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To each tribe its scribe; to each cult its creed. Turfs are not to be breached; each has its own domain and autonomy. Immanuel Kant in the Critiques established the clear domain of turfs. Morality has its proper field, and so has science, and aesthetics. The clear cut distinction ("critical" from the Greek krinō, to sever, divide, or separate) of these domains was a phenomenological move that for Kant would establish an unsurpassable barrier between the phenomenon and the noumenon, the latter serving as a limiting concept to clearly separate what can be known from the thing-in-itself (das Ding an sich). With this, eschatology was removed from the realm of speculation and mythology to be an epistemological limit-concept, beyond which one cannot think. Kant thus posed a challenge to the upcoming generation of German idealist philosophy, represented by the likes of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. The Difference between the Fichtean and the Schellingean Systems of Philosophy by Hegel in 1801, his most influential work of the early period before the Phenomenology of the Spirit, is an outcome of this challenge.² The long essay starts precisely with Kant's apparently unsurpassable dualism and turf mentality and offers the solutions to overcome it.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137108272_3

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