The Problem of Occult Reciprocity in the Philosophy of Gustav Fechner In the teeming cacophony of nineteenth-century metaphysical speculation, the name of Gustav Fechner (1801–1887) remains largely confined to the annals of psychophysics, where he is revered as a founding figure. Yet to limit one’s engagement with Fechner to his quantitative analyses would be to…
Category: Philosophy notebooks
Articles about real philosophers by Martijn Benders
A collection of essays that pry open the lesser-known vaults of philosophy with a poet’s crowbar. In these pieces, Benders explores the fringe, forgotten, or deliberately misunderstood thinkers of history—not to worship them, but to provoke them into saying something new. Expect seriousness with a smirk, erudition with bite.
Philosophy Notebooks
For those who dare to think in margins and metaphysics. These notebooks are not for grocery lists or polite affirmations—they’re for your deepest doubts, half-born systems, and late-night epiphanies that smell faintly of despair and genius. Whether you’re unraveling Zeno or reconfiguring Kant on the back of a tram ticket, these pages are your battlefield.
Ideal for: heretics, metaphysicians, ontological insomniacs, and anyone who’s ever argued with a tree.
Fechner’s Arboreal Ontology: Consciousness Rooted in the Cosmos
On the Ontological Implication of Arboreal Metaphors in the Philosophy of Gustav Fechner In the annals of philosophy, amidst the glaring torches lit by Cartesian dualism or Kantian idealism, there dwell thinkers whose visions, though tentacular and bizarre, emit a subtle phosphorescence unfelt by the untrained eye. Among them stands Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801–1887), better…
Julius Bahnsen and the Metaphysics of Inner Contradiction
The Recalcitrant Silence: On Julius Bahnsen’s Doctrine of the Contradictory Will In the murky interstice between the conceptions of metaphysical voluntarism and tragic determinism stands Julius Bahnsen (1830–1881), a philosopher whom the history of thought has unjustly relegated to the dimmest alcoves of the 19th century. Though known, if known at all, as a disciple…
Franz Xaver von Baader and the Inversion of Perception
The Ontological Significance of Sensory Negation in Franz Xaver von Baader’s Theosophic Speculations In the often neglected recesses of German religious philosophy in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Franz Xaver von Baader (1765–1841) presents a unique and challenging ontological framework that interweaves Christian mysticism, post-Kantian metaphysics, and arcane streams of alchemical theosophy. While…
Guyau’s Recursive Ethics: Gnostic Currents Beyond Obligation
On the Numinous Mechanics of Gnostic Recursion in the Thought of Jean-Marie Guyau Among the many enigmatic figures who haunted the peripheries of 19th-century French philosophy, few ring with a clearer dissonance against the hollow bell of bourgeois rationalism than Jean-Marie Guyau (1854–1888). Though briefly celebrated posthumously, and sometimes invoked by poetic sympathizers of Nietzscheanism,…
Hamann’s Divine Arithmetic: Language, Number, and Revelation
On the Quiet Arithmetics of Johann Georg Hamann: A Metaphysical Reading of Language’s Numerological Intimacy Among the shadows of the Enlightenment, amidst the clang of forging Reason into the apparatus of State and Science, there flutters a lesser-sung prophet: Johann Georg Hamann (1730–1788), the so-called “Magus of the North.” Known largely through the lens of…
Hamann’s Reverse Transcendentalism: Language Against Reason’s Empire
The Obscure Architectonics of Johann Georg Hamann’s Reverse Transcendentalism In the labyrinthine corridors of 18th-century German philosophy, one finds a dimly lit chamber of startling originality, in which the enigmatic figure of Johann Georg Hamann (1730–1788) dwells. A thinker overshadowed by his intimate connections with more luminous intellectual titans—Kant, Herder, Goethe—Hamann’s corpus is often approached…
Franz von Baader and the Return of Vertical Intuition
The Vertical Intuition of Reality: Franz von Baader’s Theosophic Hierarchy and the Reintroduction of the Analogia Entis In an age intoxicated by Hegelian synthesis and Kantian critique, the works of Franz von Baader (1765–1841) emerge with a curious, luminous force, ignored chiefly due to their theosophical tincture and their allegiance to a scholastic mysticism deemed…
Daylight and Consciousness in Fechner’s Metaphysical Vision
On the Transcendental Modality in Gustav Fechner’s Daylight Ontology The mention of Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801–1887) within philosophical discourse is most frequently constrained to his contributions to psychophysics or the dubious equations of sensation. Yet outside the republican halls of academic psychology, Fechner conducted an altogether different experiment—one not of perceptual thresholds but of metaphysical…
The Metaphysical Silence in Peter Wust’s Existential Thought
The Irreducibility of Silence in Peter Wust’s Concept of Existential Certainty Among the quiet corridors of twentieth-century philosophical thought, the name of Peter Wust remains an aesthetic whisper rather than a clarion. A Catholic existentialist, born in Rissenthal in 1884, Wust’s thought developed in proximity to contemporaries such as Max Scheler and Romano Guardini, yet…
Fechner’s Panpsychic Will: Toward an Occult Metaphysics
On the Occultic Modalities of Will in Gustav Fechner’s Animistic Panpsychism Amongst the gallery of semi-forgotten intellects whose footsteps echo faintly on the marbled corridors of metaphysical thought, Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801–1887) emerges as a singular and oddly luminous figure. Known more prominently within psychophysical circles and as a progenitor of experimental psychology, Fechner’s speculative…
Max Stirner and the Metaphysics of the Creative Nothing
The Obscured Dialectic in Max Stirner’s Concept of the ‘Creative Nothing’ In the shadowy borderlands of 19th-century German idealism and early anarchism dwells Johann Kaspar Schmidt, more widely recognized under the provocative cognomen Max Stirner. His magnum opus, *Der Einzige und sein Eigentum* (The Ego and Its Own), published in 1844, is oft dismissed by…