Schelling <i>contra </i>Fichte: The Thesis on Being before and after 1806

Schelling’s 1806 essay against Fichte is important for two reasons: it discusses (1) the impossibility of idealism to grasp the real and objective status of Being and, therefore, the need for a metaphysical grounding of reflection situated outside of consciousness itself; (2) the discovery of the irreversibility of nature in God, which sheds new light on Schelling’s speculations about the relation between the ideal and the real ground of philosophy. Schelling changed the stance first presented in the System of Transcendental Idealism of 1800 to one according to which there is a non-derivative relation between nature and God: both are independent beings; at the same time, he makes God, as in classical metaphysics, a being that transcends nature. This allows Schelling to overcome the problem of the idealist distinction between logical and real movement, although it destroys the possibility of a single system of philosophy in the years after 1806.