  While still at work on Hegel und der Staat in 1913, Rosenzweig made a scholarly discovery which led him—and scholars of German Idealism after him—to rethink the origins of German Idealism, and which at once precipitated a controversy in the field that continues to this day. Earlier that year, the Prussian Royal Library in Berlin had acquired a fragment of a text, written by Hegel, given the title “An Ethics,” because these were the text’s first two words. But a study of the fragment’s content convinced Rosenzweig that the text was no narrow investigation of a particular field of philosophy, i.e., ethics, but rather took up the very task that would later define German Idealism for posterity: the task of system. Indeed, the text revealed its author committed to constructing “a complete system of all ideas or, what is the same, of all practical postulates”; it claims to find the point of unity for the distinct philosophical domains of nature and freedom in the aesthetic act; it calls for a new mythology in the service of a new religion which would unify the enlightened and unenlightened together in “the last great work of humankind.” Utilizing a method of dating Hegelian manuscripts introduced by Dilthey and Nohl, by which manuscripts could be dated according to landmarks in the development of Hegel’s handwriting, Rosenzweig determined the text to have been written in the early summer months of 1796. This led Rosenzweig to conclude that he had found, in this fragment, the “Oldest System-Program of German Idealism,” an explicit articulation of the defining task of German Idealism, written “three or at least two years before that work which up to now has counted … as the first systematic attempt of the idealistic movement … to bound the whole philosophical world between the covers of a book, Schelling’s [System of] Transcendental Idealism.”