After higher secondary schooling Abitur at the Gymnasium Schwertstraße in Solingen, Precht did his alternative service as a parish worker.

From 2002 to 2004 he was a columnist of Literaturen, a sophisticated intellectual literary magazine, and from 2005 to 2008 he was freelance moderator of Tageszeichen, a broadcast program of WDR.

In 1999, Precht together with his brother Georg Jonathan wrote the detective Bildungsroman Das Schiff im Noor.

The novel opens in year 1985 and uses the Danish island Lilleö (in reality: Ærø) as a backdrop for a complicated web of analogies and motives, for example the relation between theology and policework.

The novel Die Kosmonauten from 2002 deals with the love story and finding of identity of Georg and Rosalie in their late twenties where they had got to know each other in Cologne and shortly afterwards moved together to Berlin in the post-reunification period 1990–91.

Parallel to this story, Precht recounts in short the tragic destiny of Sergei Krikalev, the last cosmonaut of the Soviet Union.

In 2005, Precht published his autobiographical book Lenin kam nur bis zum Lüdenscheid – Meine kleine deutsche Revolution in which he recalls from a child's perspective his childhood in the 1970s within a leftwing family who stands close to the party DKP.

The book received numerously positive critics and it was filmed with the support of WDR, SWR and the Filmstiftung Nordrhein-Westfalen.

Originally planned as an introduction to philosophy for young people, Precht's most successful work, the non-fiction Wer bin ich – und wenn ja, wie viele?

Precht deals with the question of moral at first (philosophical and evolutionary) and comes to the conclusion that humans have a relatively high need to be in tune with themselves and also to consider themselves well.

In the second moral-psychological part however, he examines numerous strategies by which people trick themselves by repressing, replacing, comparing or feeling not to be responsible.

He criticizes the renunciation of politics to the regulatory policy in the economy, pleads for more civic commitment and for a transformation of democracy by new forms of citizen participation and co-partnership.

Visiting the main sights of Berlin with his son Oskar, Precht gives a historic city outline while discussing the big topics of ethics, aesthetics and consciousness.

He stands philosophically close to the American communitarianism, the idea of democratizing society with a higher civic sense of community.

Most notably, during the first days of the invasion in early March 2022, he had concluded on multiple occasions that Ukraine could not win the war and despite having the right of self-defense, should have the wisdom to know when to surrender.