Publication Details

Abstract

Jacobi introduced nihilism into philosophical discussion and diagnosed it as the structural fate of systematic philosophy, which posed the central challenge to the early Schelling’s thought. While inheriting Jacobi’s critique of rational inference, Schelling refused to resort to faith and instead sought to ground the unconditional within the system. Between 1795 and 1796, Schelling proposed two different transcendental-philosophical projects: in Of the I, he defined the absolute as the “absolute I” or the original identity of the subjective and the objective; the “Treatise Explicatory” took spirit’s activity as its point of departure, treating the original identity of representation and object as the immediate ground of knowledge, so that the unconditional comes to appear within the system through the generative activity of spirit. Despite their different paths, both projects constitute Schelling’s systematic response to nihilism.