The word itself tells you: philosophy of nature. Not natural science, which turns nature into an object of measurement, but a way of thinking that asks about the essence of nature itself. The decision whether the cosmos is a dead mechanism or a living whole is not made in the laboratory. It is made in philosophy, and it determines everything that follows.
The Fundamental Question Nobody Asks Anymore
The prevailing natural sciences silently assume that nature is an object that can be fully unlocked through analysis, measurement, and mathematical modelling. This assumption is rarely examined because it is taken for granted. Natural philosophy does not dispute the usefulness of these methods. It disputes the assumption behind them: that nature is something dead, something that can be observed from outside without the observer being part of what is observed.
Schelling formulated the objection in 1797 in his Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature with a sharpness that has lost none of its relevance. The mathematical description of nature, Schelling argued, may offer accuracy but no real insight. It amounts to describing Homer’s works by counting the characters. Of the inner movement, one knows nothing at all. Nature as natura naturans, as inwardly striving, must be understood, or it is no natural science worthy of the name.
Schelling’s Identity, Goethe’s Boundary, Kirchhoff’s Radicalisation
Three thinkers, three approaches to the same problem, and the productive tensions between them belong to the core of what natural philosophy is.
Schelling (1775–1854) conceived the unity of spirit and nature as a philosophical system. Nature is visible spirit; spirit is invisible nature. All rigid being is an illusion; things as such are expressions of inhibited forces, inhibited impulses of will. In reality, solid things do not exist: there is a living, fluctuating something. This has consequences reaching into physics itself. For Schelling, gravity is not mechanical attraction of mass but a manifestation of a will to return to the divine primal substance. The inorganic, in his thesis, is merely negated organism; the dead, merely suppressed life.
Goethe (1749–1832) took the path of direct perception. His Metamorphosis of Plants and his Theory of Colours are philosophical counterpoints to the measuring physics of his time. At the primal phenomenon — the irreducible ground phenomenon — a person must pause rather than press forward in the urge to reduce further. What underlies a phenomenon is itself a phenomenon, not an abstractly traceable quantity. Goethe spoke of anschauende Urteilskraft — intuitive judgement — a mode of knowing in which perceiving and thinking coincide. Nature, he wrote, fills all spaces with its boundless productivity. Modern science, he observed, had developed a bad habit of being abstruse: one distances oneself from common sense without opening a higher one, and when one finally wants to be practical, one suddenly becomes atomistic and mechanical.
Both refuse to penetrate behind phenomena through abstraction. But they differ in their conclusions. For Schelling, nature is a philosophical system that spirit can and must penetrate. Goethe mistrusts precisely this penetration. He pauses at the primal phenomenon, which shows itself but does not want to be explained — an epistemological modesty that honours the visible rather than dissolving it in concepts. Jochen Kirchhoff (1944–2025) crosses this boundary with an ontological claim: life arises exclusively from life, never from dead matter. Nobody has ever observed the opposite; it is a pure assertion of the counter-position, a poor ideology. The living is the ever-present, the fundamental, the irreducible. Kirchhoff thereby radicalises Schelling’s thesis of the inorganic as negated organism and carries natural philosophy into a cosmological dimension that was latent in Schelling but never fully developed.
Knowledge as Participation, Ecology as Consequence
One of the most far-reaching consequences of natural philosophy concerns the relationship between inner and outer life. If the cosmos is living, then human consciousness is not an epiphenomenon of dead matter but participation in a cosmic order. To know something, you must be it yourself: like is known only by like. Life can only know life; spirit can only know spirit.
Kirchhoff draws an ecological consequence from this. The environmental crisis is ultimately a psycho-cosmological crisis. How we view the cosmos, how we position ourselves within it, directly affects how we treat the Earth. A cosmology that assumes monstrous, extreme events in the cosmos inevitably leads to the destruction of the Earth. Inner ecology and outer ecology are inseparable.
The Kogi, an indigenous people of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, articulate the same insight from an entirely different tradition: bad thoughts, words, and intentions physically damage water, trees, and soil. Thinking is not a private matter; it intervenes in the web of life. The convergence between Kirchhoff’s philosophical analysis and Kogi experience is no coincidence. It points to an insight that the mechanistic worldview systematically blocks from view.
A Counter-Current Within the Enlightenment
In the natural philosophy of the Renaissance and Romanticism lies an insufficiently recognised alternative within the Enlightenment itself. It stands in relation to the mechanistic worldview not as a relapse into the pre-modern but as its philosophical critique from within. Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) conceived the cosmos as infinitely ensouled, Jakob Boehme (1575–1624) read in nature the signature of the divine, Novalis (1772–1801), Schelling, Goethe, Kirchhoff: the line is long, and it runs not at the margins of European intellectual history but through its centre.
Novalis drove Goethe’s thought of inner perception into the poetic — and in doing so crossed Goethe’s boundary. To romanticise is a qualitative potentiation: to give the ordinary a mysterious aspect, the familiar the dignity of the unknown, the finite an infinite appearance. Where Goethe pauses at the primal phenomenon, Novalis demands in his Novices of Sais: let nature arise inwardly in its entire sequence. Nature is not explained but inwardly re-enacted — a more radical claim than Goethe’s intuitive judgement, because it seeks not merely to see but to bring forth.
What Natural Philosophy Means for Practice
In philosophical accompaniment, natural philosophy functions as the background that sustains the entire work. It determines how the human being is understood: as part of a living interconnection that carries them and to which they respond. Contextual Disclosure presupposes that invisible premises exist which can be made visible. The Space-Organ presupposes that the human being possesses an inner organ of perception for the living — one that is not metaphor but experience.
Whoever regards the question of whether the cosmos is alive as settled has never truly asked it. Natural philosophy begins where this question opens again — and with it, everything that rests on the answer. Those who wish to think the cosmological dimension further will find in the Cosmic Anthropos the thought that grasps human being and cosmos as structurally identical.
Sources
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