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Jacobin dictatorship and then the rule of the little Corsican are just over the horizon. The latter was seen by Hegel with his own eyes the day after the Battle of Jena, “Weltseele zu Pferde” (“mounted on the soul of the world”), as Hegel wrote to Niethammer‘. The positions of Schelling and Hegelian are not far apart: the subject does not recognize an object independent of itself, but the cognition occurring is cognition of himself, since in all other cases cognition would be lead down the false track of dogmatism, and dogmatism is best suited by oppression and suffering. The critical attitude is the field of freedom and opposition to it. Every autocratic system is dogmatic. There is no freedom in it, especially not individual freedom, but the dogmatic person likes this and does not understand why they should have to be free. It is not the tyrant who creates the slave — building on Unamuno’s ideas (Unamuno 1928. p.38.) — but the slave who creates the tyrant. That is to say, as Schelling writes, that all cognition can only be imagined occurring with a foundation of freedom, because there is no thought (and, let us add, no thinker) that would renounce freedom and still dare to call themselves thinking people. Not-free thinking is not thinking. Thus, the only way of thinking, like the only way of philosophy, is critical thinking. In the modern sense, we can add that the advantages of anyone, no matter how skilled, educated, etc. they may be, are not worth a button if they are in the service of an ideology, and the same can be said of the person themselves. In criticism, mediation and reflection can only be interpreted after recognizing this. Let us simply call the latter a conscious thought, an observation. However, before looking at the category of mediation and trying to ascertain its nature, it is useful to look at the basic elements of Fichte and Schelling’s philosophy of identity (also known as Identiätsphilosophie). 6 Thelegend that Hegel finished The Phenomenology of Spirit on the night ofthe Battle of Jena does not match reality. The battle, the day after which Hegel saw Napoleon, was on October 16, 1806, while Hegel had already signed the contract with the publisher that summer.
