 However, a closer look at how Hegel tries to realize a monistic idealism reveals that it proved rather complicated to establish a philosophical system based on the identity of thinking and being or subject and object. At the outset this project was to be realized within the boundaries of two conditions. The first was to present an argument in favor of the superiority of idealism that would not just make the endorsement of idealism a question of individual character or what a person wants to be, a move he thought to be characteristic of both Fichte’s and Schelling’s defense of idealism. The second was to abandon the view also, according to Hegel, sometimes to be found in Fichte and Schelling, that one has to think of idealism as an alternative and in opposition to dogmatism/ realism/ materialism. Not to meet these two conditions were in Hegel’s eyes two unacceptable shortcomings of any attempt to establish a convincing idealistic worldview. He expressed his dissatisfaction with attempts of this kind to establish idealism as the superior approach in philosophy quite early (Faith and Knowledge, 1802) by referring to them under the title “philosophy of reflection of subjectivity” (Reflexionsphilosophie der Subjektivität). This kind of philosophy of reflection, though favoring subjectivity and hence giving priority to the conceptual and in this sense ideal contributions of the mind to what shows up as reality is still according to Hegel stuck in what he later used to call the “opposition of consciousness” (Gegensatz des Bewusstseins) (in both the, Phenomenology and the Science of Logic). This kind of philosophy is committed to a mode of thinking that takes place within a framework in which the opposition of thinking and being or subject and object is still basic, dissolved only superficially by either abstracting from one of the opposed sides or by establishing a relation of domination between the elements opposed, without transcending and transforming them into a whole, his renowned “Subject-Object”, a whole that is both constituted by these elements, the subject and the object, and that at the same time constitutes them as its own internal differentiations.  This way of overcoming oppositions by thinking of the elements opposed as having significance only insofar as their mutual relation can be conceived of as being constituted by the unity they together form led Hegel to claim that in order to avoid the idea of self-standing or irreducible oppositions and hence to escape the charge of one-sidedness in cases where the prioritization of opposites is at stake, one has to follow the methodological maxim that for every opposition there has to be a unity in place that consists of the elements opposed. Hegel took this principle to imply that the “absolute”, the totality of what there is and can be, must be conceived of as what he sometimes calls the “identity of identity and non-identity” (Difference-Writing, beginning of Schelling chapter) or as the “unity of unity and multiplicity/diversity” (Natural Law Essay, section II) where the terms “identity/unity” in each of these formulations are meant to refer to both the whole that gives rise to what is opposed and to one of the elements in opposition.