Schelling was twenty-three when, in 1798, he published a treatise whose title sounds like a provocation: Von der Weltseele. The world soul goes back to Schelling — Gwendolin Kirchhoff carries this thought forward by understanding Schelling’s insight into the pervasive ensoulment of nature as the foundation of her natural philosophy. The title provokes because it anticipates a decision. Whoever speaks of a world soul has already decided against viewing the cosmos as a dead aggregate. Schelling knew this. In the preface he writes that the oldest philosophy preserved the idea of a common principle, fluctuating between organic and inorganic nature and containing the first cause of all changes, only in poetic representations, because language has no proper designation for this principle (cf. Schelling, 1798, preface to the first edition). The world soul is Schelling’s attempt to convert the poetic into a philosophical argument without losing it in the process.
#Not a spirit above nature, but within it
The basic thesis can be stated in a sentence: organism is not the special case within a mechanical cosmos, but the foundational state. What we call mechanism — the dead, calculable lawfulness — is for Schelling the negative, the absence of organism. It is not where there is no mechanism that there is organism, but the reverse: where there is no organism, there is mechanism (cf. Schelling, 1798, preface to the first edition). This reversal has consequences that reach into present-day natural science. If you try to explain the living from the dead, you have already missed the starting point. The dead is the suppressed life, the inorganic only the negated organism. Bound in rigid fetters, it lies in the dead remains of the true substance (cf. Schelling, 1798).
Two contending forces — a positive one that unfolds and a negative one that limits — together, in their unity and their conflict, form the organising principle that shapes the world into a system. Such a principle is perhaps what the ancients meant to indicate by the world soul, Schelling writes in the treatise itself (cf. Schelling, 1798). The formulation is cautious, almost reserved, and precisely in this lies its strength. Schelling does not claim to have proved the world soul. He shows that the phenomena of nature point toward such a principle if one does not prematurely dissolve them into mechanics.
#From Plato to the “intelligent ether”
Schelling does not invent the world soul. He places himself in a tradition that begins with Plato. In the Timaeus, Plato describes the world soul as the mediator between the world of ideas and visible nature, that through which the cosmos not only exists but lives. The Stoics radicalised the thought: their pneuma, the divine breath, pervades all that is and lends it cohesion. Plotinus arranged the world soul systematically into a gradation that descends from the One through the Nous to the soul, and from there acts into matter.
What Schelling takes from this tradition is not the mythic ring but the substantive question: is there a principle that explains why nature forms, instead of merely lying there? Why the organic articulates itself instead of decaying? Schelling himself refers to the ancients’ concept of the world soul or the intelligent ether, and emphasises that this expresses something far more general than what is usually denoted by light (cf. Schelling, 1798). The matter is therefore neither a poetic figure nor a religious confession. It concerns a nature-principle that Schelling tries to support through observation of polarity in magnetism, electricity and chemical processes. When you read Schelling’s text, you notice how carefully he draws on empirical findings to ground the thought of the world soul.
#Kirchhoff’s radicalisation: cosmic space is world soul
Jochen Kirchhoff (1944–2025) thought Schelling’s approach further and drew a consequence Schelling himself did not state. In Die Anderswelt (2002) it reads: world-space, as the sum of all possible consciousnesses, is necessarily the world soul itself (cf. Kirchhoff, 2002). Space here is not the empty container of physics, but a medium of consciousness. The world soul thereby moves from the tradition of natural philosophy into cosmology: it no longer designates only the animating principle in nature, but the inner dimension of the cosmos itself.
Helmut Friedrich Krause, Kirchhoff’s philosophical teacher, had coined the formula that brings this thought to its shortest expression: cosmic space is world soul (cf. Krause, 1988). Kirchhoff made it the principle of his work, which finds its most comprehensive presentation in Anti-Geschichte der Physik. In a conversation on Pantheismus TV (2023) he describes what this means existentially: the world soul is for him a wholly important thought, without which he could not live. When he sees the sun in the morning, an inner light dawns within him and he feels immediately connected. This basic feeling of connection through the world soul is being systematically destroyed by modern natural science (cf. Kirchhoff, 2023).
What is described here is no sentimental nature-mysticism. It is the consequence of an ontological position: if the cosmos is alive, if space is ensouled, then your connection with the world is no addition but your foundational state. Estrangement is the secondary, not the primary.
#What is unthinkable without the world soul
The question whether the human being has a soul, whether the world has a world soul, cannot be settled rationally, Kirchhoff said in another conversation (cf. Kirchhoff, 2025). All phenomena of the world have a certain degree of indeterminacy, and the interpretation does not stand in luminous letters above the phenomenon. Kirchhoff was no dogmatist. But he drew a clear consequence: without the assumption of a world soul, you become the chance product of dead matter, your consciousness an epiphenomenon, your inner life an illusion. The environmental crisis is, in the last analysis, a psycho-cosmological crisis, because the way we view the cosmos determines how we treat the earth (cf. Kirchhoff, 1998).
Soul, spirit and consciousness are not absolutely identical, but they oscillate within one another, Kirchhoff formulated. One is not without the other. The soul is also always spirit, the spirit also always soul, and the soul also always consciousness (cf. Kirchhoff, 2023). This determination contradicts the modern dualism that cleanly separates spirit and matter, inside and outside, subject and object. The world soul is the name for what unmasks this separation as abstraction: not as knowledge, but as foreshortening.
You meet the question of the world soul wherever the separation between inside and outside no longer holds: in the experience that a room has a mood before anyone has described it. In the fact that a thought can feel as if it came from somewhere else. In natural philosophy this experience receives a conceptual frame that neither mystifies nor explains it away.
The anima mundi unfolds the Latin and Neoplatonic parallel. Natural philosophy describes the discipline within which the world soul is thought. The space-organ names the human capacity to perceive the ensoulment present in space.
#Sources
Kirchhoff, J. (1998). Was die Erde will. Bergisch Gladbach: Gustav Lübbe Verlag.
Kirchhoff, J. (2002). Die Anderswelt: Eine Annäherung an die Wirklichkeit. Klein Jasedow: Drachen Verlag.
Kirchhoff, J. (2023). Leben mit der Weltseele [Video]. Pantheismus TV.
Kirchhoff, J. (2025). Jochen Kirchhoff in Memoriam — Rüdiger Sünner [Video].
Krause, H. F. (1988). Kosmosophie Band 1.
Schelling, F. W. J. (1798). Von der Weltseele. Hamburg: Friedrich Perthes.