The Absolute and the Concept of Difference: The Discourse between Schelling and Hegel 1794-1842

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The aim of the Emmy Noether junior research group, for which an extension application is made, is to, for the first time, reconstruct the dispute between F.W.J. Schelling and G.W.F. Hegel, spanning almost fifty years, comprehensively and from a specific systematic point of view. In an historical perspective, the project reconstructs the development of the debate between the two thinkers chronologically in its central steps. Thereby, the project tries to show that the debate, in spite of all the polemics between the two thinkers, is at bottom a productive and reciprocal dialogue, which takes place as a complex interplay of appropriation and taking distance. From a systematic perspective, the debate is reconstructed as a 'dispute about difference'. In doing so, the various conceptions of difference as developed in the course of the discussion (e.g. quantitative difference subordinate to identity, internal relational-dynamic difference, external alterity, etc.) are analyzed and discussed in a typology of idealistic forms of difference. The project work to date has been chronologically based on the progress of the dialogue in five steps, successively reconstructing the respective interactions between Schelling and Hegel as well as the conceptions of difference that are expressed in this process. In the sixth step requested here, two new questions are to be pursued based on this, which have arisen as desiderata from the project work, in the sense of transversal questions across the entire dialogue. a) On the one hand, the chronology of the mutual depictions of Schelling and Hegel in their lectures on (above all) the history of philosophy will be reconstructed. The well-known and influential text versions of the respective lectures on "History of Philosophy" were edited posthumously from the thinkers’ estate (by K.L. Michelet and by K.F.A. Schelling) and are of questionable authenticity. The project will reconstruct a much more differentiated picture of these mutual representations, mostly based on students’ notes (Nachschriften), also inquiring changes in the mutual presentations. b) On the other hand, the debate is to be examined with a view to a 'dispute about method'. After Hegel's death, Schelling publicly accuses him of having appropriated the method of his (Schelling's) earlier system, but at the same time improperly transformed it. Conversely, in Hegel's lectures, we find the accusation that Schelling was completely lacking a method. The project will reconstruct the different methodological approaches involved in this debate and discuss them, in a comparative manner. The main thesis is that the divergence in the question of method may precisely be explained based on the conceptions of difference that were reconstructed in the previous steps of the project.