World-immanent interiority challenges a conviction the modern person takes for granted: that they possess an inner world that is private, sealed off, and connected to the external world only through sense organs and nerve pathways. This notion is the result of a philosophical turning that took place in the seventeenth century and has since sunk so deeply into our thinking that it is scarcely recognisable as a decision. The counter-position holds: the cosmos itself possesses interiority, and human consciousness is not an isolated private chamber but participation in this cosmic dimension.
#The Cartesian Split and Its Consequences
René Descartes separated reality in the Discours de la méthode (1637) into two substances: res cogitans, the thinking thing, and res extensa, the extended thing. Mind here, matter there. What follows is not a merely academic distinction but a transformation of the entire experience of the world. Animals become machines. Nature becomes an object of measurement. And the interiority of the human being shrinks to the private property of an isolated subject sitting behind its eyes and gazing out at a mindless external world.
Gwendolin Kirchhoff makes the consequences of this split precisely visible in the Everlast AI Debate (2026): Descartes defined animals as mechanical automata, and what followed was vivisection. When a dog is cut open alive and makes noises, “it squeaks like a machine. It does not suffer the moment we define something as non-suffering or as a machine” (cf. Kirchhoff, G., 2026, Everlast AI Debate, [79:19]). The ontological decision to determine something as devoid of interiority justifies the destructive grasp. This applies to animals, to ecosystems, to the human body.
#What “World-Immanent” Means
The term draws a boundary on two sides. Against materialism, which treats interiority as an epiphenomenon of neural processes — something that does not truly belong to the world but merely occurs as a by-product. And against dualism, which acknowledges interiority but detaches it from the world and relocates it to a worldless beyond.
World-immanent means: within the world, not behind it and not alongside it. Interiority is not the property of a separated mind looking at nature from outside. It pervades reality itself. Kirchhoff states in the debate: “This world-immanent interiority is far more complex than it is represented by this philosophy or by this reductive metaphysics. And the fact that this complex interiority is defended, because it represents a real phenomenon, I consider by no means cheap or projective, but very necessary” (cf. Kirchhoff, G., 2026, Everlast AI Debate, [78:40]).
The defence is directed against two reductions at once: against the materialist claim that interiority is “merely subjective,” and against the idealist claim that it is worldless. What Kirchhoff defends is a third position: interiority as a real phenomenon within the cosmos.
#Schelling, Schopenhauer, and the German Metaphysics of Will
This third position has philosophical predecessors. Schelling formulated the guiding principle in 1797: nature shall be the visible mind, mind the invisible nature (cf. Schelling, 1797, Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur, Breitkopf und Härtel). This is not a metaphor. It is an ontological thesis: mind and nature are not two separate spheres but expressions of the same reality. Schelling’s Von der Weltseele (1798) makes the cosmological claim explicit. The cosmos is not dead matter that at some point gives rise to mind, but an ensouled whole in which the living is what is primordial.
Schopenhauer radicalised this thought. The world has an inside, and that inside is called will. The German metaphysics of will — from Meister Eckhart through Jakob Böhme and Spinoza to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche — names the inner dimension of all natural processes. Through the analogy of one’s own will, the human being gains access to the interior of the world (cf. Kirchhoff, J., 2022, Nietzsche as Critic of Science, [89:25]). This is the decisive epistemological step: not the distanced gaze discloses reality, but the sensing, feeling being-in-contact with it.
#The Human Being as Double Being
Jochen Kirchhoff unfolds the consequence of this tradition. The human being is a double being with inner world and outer world. This polarity is not psychological but ontological: the inner world possesses its own reality of consciousness with its own laws, “a different physics” (cf. Kirchhoff, J., 2024, Outer World Inner World, [05:33]). The human being mediates between both worlds and carries both within. The boundary between inside and outside is in principle not always determinable.
This has far-reaching consequences. When you speak of interiority, you probably mean something private — something that belongs only to you and to which no one else has access. Kirchhoff’s position says something different: your interiority is a segment of a cosmic interiority. It does not belong to you alone. It belongs to the world. What you bring as consciousness, as perception, as inner experience, is participation in a dimension that belongs to the cosmos as a whole. Gwendolin Kirchhoff puts this thesis in a nutshell in the debate: “What animism really means is that an interiority exists in the world that is contactable by human consciousness, that communicates itself” (cf. Kirchhoff, G., 2026, Everlast AI Debate, [90:41]).
#Consciousness as Cosmological Category
The standard scientific position treats consciousness as the product of highly complex neural networking: no brain, no consciousness. Kirchhoff reverses the relationship. Consciousness is not the result of material complexity but a living effective force in the cosmos. Thoughts are not merely subjective events but forces that are fed into the cosmic field of consciousness and produce real effects (cf. Kirchhoff, J., 2023, Novalis: the Poet as Philosopher, [69:55]). This presupposes that the cosmos itself is a space of consciousness.
Gwendolin Kirchhoff grounds this reversal with the analogy model: since the human being lives and is conscious as part of the cosmos, they may “attribute life and consciousness to the cosmos as a whole” (cf. Kirchhoff, G., 2026, Everlast AI Debate, [160:43]). The counter-proposal — deriving everything from the machine metaphor — is “a far, far greater metaphysical leap” than the analogical inference from one’s own consciousness to the whole. Whoever claims that consciousness arises from dead matter claims a leap from nothing. Whoever claims that consciousness is cosmological infers from the part to the whole — and this inference is far better grounded in the history of philosophy.
#What Follows from the Denial
World-immanent interiority is not a specialist problem of the philosophy department. The question of whether the cosmos possesses interiority determines how a society treats the living. Kirchhoff speaks of a “psycho-cosmological crisis”: how we regard the cosmos affects how we treat the earth. A cosmology that assumes purely mechanical processes destroys what it looks upon (cf. Kirchhoff, J., 1998, Was die Erde will). Inner ecology and outer ecology are inseparable.
Whoever declares the cosmos devoid of interiority becomes isolated. This isolation is not merely subjectively felt but ontologically produced: a human being in a dead cosmos has nothing with which to enter into relationship except other human beings and the things they use. The space-organ, the faculty through which the human being perceives living space, atrophies when there is nothing living left to sense. The Cosmic Anthropos, the full unfolding of humanness in relation to all layers of being, becomes unreachable when those layers themselves are declared non-existent.
#Sources
Kirchhoff, G. (2026). “Everlast AI Debate: Gwendolin Kirchhoff vs. Joscha Bach” [video/debate].
Kirchhoff, J. (1998). Was die Erde will. Bergisch Gladbach: Gustav Lübbe Verlag.
Kirchhoff, J. (2006). Räume, Dimensionen, Weltmodelle. Klein Jasedow: Drachen Verlag.
Kirchhoff, J. (2024). “Außenwelt Innenwelt — Das Doppelwesen Mensch” [video].
Schelling, F. W. J. (1797). Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur. Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel.
Schelling, F. W. J. (1798). Von der Weltseele. Hamburg: Friedrich Perthes.