ABSTRACT
The System of Transcendental Idealism(STI) of 1800 explicates for the first time in systematic form one of the most influential ideas in modern thinking: the idea that self-consciousness has to develop in stages from a point where it did not exist as such. The STI also develops the newly emerged Romantic thought, which the authors briefly touched on when looking at metaphor in the Introduction, that art can reveal more than philosophy can say. It is no coincidence that structures which anticipate psychoanalysis emerge in the process, that a new understanding of the significance of art for philosophy is promulgated, and that, in moving away from Fichte, Schelling will in his subsequent work develop an expressly ecological conception of nature. Instead of a conception in which both nature and consciousness have their source in a higher activity, the Absolute, consciousness is given priority.
