 Hegel attempts to merge concept and being by making being part of a structure of self-reflection, rather than the basis of the interrelation between subject and object. In Schelling’s terms, Hegel therefore invalidly assumes that ‘essence’, what we know of things, which is one side of the relationship between being and essence, can articulate its identity with the other side in the ‘concept’, because the other side is revealed as being ‘nothing’ until it has entered into a relationship which makes it determinate as a knowable moment of the whole process. For Hegel, on the other hand, Schelling has to invoke being as something immediate: this means it must be wholly opaque, and so is equivalent to nothing.