Matthew David Segall

“When Schelling says that “to philosophize about nature means to create nature,” it should not be collapsed into the prima facie quite similar statement by Kant, that “He who would know the world must first manufacture it—in his own self, indeed.” Kant’s approach to the study of nature is grounded in subjective voluntarism, wherein the philosopher fabricates “nature” as his own object according to the transcendentally deduced categories delimiting his experience. Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, on the contrary, re-interprets the epistemic position of the natural scientist: where the post-Kantian scientist can only grasp himself as thinking about nature from beyond nature, Schelling’s scientific method involves awakening to oneself as “nature itself philosophizing (autophusis philosophia)” As Grant describes it, “What thinks in me is what is outside me.” If the Naturphilosoph is able to think as nature, she becomes “a new species equipped with new organs of thought.”
― Matthew David Segall, The Re-Emergence of Schelling: Philosophy in a Time of Emergency