Natural philosophy is a way of thinking that understands nature not as a dead mechanism but as a living cosmos in which spirit and matter are not separate but of the same essence. Knowledge does not come from dissecting nature into measurable parts, but from thinking participation in its living interconnection.
What Natural Philosophy Means
Natural philosophy poses a fundamental question that modern scientific thinking no longer asks: What is nature in its essence? The prevailing natural sciences assume that nature is an object that can be unlocked through analysis, measurement, and mathematical modelling. Natural philosophy does not dispute the usefulness of these methods, but it does dispute the tacit assumption behind them: that nature is something dead, something that can be observed from the outside.
All rigid being in nature is an illusion. Things as such are expressions of inhibited forces, inhibited currents, inhibited impulses of will. In reality, solid things do not exist; there is a living, fluctuating something. The world of appearances is semi-real: real, but not fully real. The truly real is the infinite. The world of appearances only acquires the character of the real through the imagination of the infinite into the finite.
This insight has consequences for epistemology. To know something, you must be it yourself. Like is only known by like. Life can only know life; spirit can only know spirit. The pure object as dead object cannot be known at all. We know the world because at the deepest level we are identical with what we know. Truth is therefore not something separate from reality; whoever penetrates deeper into reality penetrates into truth. This contradicts the constructivist position, which interprets truth as mere perspective.
Where the Concept Comes From
Schelling (1775-1854) formulated natural philosophy as a systematic programme. In his Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature (1797) and On the World Soul (1798), he developed a way of thinking in which nature is not the other of spirit but visible spirit, just as spirit is invisible nature. The external world lies open before us so that we may rediscover in it the history of our own spirit. For Schelling, gravity is not mechanical attraction of mass but a manifestation of a will to return to the divine primal substance. He conceives a subtle ether theory in which forces are understood as spirit-like realities, not abstract quantities.
Goethe (1749-1832) took the path of direct perception. His Metamorphosis of Plants (1790) and his Theory of Colours (1810) are not supplements to mainstream physics but its philosophical counterpoint. Goethe spoke of anschauende Urteilskraft — intuitive judgement — and meant a knowing in which perceiving and thinking coincide. Nature, he wrote, fills all spaces with its boundless productivity; everything we call evil and unhappy comes from the fact that it cannot give room to everything that arises. The beauty of nature contains a promise it does not fulfil: beauty simultaneously conceals and reveals a closeness to the divine.
Novalis (1772-1801) pushed the thought further. To romanticise, he wrote, is a qualitative potentiation: to give the ordinary a mysterious aspect, the familiar the dignity of the unknown, the finite an infinite appearance. This is not projection but the recovery of an original meaning lost in the rupture of separation. In his The Novices of Sais (1802), he allows nature to appear as a partner in conversation, not an object of measurement.
Jochen Kirchhoff (1944-2025) carried natural philosophy forward into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. His thinking combines Schelling’s identity philosophy with a cosmological foundation. For Kirchhoff, the cosmos is not an empty space in which dead matter orbits, but a living, ensouled whole in which every celestial body is an expression of the same world-will. In his works Spaces, Dimensions, World Models and The Otherworld, he demonstrates that the critique of materialism is not backward-looking but the precondition for grasping nature as what it actually is.
Natural Philosophy in Practice
In philosophical accompaniment, natural philosophy operates as background, not as topic. It determines how the human being is understood: not as an isolated subject in a meaningless environment, but as part of a living interconnection that sustains them and to which they respond. Whoever experiences, in the encounter with beauty, that subject and object flow into one another — that the usual sharp separation between inner and outer falls away in aesthetic encounter — touches a form of knowledge that goes beyond analytical distance.
Heraclitus’ Logos is at once world-law, world-reason, and world-substance — a living unity that pervades everything. Unlike the conceptual logos, it is not an abstract law but a flowing event that seizes the person. Natural philosophy stands in this tradition: it does not ask for facts about nature but for the living relationship of the person to the world in which they stand.
Related Concepts
Natural philosophy provides the epistemological framework in which Thinking Empathy finds its place: only because we are of the same essence as what we know is a thinking that simultaneously feels possible. It connects with Judgement through Goethe’s intuitive judgement, which arises from participation in nature, not from distance to it. In Order Work, the core natural-philosophical insight shows itself in the fact that relational systems carry their own orders — orders that are not arbitrary but follow a greater logic.