  In his study of the fragment he found, moreover, Rosenzweig reached a further controversial conclusion. If the text was to be dated in the early summer of 1796, as Hegel’s handwriting suggested, this would place the writing of the text at the very moment in Hegel’s life when, according to Rosenzweig, he was in the midst of his melancholic despair over the possibility of reconciling the subjectivity of the free self with the objectivity of the world. If this were the case, Rosenzweig reasoned, Hegel couldn’t possibly have been the author of the text. “Only one person in the philosophical Germany of 1796 possessed this youthful-victorious tone” that pervades the text-fragment, Rosenzweig determined, and that person was Hegel’s friend and former fellow-student at the Tübinger Stift, F.W.J Schelling. In all likelihood, surmised Rosenzweig, Schelling had sent or shown an original version of the text to Hegel, who, in turn, had copied it over for future perusal. The original had since been lost, and only Hegel’s copy remained. Since the existing copy was in Hegel’s handwriting, Rosenzweig concluded, the text had mistakenly been assigned to Hegel himself. In Rosenzweig’s “Oldest System-Program of German Idealism,” an article he wrote in 1914 and published in 1917, Rosenzweig presented the two-page text, together with a demonstration of his conclusions and a determination of the position the text might be said to occupy within Schelling’s early writings. Rosenzweig’s presentation received high praise from its initial reviewers, but his conclusions about the text—and about Schelling’s authorship, in particular—have been hotly contested ever since. Although no scholarly consensus has yet been reached regarding the actual author of the fragment—whether it be Hegel himself, Schelling, Hölderlin, or perhaps yet another figure in their circles—scholars have generally come to question the supposition that Hegel suffered from a depression during the late 1790s that would rule him out as its author.