Biography

An Introduction to His Work and Path of Thought

What Johannes Heinrichs discovered and where to begin reading him is shown in Kai Froeb’s book Die Entdeckung Johannes Heinrichs (Reflexivity Press, 2026; in German). Heinrichs tells his own path of thought in the appendix to his autobiography Das Recht nicht zu lügen. What follows is a brief outline of his life.

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 (Geffrub-Förderpreis) of the Friends and Sponsors 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.

From 1975 he taught philosophy, especially social philosophy, at the Frankfurt College. The script of his lecture course on social philosophy appeared in part in 1976 under the title “Reflection as a Social System” as a reflection-system theory of society and in revised form in 2005 under the title “Logic of the Social. How Society Emerges”. 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 summer 1981), during which he worked out his theories of action and of language under a research grant from the German Research Foundation, he switched from the Roman Catholic to the Old Catholic Church in 1981, but left it again at the end of 1983.

From 1981 to 1982 he served for three semesters as acting holder of the Chair of Kant Research at the University of Bonn. Thereafter, despite numerous applications for a “secular” philosophy professorship, he received only teaching assignments at the University of Bonn and research commissions (including from the Schweisfurth 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 has given talks and guest lectures in Europe and India 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 2019).

“Reflexivity Press” publishes his books in German as page-identical editions; the two most recent, Dialektik als Reflexionslogik and Das kosmische Kaleidoskop, will also appear in English and Japanese.

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 has been published by Reflexivity Press (São Martinho do Porto, Portugal).