 The contemporary ramifications of the debate between Schelling and Hegel have been given new significance by the continuing elaboration of ‘non-metaphysical’ readings of Hegel by Robert Pippin and others. If Hegel is really the philosopher who insists that legitimation can only be in terms of the account we can give of how we came to adopt the forms of legitimation of our society, there being no extra-mundane perspective on these forms, how far is he from Schelling’s moves against rationalist metaphysics in his later philosophy? The difference between Hegel and Schelling seems here to lie above all in Schelling’s insistence that one cannot reduce the ways in which we face up to the terrors and irrationality of existence to what can be achieved by a philosophical system that makes sense of negativity by showing it has a rational basis. His attention to art and the unconscious in his early philosophy already suggests this direction in his later thinking.