Schelling’s Depotentiated Philosopher: Thinking Nature without the Human

This essay concerns the transfiguration of philosophical reason outside of life—something which I take to be a defining feature of Schelling’s philosophy of nature, at least during one short period from 1800 to 1801. I reconstruct Schelling’s talk of an anti-anthropocentric philosophy achieved through a naturephilosophical epochē. In the first half of the essay, I sketch Schelling’s image of the philosopher of nature as it emerges during a short-lived moment in his intellectual journey—a moment that lasts, perhaps, three to four months from late 1800 to early 1801. What Schelling offers during these few months is an account of the impossible possibility of anti-anthropocentric thinking—a series of reflections on who the philosopher of nature must (but cannot) become to think nature without the human. In the second half of the essay, I expand on the practices of the depotentiated philosopher and, in particular, the ways in which depotentiated thinking, speaking and writing differ from their anthropocentric counterparts.