NATURE'S NEGATIVITYIN J. G. FICHTE'S IDEALISM; A CLASH WITH F. W. J. SCHELLING

Considered as a radical subjectivist who presented the world as a mere product of thought, Fichte had to face charges of atheism, naive idealism and reductionism. He always reacted identically, repeatedly explaining his system, or redirecting it in order to overcome new challenges. Even though, part of his critics especially the ones who saw in his theories a deficient concept of Nature, like Schelling, who was moved by a bitter personal and conceptual disagreement with him around 1801, would later consider Fichte's final works as a complete reformulation. Recent historical research, however, shows that Fichte was aware of his lack of clarity concerning natural philosophy already in 1798, and he even admitted being incapable of solving the problem. We argue here that Fichte's original conception of nature original is not so far from the new one, and that his further presentation is not a mere defensive reaction to the advancement of Schellingian philosophy of nature.