, and methodological geocentrism, as if everything in the cosmos were like here — only without life and consciousness. This double blindness is the fundamental error.
So-called consciousness can, within the materialist framework, at best be described as an epiphenomenon — an effectless accompaniment of neuronal processes. Whoever is satisfied with this explanation has stopped asking the real question.
#The Emotional Root of an Ideology
Gwendolin Kirchhoff goes a step beyond the ontological level in her critique. Strict materialism, she argues, springs from an emotional experience of isolation that has become ideologised: “The origin of materialism lies in an actually experienced isolation, the feeling of being completely alone. And from this arises a view of the real in which connection does not exist. That is what materialism broadcasts as a vibe: that nothing is connected” (Kirchhoff, G., 2024, Vergessene Geister).
This diagnosis connects the philosophical critique with a psychological deep structure. Materialism does not merely claim that everything is matter. It implicitly claims that there is no genuine connection: not between the human being and the cosmos, not between consciousness and world, not between the individual and the whole. What presents itself as a sober scientific position carries an affect within it — the conviction that belonging is an illusion.
From this follows what Gwendolin Kirchhoff describes as the “decision for materialism”: to trust the feeling for the other and the feeling for the space less than the cleverness of the individual with their own interests (cf. Kirchhoff, G., 2024, Vergessene Geister). The prevailing intellectual culture enforces disenchantment as the only admissible register of conversation — whoever poses deeper questions about the spiritual is shamed as unserious (cf. Kirchhoff, G., 2026, Everlast AI Debate). Whoever examines the premises of their own thinking must not be intimidated by this.
#What Natural Philosophy Sets Against It
The alternative to materialism is not a vague spiritualism but the philosophically grounded position that the world is a living, ensouled whole. “Everything in the cosmos is ensouled,” Schelling formulates in the summary of his natural philosophy (cf. Kirchhoff, J., 2021, Schelling: Genie der Naturphilosophie). And further: “As long as I am myself identical with nature, I understand what living nature is. As soon as I separate myself from nature, nothing remains to me but a dead object.”
“There is nothing absolutely dead — everything is primal seed or nothing” (Schelling, per Kirchhoff, J., 2021, Schelling: Genie der Naturphilosophie). From the dead, nothing living has ever arisen. No one has observed it. It is, as Jochen Kirchhoff puts it, a pure fiction, an ideology that passes itself off as science.
The consequences of this insight reach far beyond academia. Animism, dismissed by the Enlightenment as primitive thinking, articulates at its core the same experience: that nature is a counterpart that communicates. And the critique of science as Kirchhoff practises it is not a rejection of empirical inquiry but the uncovering of the invisible metaphysics on which it rests. If you treat materialism as a scientific self-evidence, you have not yet examined its philosophical presuppositions.
#Sources
Kirchhoff, G. (2024). “Vergessene Geister — Idealismus, Naturphilosophie und die verlorene Tradition” [Video].
Kirchhoff, G. (2026). “Wahres Ziel von KI — Everlast AI Debate” [Video].
Kirchhoff, J. (2021). “Schelling: Genie der Naturphilosophie” [Video]. Jochen Kirchhoff — In Memoriam, YouTube.
Kirchhoff, J. (2022). “Nietzsche als Wissenschaftskritiker” [Video]. Jochen Kirchhoff — In Memoriam, YouTube.
Kirchhoff, J. (2023). “Was ist Erkenntnis? Wissenschaftliche Methode & Philosophie” [Video]. Jochen Kirchhoff — In Memoriam, YouTube.
Nietzsche, F. (1886). Beyond Good and Evil. C. G. Naumann.
Schelling, F. W. J. (1797). Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur. Breitkopf und Hartel.
Schopenhauer, A. (1844). Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, vol. 2. Brockhaus.