Panpsychism is one of the few positions in contemporary philosophy of consciousness that takes the fundamental problem seriously: that consciousness cannot be derived from unconscious stuff. When one asks why there is “something it is like” to be a living creature — the formulation comes from Thomas Nagel (1974, What Is It Like to Be a Bat?) — one encounters a boundary at which materialist explanations fall silent. Panpsychism responds with a radical thesis: consciousness is not a product of complex neuronal wiring but a fundamental feature of matter itself.
David Chalmers formulated this boundary as the “hard problem of consciousness” (cf. Chalmers, 1996, The Conscious Mind): even if all functional, neuronal, and information-processing descriptions were complete, it would remain unexplained why it feels a certain way to see red, to feel pain, or to think a thought. Panpsychism attempts to bypass this problem by changing the premise: if experience is already present at the most fundamental level, it no longer needs to arise from non-experience.
#A Correct Intuition — and Its Weakness
The intuition of panpsychism is correct: consciousness cannot arise from the unconscious. This insight is shared with the entire natural-philosophical tradition. Schelling formulated it in 1797 as an ontological principle: Nature should be visible spirit, spirit the invisible nature (cf. Schelling, 1797, Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature). For Schelling, the question of how consciousness arises from dead matter is no question at all — it simply does not arise, because the separation of spirit and matter is an abstraction that does not correspond to reality.
Contemporary panpsychism, as represented by Philip Goff (2019, Galileo’s Error), takes up this tradition but stops halfway. It ascribes a “proto-experience” to every physical particle — a tiny, elementary form of interiority. An electron, on this view, has no thoughts and no feelings, but some rudimentary experiential quality. Consciousness as we know it would then be the result of combining countless such micro-experiences.
Here lies the first problem. In philosophy it is called the “combination problem”: how does a unified consciousness arise from billions of tiny experience-fragments? How does the diffuse proto-experiencing of an electron become the experience of a human being who feels pain, hears a Bach fugue, and reflects on their own death? Panpsychism distributes consciousness across everything — and thereby loses the unity of conscious experience.
#What Panpsychism Does Not See
The deeper deficiency of panpsychism lies not in a technical problem but in an ontological blind spot. It conceives consciousness as a property — as something that inheres in things, like mass or charge. The electron “has” proto-experience the way it “has” spin. This way of thinking remains captive to the very framework it seeks to overcome: consciousness is treated as one more physical property, just a strange one.
For natural philosophy in the tradition of Schelling and Kirchhoff, consciousness is not a property that belongs to matter. It is the essence of reality itself. “Everything in the universe is ensouled,” Jochen Kirchhoff quotes Schelling’s fundamental thesis — and adds: “To the organism belongs the organising principle of spirit. The principle of life is omnipresent in the cosmos” (Kirchhoff, J., 2021, Schelling: Genie der Naturphilosophie). This is more than the claim that everything has a bit of experience. It is the claim that the cosmos as a whole is alive and that this aliveness organises itself.
#From Property to Relationship
The decisive step beyond panpsychism lies in the question of whether interiority is merely present or whether it can be contacted. The interiority that panpsychism ascribes to matter is mute. It is there, but it does not speak. An electron, on the panpsychist view, experiences something, but no one can enter into relationship with it.
The natural-philosophical position that Gwendolin Kirchhoff represents claims more: “Nature is something with its own life. And as something with its own life, I can also enter into communication with it. Then it answers me, then I am in dialogue” (Kirchhoff, G., 2024, Was ist Erkenntnis?). Interiority here is not a mute property but something that communicates — in the perception of rightness and wrongness, in the sensing of what a place, a plant, a counterpart expresses.
Schelling recognised this principle already in the mineral kingdom: to the extent that we ourselves fall silent within us, nature speaks to us; even in metals and stones the powerful drive toward determinacy and individuality is unmistakable (cf. Schelling, 1797, Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature). Animism takes exactly this step: it claims not only that everything possesses consciousness but that everything stands in a communicative relationship — a relationship that human consciousness can open through what Jochen Kirchhoff called the space organ.
Novalis expressed the same insight poetically: “Nature would not be nature if it had no spirit, not that unique counter-image of humanity, not the indispensable answer to this mysterious question, or the question to this infinite answer” (Novalis, 1802, Die Lehrlinge zu Sais). Nature and the human being stand in a relationship of question and answer — not in the relation of an observer to a mute object to which one theoretically ascribes consciousness.
#Why Panpsychism Still Matters
The rediscovery of panpsychism in academic philosophy — through Chalmers, Goff, Strawson, and others — is a sign that the materialist paradigm is failing on its own questions. The attempt to derive consciousness from neuronal complexity has, after decades of intensive research, produced no satisfying answer. That philosophers today seriously consider whether electrons might have experience reveals the depth of the crisis.
Yet the solution does not lie in expanding the framework of materialism by adding one more property to it. The solution lies in a different framework. Natural philosophy offers it: a cosmos that does not consist of dead particles to which one retroactively ascribes experience, but that is alive from the start — pervaded by a spirit that the human being does not generate but in which they participate. The mind-body problem is not resolved by refining the premises but by revising the worldview.
Whoever thinks panpsychism further arrives at a decision: is interiority an abstract attribute of matter or a living reality that one can encounter? Natural philosophy chooses the latter — and thereby opens a dimension that panpsychism senses but does not enter.
#Sources
Chalmers, D. (1996). The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. Oxford University Press.
Goff, P. (2019). Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness. Pantheon Books.
Kirchhoff, G. (2019). “Was ist Erkenntnis?” [Video]. Gwendolin Kirchhoff, YouTube. https://youtube.com/watch?v=msqlr1nZLuA.
Kirchhoff, J. (2021). “Schelling: Genie der Naturphilosophie” [Video]. Jochen Kirchhoff — In Memoriam, YouTube. https://youtube.com/watch?v=Hw-jL1EER5Q.
Nagel, T. (1974). “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” The Philosophical Review, 83(4), pp. 435—450.
Novalis (1802). Die Lehrlinge zu Sais. In: Schriften.
Schelling, F. W. J. (1797). Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur.
Schelling, F. W. J. (1798). Von der Weltseele.