In the chapter “Von den Hinterweltlern” (“On Believers in a World Behind”), the “believers in a world behind” (Hinterweltler) represent people who in differing forms posit some deeper, truer, or more “real” realm behind the sensory, changing, embodied world.

This tradition encompasses a range of thinkers who posited a reality more fundamental than the world of immediate experience. Socrates represents the beginning of rationalist tendencies that distrust sensory experience in favor of abstract reasoning through dialectical inquiry. Plato exemplifies this approach most clearly with his theory of Forms, which presents a metaphysical realm of eternal ideas as more real than the material world. Pythagoras embodies an obsession with mathematical harmony and eternal numbers that denies change and material existence. Christianity, particularly in Paul’s formulation, constitutes a moralized intensification of this dualism, establishing a cosmic hierarchy where heavenly truth remains superior to earthly life. Augustine demonstrates the Platonic-Christian synthesis through his inward turn toward the soul to locate divine truth while devaluing worldly existence. Descartes exemplifies mind-body dualism and the cogito, which privileges thought over embodied experience. Kant preserves metaphysical absolutism through his concept of the thing-in-itself and categorical moral law, maintaining hidden absolutes behind appearances. Schopenhauer, despite his pessimism, retains the “world behind” structure through his irrational Will as ultimate reality. Hegel constructs a teleological system where history unfolds according to absolute Spirit, presenting reality as fundamentally rational and meaningful. Even scientists and positivists like Newton and Comte assume hidden structures and laws that reality must conform to, treating their rational schemes as metaphysical foundations rather than useful tools for understanding experience.