 The condition of the knowledge of appearances for Kant is the ‘transcendental subject’, but what sort of ‘condition’ is the transcendental subject? The perception that Kant has no proper answer to this problem initially unites Schelling and Fichte. Fichte insists in the Wissenschaftslehre (1794) that the unconditioned status of the I has to be established if Kant’s system is to legitimate itself. He asserts that “It is (…) the ground of explanation of all facts of empirical consciousness that before all positing in the I the I itself must previously be posited” (Fichte 1971, p. 95), thereby giving the I the founding role which he thought Kant had failed adequately to explicate. Fichte does this by extending the consequences of Kant’s claim that the cognitive activity of the I, via which it can reflect upon itself, cannot be understood as part of the causal world of appearances, and must therefore be part of the noumenal realm, the realm of the ‘unconditioned’. For Fichte the very existence of philosophy depends upon the free act of the I which initiates the reflection on its own activity by the I.