The Difference Between Fichte's and Schelling's System of Philosophy

Hegel's first philosophical book prises apart two systems his contemporaries took for one — Fichte's, and that of his friend Schelling.

by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel228 passages held

German, the original language

Original title: Differenz des Fichteschen und Schellingschen Systems der Philosophie
First published: 1801(aged 31)
Original language: German

Report a rights issue

Overview

Karl Leonhard Reinhold, one of the first popularisers of Kant, took it for granted that Fichte and Schelling taught one and the same philosophy, and in the first number of his Beyträge, a new series surveying the state of philosophy at the turn of the century, he wrote as if they did. Hegel had come to Jena in 1801 to join Schelling, his friend from their seminary years, and held no university post. He answered Reinhold at once: the preface is dated July 1801, the essay came out that year with the Jena bookseller Seidler, and in August he defended the theses that let him teach. Its claim is that the two systems part at the root. Fichte had rebuilt Kant from the self outward, so that nature appears only as the self's limit; Schelling set nature beside the self as a second, equal expression of one absolute, and only that, Hegel argued, completes what Kant began. Before the comparison comes the passage readers now return to most. Philosophy becomes necessary, Hegel wrote, when the forces that held a culture together fail and its opposites — mind and matter, faith and reason — harden into separate camps; its work is to bring them back into living relation, not to rank them. A closing section mocks Reinhold's newest cause, the plan to reduce all philosophy to logic, which he had taken from Christoph Gottfried Bardili, a logician and Schelling's cousin. The book made Hegel's name, but as Schelling's follower, and the label stayed on him for years.

Key concepts

What does Hegel mean by 'the need of philosophy'?

It is the situation that calls philosophy into being: a life split into opposites that have lost their living connection. Hegel's examples are pairs that once carried all of people's interests, such as mind and matter, soul and body, faith and understanding. When each side stands alone and claims to be absolute, people feel the split as a need, and philosophy is the attempt to answer it.

How are understanding and reason different in this book?

Understanding is the power that separates: it fixes things into clear, limited opposites and keeps them apart. Reason is the power that sees how those opposites belong to one whole. Hegel does not despise understanding, since every thought needs its clear distinctions, but left to itself it raises a whole building of limits between people and the absolute.

What is a 'subject-object', and why are there two?

A subject-object is Hegel's shorthand for a reality in which knower and known are the same. Fichte's self, which knows itself, is one: a subjective subject-object, where everything is seen from the side of the mind. Schelling's nature, alive and organising itself, is the other: an objective subject-object. Hegel argues that philosophy needs both sides, each a complete science in its own right.

What does Hegel mean by speculation?

Speculation is reason turned on itself, grasping opposites together instead of choosing between them. It has nothing to do with guesswork. Hegel sets it beside art: both, he writes, are a kind of worship, a living beholding of the life of the whole and a being one with it. Where common sense sees two things, mind here and world there, speculation sees one reality appearing twice.

Why does Hegel mock the demand to ground philosophy before starting?

Reinhold, an early popularizer of Kant, wanted a first principle secured before any real philosophy began. Hegel mocks a love of truth risen so high that even the step into the temple must first be founded and grounded. His point is that a philosophy proves itself as a whole, where beginning and end support each other like the centre and the circle, not by a first step fixed in advance.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Why a divided age needs philosophy

When does a culture need philosophy at all? Hegel's answer is that it needs it when the bonds holding its life together give way, and its opposites harden into rival camps.

Philosophy arises from division, Hegel argues: once the power of unification vanishes from people's lives, mind and matter, faith and understanding, freedom and necessity stand apart as fixed opposites. The understanding, which separates and sets limits, cannot mend this; it only builds its house of limits higher. Reason's task is to bring the opposites back into living relation. It does not abolish division, which belongs to life, but shows that the fullest wholeness is restored out of the deepest separation. Every philosophy that achieves this, in any age, has reached the one truth.

reason
absolute
reflection
understanding
opposition
totality
finitude
infinity
antinomy
speculation
speculative philosophy
philosophical method
knowledge
synthesis

Enter a dialogue

Nature as a limit, or nature as a partner

Is nature only the wall a thinking self runs into, or a second face of the same reality? The comparison turns on how much standing the world outside the mind is given.

