Since the seventeenth century, Western philosophy has circled around a question it created itself: how can subjective experience arise from lifeless matter? The mind-body problem, known in its modern form as the Hard Problem of Consciousness, demands an explanation for why qualia exist — why seeing red feels like something and pain hurts — even though both are supposedly nothing more than neural activity. The explanatory gap between brain processes and conscious experience has not closed despite neuroscientific advances. From a natural-philosophical perspective, this is because the question is wrongly posed. The mind-body problem arises not because nature is mysterious but because the dualism that produced it cuts reality in two before attempting to understand it.
#The Mind-Body Problem Since Descartes
Rene Descartes made the cut in 1641 that founded the mind-body problem in its present form (Descartes, 1641). His distinction between res cogitans (thinking substance, mind) and res extensa (extended substance, matter) created two ontologically separate spheres. The body functions mechanically, the soul thinks and feels. The question that Cartesian dualism raises is: how do these two substances communicate? Descartes himself attempted an answer via the pineal gland, which convinced few even among his contemporaries.
The philosophy of mind has since produced three centuries of attempted solutions. Materialism declares consciousness a by-product of physical processes. Functionalism defines mental states by their causal role, not by their subjective experience. Property dualism grants matter mental properties without being able to explain where they come from. The pattern remains stable: one begins with dead matter and tries to derive the living from it. The derivation never succeeds, because the starting point excludes what is meant to be explained.
#Qualia and the Explanatory Gap
David Chalmers in 1995 brought the mind-body problem to a formula that the philosophy of mind has not escaped since (Chalmers, 1995). The “easy” problems of consciousness concern cognitive functions: information processing, attention, behavioural control. These are difficult but solvable questions within the natural-scientific framework. The Hard Problem of Consciousness is categorially different. It asks: why is there subjective experience at all? Why does anything feel like anything?
Qualia — the subjective experiential qualities — form the heart of this explanatory gap. Seeing red is not the same as registering a wavelength of 700 nanometres. Feeling pain is not the same as describing the activation of certain nerve fibres. No neural model, however detailed, can make the leap from the third to the first person, from physical description to subjective experience. Frank Jackson’s famous thought experiment of Mary’s Room makes the point vivid (Jackson, 1982): the neuroscientist Mary knows everything physical about colour perception but has never seen colour. When she sees red for the first time, she learns something new. Subjective experience cannot be derived from physical knowledge.
#Schelling’s Dissolution of Dualism
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling recognised already in 1797 — a century and a half before Chalmers — that the mind-body problem is not a genuine problem but the result of a false separation. In Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur he wrote (Schelling, 1797): “As long as I myself am identical with nature, I understand what living nature is as well as I understand my own life. But as soon as I separate myself and with me everything ideal from nature, nothing remains to me but a dead object.”
Natural philosophy, as Schelling conceived it, does not resolve dualism by building a bridge between two substances but through the insight that the separation itself was the error: “Nature is to be visible spirit, spirit invisible nature.” Nature and mind are not two worlds requiring a connection. They are one reality that merely presents itself differently to different modes of observation. What appears from without as matter is, experienced from within, consciousness.
Schelling’s position stands in a tradition reaching from Heraclitus through Giordano Bruno to German Romanticism, one that grasps the living as ontologically primary. Jochen Kirchhoff (1944-2025) radicalised this thought: “Consciousness can only arise from consciousness. That dead matter simply gives birth to life is a pure assertion of science, never proved. Never.” (Kirchhoff, J., 1998). The natural sciences do not interpret the world without presuppositions but according to very specific premises. That matter is primary and consciousness derived is not an empirical finding. It is, as Kirchhoff put it, “bad metaphysics” masquerading as fact (Kirchhoff, J., 2007).
#Why Materialism Fails at the Mind-Body Problem
If dualism is an artefact and not a discovery, the question shifts. One no longer asks: how do we bridge the gap between mind and matter? One asks: why has Western philosophy of mind clung so stubbornly to this gap?
The layer model offers an approach to an answer. Beneath the surface of the scientific progress narrative lies a prior decision that is rarely questioned: the assumption that a dead, calculable world is knowable and controllable, while a living, ensouled world is not. The materialist framework promises control. If consciousness were primary — if the soul were more than a neural function — then inner life could not be fully objectified, and the relationship to nature as mere resource would stand exposed as a violation.
Gwendolin Kirchhoff’s own position connects the epistemological critique with a relational diagnosis: strict materialism is rooted in an emotional experience of isolation that has gradually become ideologised. The inability to think consciousness as primary is not solely an intellectual failure. It is a form of estrangement from the living, dressed up as scientific sobriety.
#Consciousness as Primary Reality
The cosmic anthropos describes the human being as a microcosm in which physical, psychic, and spiritual reality interpenetrate. In this perspective, there is no mind-body problem, because body and soul were never separated. Subjective experience, qualia, the felt quality of the world require no explanation by something that does not contain them. They are the immediate way in which the living experiences itself.
The Hard Problem of Consciousness remains hard exclusively within the materialist framework. The philosophy of mind that seeks a bridge between body and soul seeks a solution to a problem it created itself. Natural philosophy offers no better bridge. It shows that no bridge is needed.
#Sources
- Chalmers, D. (1995). Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2(3), 200-219.
- Descartes, R. (1641). Meditationes de Prima Philosophia. Paris: Michel Soly.
- Jackson, F. (1982). Epiphenomenal Qualia. Philosophical Quarterly, 32(127), 127-136.
- Kirchhoff, J. (1998). Was die Erde will. Bergisch Gladbach: Gustav Lübbe Verlag.
- Kirchhoff, J. (2006). Raeume, Dimensionen, Weltmodelle. Drachen Verlag.
- Schelling, F. W. J. (1797). Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur. Leipzig: Breitkopf und Haertel.
Related entries: Natural Philosophy, Cosmic Anthropos, Layer Model, Consciousness Philosophy