 Schelling takes up the issues raised by Jacobi and Fichte in two texts of 1795: Of the I as Principle of Philosophy or on the Unconditional in Human Knowledge, and Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism. In a move which prefigures aspects of Heidegger’s questioning of the notion of being, he reinterprets Kant’s question as to the condition of possibility of synthetic judgements a priori as a question about why there is a realm of judgements, a manifest world requiring syntheses by the subject for knowledge to be produced, at all. In Of the I, Schelling puts Kant’s question in Fichtean terms: “how is it that the absolute I goes out of itself and opposes a Not-I to itself?” (Sämmtliche Werke [SW], I/1, p. 175). He maintains that the condition of knowledge, the ‘positing’ by the I of that which is opposed to it, must have a different status from the determined realm which it posits: “nothing can be posited by itself as a thing, i.e. an absolute/unconditioned thing (unbedingtes Ding) is a contradiction” (ibid., p. 116). However, his key worry about Fichte’s position already becomes apparent in the Philosophical Letters, where he drops the Fichtean terminology: “How is it that I step at all out of the absolute and move towards something opposed (auf ein Entgegengesetztes)?” (ibid., p. 294). The problem Schelling confronts was identified by his friend Hölderlin, in the light of Jacobi’s formulation of the problem of the ‘unconditioned’. Fichte wished to understand the absolute as an I in order to avoid the problem of nature ‘in itself’ which creates Kantian dualism. For something to be an I, though, it must be conscious of an other, and thus in a relationship to that other. The overall structure of the relationship could not, therefore, be described from only one side of that relationship. Hölderlin argued that one has to understand the structure of the relationship of subject to object in consciousness as grounded in ‘a whole of which subject and object are the parts’, which he termed ‘being’. This idea will be vital to Schelling at various times in his philosophy.