Biography

Scientific-Philosophical Biography of 2026

Reflexivity Press has published a scientific-philosophical biography by Kai Froeb, which makes a presentation of Johannes Heinrichs’ intellectual journey at this point both unnecessary and yet enables the following brief overview.

Life

Johannes Heinrichs (* September 17, 1942 in Rheinhausen, now Duisburg) is a philosopher and semiotician.

After graduating from the Municipal Natural Science Gymnasium in Rheinhausen, Johannes Heinrichs entered the Jesuit novitiate at Eringerfeld Castle in 1962. From 1964, he began undergraduate studies in philosophy at the Jesuit College of Philosophy in Pullach in the Isar Valley, which he completed in 1967 with a Philosophical Licentiate. Heinrichs worked there as a tutor (assistant) until 1970, alongside philosophical studies at the University of Munich. In 1970, with a scholarship from the German Academic Scholarship Foundation, he went first to the Hegel Archive in Bochum to prepare his Hegel dissertation “The Logic of the ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’” and received his doctorate in 1972 from Klaus Hartmann in Bonn (summa cum laude; second reviewer Gerhart Schmidt). For this work he received the Geffrub Prize of the University of Bonn in 1973. After a diploma in theology at the Philosophical-Theological College of Sankt Georgen in Frankfurt am Main, ordination to the priesthood in Frankfurt’s St. Bartholomew’s Cathedral in 1974, and research studies in Paris, he completed his habilitation in 1975 at the same college with state recognition. His habilitation achievements included, in addition to his aforementioned Hegel book, the script for the lecture on Social Philosophy, which appeared in print in 1976 under the title “Reflection as a Social System” as a reflection-system theory of society and partially in revised form in 2005 under the title “Logic of the Social. How Society Emerges”.

From 1975 he taught philosophy, especially social philosophy, at the Frankfurt College. He engaged with Catholic social teaching in a novel way, in close personal contact with its doyen Oswald von Nell-Breuning. However, in 1977 he gradually left the Jesuit order due to fundamental criticism of the institutionalized church, thereby giving up his chair. After a transitional period as Spiritual Rector and lecturer at the Catholic Academy for Adult Education (autumn 1978 to spring 1981), he switched from the Roman Catholic to the Old Catholic Church in 1981, but left it again in 1983.

In 1981/82 he held a chair substitution for Kant research at the University of Bonn, thereafter despite numerous applications for a “secular” philosophy professorship only teaching and research assignments (including from the German Research Foundation), which he attributes to the concordat conditions at German-speaking universities, i.e., specifically to the right of church-dependent professors to participate in appointment procedures. From 1998 to 2002, within the framework of a foundation professorship of the Schweisfurth Foundation, he succeeded the deceased GDR dissident Rudolf Bahro at Humboldt University with a guest professorship for social ecology. Today Heinrichs lives as a writer (more than 40 philosophical books, 170 partly academic, partly popular articles and a 2023 autobiography The Right Not to Lie, several poetry volumes) and lecturer in Duisburg and Berlin, sometimes in Auroville, South India. He taught through guest lectures and presentations around the world and was a member of various philosophical and cultural-political societies.

Since 2001 married to Christel Cleve-Heinrichs. Living partly in Duisburg, partly in Berlin for family reasons.

Heinrichs continues to publish as a free philosophical writer with undiminished vigor to this day. His works have found international recognition: The book “Revolution of Democracy” was translated into Bulgarian, the “Democracy Manifesto” into Russian. Significant are the translations “Integral Philosophy” (ibidem-Verlag, Stuttgart 2018, together with Columbia University Press, New York), “Diamonds of Integral Philosophy” (Edition Prisma, Auroville/India) and “Value-levels-democracy” (Edition Prisma, Auroville 2018).

“Reflexivity Press” plans to translate and distribute important books by Johannes Heinrichs, especially new publications from 2025 onwards, into English, Spanish, Portuguese and French.

Reflection as a Way of Life

Heinrichs’ philosophical work is not academic glass bead game, but the existential expression of a way of life. Reflection, understood as dialogical relationality in all its forms, permeates thinking and acting, theory and practice. It concerns a “lived reflection” that proves itself in personal existence as well as in the shaping of the social.

Autobiography 2023

The Right Not to Lie. The Ex-Jesuit in autobiographical interview about sexual hypocrisy, state church system and academic discourse disease, Europabuch Verlag, Berlin - Rome 2023, 500 pages. (Reviews on Amazon.)

A new edition of this book, rather misplaced in the Europabuch Verlag, is in preparation at “Reflexivity Press” (São Martinho, Portugal).