ABSTRACT
In Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling’s New Deduction of Natural Right, by contrast, right is grounded as an enabler of an ideally-envisioned a posteriori escape from individuated status, by way of an unceasing endeavor to transcend the conditions definitive of finite selfhood. This chapter discusses the New Deduction of Natural Right, sketching the pivotal steps in Schelling’s deduction of right and further sharpening various points of comparison and contrast between his position and J. G. Fichte. In the context of Fichte’s Jena Wissenschaftslehre, right is derived and egitimated roughly as follows. In Fichte’s Foundations of Natural Right, right is grounded as a co-enabler, in the manner of a transcendental condition, of the a priori articulation of empirically individuated selfhood. The subject, for Fichte, can grasp itself as an empirically determinate individual only on the basis of the transcendental acts that a priori originate Recht. In Jena, meanwhile, during the winter semester of 1795–1796, Fichte lectured on the same subject.
