ABSTRACT
The early German idealist attempts to articulate a philosophical system is all essentially monistic in character, expressly designed to translate the Kantian dualism into the terms of a monist theoretical model. Nonetheless, with his System of Transcendental Idealism of 1800, conceived at a time when that dualism was already widely regarded as having been transcended, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling took up and modified the question concerning the relative opposition between idealism and realism. Schelling provides a simple explanation for the problem of the circularity of subjectivity and self-consciousness that appears insoluble within the narrow limits of epistemological theory. In Schelling's eyes, all that is required to interpret the transcendental conditions of subjectivity in developmental and historical fashion. Schelling's notion of the process of 'coming to self-awareness' was originally motivated by fundamental thought: 'no relation to the self without a relation to nature'.
