Repository | Journal | Volume | Articles

If it were true that in 1796-97, period in which the Neue Deduktion des Naturrechts was written, Schelling merely follows the principles of Fitche’s philosophy, then the conclusions reached in this work should be the same as those drawn by Fitche in the Grundlage des Naturrechts. However, they do not coincide at all, and his conclusions are far from those reached by Fichte. The Wissenschaftslehre implied, in its internal development, to address –and also to be concerned by– a system of the Ethics and another system of the Laws, which would merely be extensions and specifications of the approach in his central work. By contrast, Schelling, even understanding the Vom Ich as propedeutics of the Doctrine of Science (which would imply that, sooner or later, a logical –an necessary– consequence would be to develop an ethics that completed his approach), never wrote an ethics, not even one à la Spinoza in which he said to have addressed around 1795. Nevertheless, the text that was prepared and published a year later was his Neue Deduktion des Naturrechts which, although it is naturally not that promised ethics, it was written following the ways and the style of Spinoza to obtain a “kind of Law proved by geometrical order” with fatal and disturbing consequences for the legal sciences, and that already points to substantial –and seminal– elements of estrangement from Fichte: Why did he wrote a deduction of Natural Law and not an Ethics? Which are those elements of estrangement?

Full citation: