Controversy with Schelling Jacobi and Schelling knew each other before the controversy. After being appointed as the president of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences (
Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften), Jacobi worked along with Schelling as colleagues. As illustrated above, a great portion of Jacobi's work focused on opposing the Spinozist
pantheism as well as
fatalism. From Jacobi's perspective, Schelling, his colleague as well as one of the most influential philosophers at that time, matches his criteria of pantheism perfectly. Jacobi holds a viewpoint that the
Naturphilosophie of Schelling is essentially a philosophy without the transcendental realm: everything emerges from a unconditional nature (
natura naturans), which leads to a conclusion that God is nature that is graspable by
human reason, while not the "total other" in Christian traditions; in the meantime, the realm of faith, which is the central conception that Jacobi intended to restore, is faded in Schelling's
rationalism. Correspondingly, Schelling responded to Jacobi with his last publication
Denkmal in next year. The way Schelling defended himself is to re-emphasise his idea in his 1809
Philosophical Inquiries into the Essence of Human Freedom (
Freiheitschrift). According to Schelling, the relationship between God and nature must be taken into account in philosophy, or it will leave "an unnatural God and a godless nature". In other words, Schelling's reaction based on this viewpoint: freedom does not expel necessity but contains it. Schelling holds a quite
Kantian position, claiming that freedom implies self-determination, not merely actions. Therefore, freedom does not present itself in actions, but in the obedience to certain rules that are not imposed from outside, but from within. To Schelling, since these rules emerge without the interference from outside, this is an indication of nature's self-determination, namely, freedom; additionally, it is this self-determination that made the freedom of actions emphasized by Jacobi possible. In other words, in Schelling's discourse, freedom and necessity do not essentially expel each other; rather, freedom and necessity are ultimately one.,
Influences on Fichte's 1794 Wissenschaftslehre Although
J. G. Fichte never directly mentioned Jacobi's name or cited his work in 1794 version of
Wissenschaftslehre, according to Wood, Fichte's work in fact explicitly expresses some proximity to Jacobi's thought. In Jacobi's 1785 work
On the teachings of Spinoza in letters to Moses Mendelssohn (
Über die Lehre des Spinoza in Briefen an den Herrn Moses Mendelssohn), he declared Here the structure we observed from Jacobi's text could be summarized as follows: we as beings who possess "I", only manifest the "I" (namely, selfhood) when encounters Thou, that is, the "other" surrounds us. Only when we encounter something other than ourselves, our sense of "self" is confirmed. Hence, we may perceive a nexus and mutual dependency between I and Thou: I always come first, and then Thou confirms the existence of it. This pair of reflective determinations echoes Fichte's work. In his 1794
Foundations of Science of Knowledge (
Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre), Fichte adopted a methodology that he called "synthetic method". In the context of
Foundations, it presents itself in a mode of "
thesis–antithesis–synthesis": "I" is absolutely posited at first, and then "Not-I" is posited as the antithesis of the former. Nevertheless, this process would be incomplete if it lacked the final step of synthesis. The synthesis method guarantees the relations between I and Not-I. In Fichtean discourse, this may possibly contain interpersonal relationships.: As we shall tell from the use of certain terms, Fichte addressed the same topic as Jacobi. Furthermore, this proximity in ways of searching for unconditional ontological foundation was directly acknowledged by Fichte: ==Philosophical work==