Fichte, on Hegel's reading, starts from the self positing itself and never gets back out: nature stays a mere barrier, dead and opposed, and the unity of self and world is only demanded, striven for without end. Hegel calls this a subjective subject-object. Schelling adds an objective one, a philosophy of nature that shows nature as living and self-organising, equal in rank to the science of the mind. Only the two together complete what Kant began. The same flaw returns in Fichte's ideal state, where the police must watch every act.

idealism
self-consciousness
subjectivity
objectivity
subject-object relation
subject-object
identity
absolute identity
nature
philosophy of nature
transcendental idealism
transcendental philosophy
philosophical systems
freedom
consciousness
causality

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held: 228
distinct concepts: 232
by passages held, corpus-wide: #320

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “absolute” and “reason”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 28 pairings. 77 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
absolute	reason	17
absolute	reflection	11
idealism	nature	10
freedom	nature	9
identity	self-consciousness	9
reason	reflection	9
nature	reason	6
freedom	reason	5
freedom	reflection	5
idealism	reason	5
idealism	self-consciousness	5
identity	reason	5
identity	reflection	5
nature	self-consciousness	5
absolute	freedom	4
absolute	identity	4
absolute	nature	4
absolute	self-consciousness	4
freedom	self-consciousness	4
nature	reflection	4
reflection	self-consciousness	4
absolute	idealism	3
freedom	idealism	3
identity	nature	3
freedom	identity	2
idealism	reflection	2
reason	self-consciousness	2
idealism	identity	1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1801 The Difference Between Fichte's and Schelling's System of Philosophy (Differenz des Fichteschen und Schellingschen Systems der Philosophie) you are here DE
1802 Faith and Knowledge (Glauben und Wissen)
Written at the height of the alliance with Schelling: the longest of Hegel's pieces for their journal, and his fullest early reckoning with Kant.
DE
1802 How the Ordinary Human Understanding Takes Philosophy (Wie der gemeine Menschenverstand die Philosophie nehme)
Of Hegel's reviews for the Critical Journal, the most openly mocking: the journal's programme of severity turned on a single named Kantian.
DE
1802 On the Essence of Philosophical Criticism (Über das Wesen der philosophischen Kritik überhaupt)
Unsigned, and claimed for both editors ever since: the programme at the head of the journal Hegel and Schelling ran in 1802–03, which Hegel's reviews in its later issues put into practice.
DE
1802 On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Law (Über die wissenschaftlichen Behandlungsarten des Naturrechts)
Spread across the Critical Journal's last two issues: Hegel's longest published early writing on law and the state, composed while he was still an unsalaried lecturer at Jena.
DE
1802 Relationship of Skepticism to Philosophy (Verhältnis des Skeptizismus zur Philosophie)
Between the Krug review and Faith and Knowledge in the Critical Journal's run, the essay in which Hegel first says what doubt does for philosophy.
DE
1807 Phenomenology of Spirit (Die Phänomenologie des Geistes)
Written as Napoleon's army entered Jena and published in 1807, the book Hegel meant as the doorway into his system — and the one many readers still enter him through.
DE
1812 Science of Logic (Wissenschaft der Logik)
The larger of Hegel's two versions of the Logic, written away from any university while he ran a Nuremberg school; the metaphysical core the rest of the system rests on.
DE
1817 Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline (Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse)
The frame for Hegel's other books: its first part condenses the Science of Logic, and the Philosophy of Right expands one section of its third part. Hegel taught from it and rewrote it twice.
DEEN
1821 Elements of the Philosophy of Right (Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts)
The last book Hegel published in his lifetime apart from new editions of the Encyclopaedia: the textbook of his Berlin law lectures, and the one of his books most argued over by political readers.
DE
1831 On the English Reform Bill (Über die englische Reformbill)
Some three decades after his first, unpublished pamphlets on Württemberg and on the German constitution, Hegel's last venture into the politics of the day.
DE
1833 Lectures on the History of Philosophy (Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie)
Among the posthumous lecture books, the course Hegel carried through nearly his whole teaching life, and the one that closes on his thanks to the students who had followed it.
DE
1835 The Philosophy of Fine Art (Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik)
Not a book Hegel wrote but Berlin lectures assembled by a student after his death — the most influential philosophy of art of the nineteenth century, and a contested reconstruction of it.
EN
1835 Who Thinks Abstractly? (Wer denkt abstrakt?)
Hegel in the manner of a magazine essayist: short, comic and aimed at the general reader, though he never published it himself.
DE
1837 Lectures on the Philosophy of History (Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte)
For decades the most widely read of Hegel's works, and now the most contested — lectures on world history, published after his death, reading it as the growth of human freedom.
DE

— or open another of their works