Ontology asks what exists. The answer to this question sounds self-evident, yet it is not. Whoever claims that only the measurable is real has already made an ontological decision that they rarely recognise as a decision. Whoever, by contrast, holds that consciousness, aliveness, and spirit constitute autonomous dimensions of reality stands on different ground. The question of being is not an academic exercise. It determines how an entire culture treats nature, understands the human being, and conducts science.
#What You Take for Reality
Every person operates with an ontology, even if they have never heard the word. The notion that atoms and molecules form the actual reality and that everything else — consciousness, sensation, meaning — is derivable from them is not the result of philosophical scrutiny. It is the result of cultural habituation. One learns it at school, encounters it in the news, breathes it in until it appears as fact.
Aristotle designated this level of reflection as prote philosophia, first philosophy. It asks not about particular things but about what it means for something to be — what substance, cause, and essence mean (Aristotle, Metaphysics, c. 350 BCE). The question sounds abstract. Its consequences are not. Whether a physician understands the body as a machine or as a living whole, whether a physicist takes matter to be the ultimate ground or a manifestation of spirit, whether a society conceives the cosmos as dead space or as an ensouled whole: all of these are ontological prior decisions that pervade all thought and action.
#From Parmenides to Aristotle: The Question of Being
Western ontology begins with a sentence by Parmenides that is at once the most enigmatic and the most consequential in the history of philosophy: Being is; non-being is not. What sounds so simple contains a radical thesis: becoming and perishing are illusion. What truly is can neither arise nor pass away, for from nothing, nothing comes. Parmenides thereby compels thought to decide: do you trust the senses, which show you change, or reason, which tells you that being must be unchangeable?
Plato resolved this contradiction by positing two levels of being: the world of visible things, which arise and pass away, and the world of ideas, which are unchangeable and eternal. Aristotle, in his Metaphysics, contradicted the teacher. He sought the essence of things not in a separated world of ideas but in the things themselves — as ousia, the substance that gives a thing its determinacy. The question “What is being as being?” became the founding principle of a discipline that asks about the most general structures of all that is real.
What happens between Parmenides and Aristotle is more than an academic debate. It is the laying of the Western foundation for thinking about what is real, and a bifurcation into two paths: one that seeks being in ideas, and one that finds it in the concrete shape of things. Both paths still shape how Western culture thinks about reality. The third path — the cosmos as a living whole — fell into the background between them.
#The Invisible Decision of Natural Science
Modern natural science presupposes an ontology that it neither grounds nor names as such. Arthur Schopenhauer already recognised in 1844 where the error lies: “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” (Schopenhauer, 1844, The World as Will and Representation, vol. 2). Matter is posited as the fundamental, without noticing that the knowing subject who performs this positing cannot itself be derived from matter.
Jochen Kirchhoff developed this critique over decades. The foundational ontological assumption of the prevailing science — that everything that exists is ultimately matter and consciousness a by-product of material processes — is not an empirical discovery. It is “bad metaphysics” in the sense that it presents a metaphysical stipulation as empirically secured knowledge (cf. Kirchhoff, J., 1998, Was die Erde will). The natural scientist builds on ontological premises from which he cannot disengage, just as the mathematician has axioms unprovable within his own science. That there must be nothing divine, no meaning, no purposiveness in nature is not a scientific finding but an ontological prior decision.
Schelling saw this connection as early as 1797: the mathematical description of nature offers accuracy but no genuine insight into the essence of nature. Of its inner movement one knows nothing at all. “Nature should be visible spirit, spirit the invisible nature” (Schelling, 1797, Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature). What is formulated here is an ontological counter-thesis: spirit and nature are not two separate spheres but forms of expression of the same reality.
#Living Cosmos or Dead Matter
The question of whether the cosmos is a dead mechanism or a living whole is the foundational ontological question of natural philosophy. It cannot be decided empirically, because every empirical inquiry already presupposes what ontology first asks: what kind of reality belongs to the object of investigation.
Kirchhoff radicalises Schelling’s position: life arises without exception only from life, never from the dead (Kirchhoff, J., 1998, Was die Erde will). The claim that dead matter at some point produced consciousness is a pure fiction, an ideology that passes itself off as science. “If I have consciousness, then the cosmos also has consciousness” (Kirchhoff, J., 2007, Raume, Dimensionen, Weltmodelle). This sentence follows from the analogy model: if the human being, as part of the cosmos, possesses consciousness, then the cosmos as a whole cannot be devoid of consciousness — unless consciousness has arisen from nothing. Since from nothing nothing comes, as Parmenides already formulated, consciousness must be a fundamental trait of reality itself.
Gwendolin Kirchhoff connects the ontological critique with a psychological depth dimension. 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” (Kirchhoff, G., 2024, Vergessene Geister). 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.
#The Choice That Precedes All Research
To engage in ontology means to consciously examine the foundation of one’s own thinking rather than taking it for granted. Epistemology asks how we know. The philosophy of consciousness asks what consciousness is. Ontology lies a level deeper still: it asks what we presuppose when we say “reality.” A culture that does not pose this question builds on premises it does not even recognise as premises.
#Sources
Aristotle. Metaphysics (c. 350 BCE).
Kirchhoff, G. (2024). “Vergessene Geister — Idealismus, Naturphilosophie und die verlorene Tradition” [Video]. https://youtube.com/watch?v=XkN3H7IvWsk.
Kirchhoff, J. (1998). Was die Erde will. Bergisch Gladbach: Gustav Lubbe Verlag.
Kirchhoff, J. (2006). Raume, Dimensionen, Weltmodelle. Drachen Verlag.
Schelling, F. W. J. (1797). Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur. Breitkopf und Hartel.
Schelling, F. W. J. (1800). System des transcendentalen Idealismus. Tubingen: Cotta.
Schopenhauer, A. (1844). Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, vol. 2. Brockhaus.