How did Friedrich Schelling influence Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s early work at Jena?

When Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel arrived at the University of Jena in 1801, Friedrich Schelling was already an established professor there. Schelling’s influence on Hegel’s early work was significant but relatively brief.1

Hegel’s initial academic qualification and his first publication, The Difference Between the Fichtean and Schellingian Systems of Philosophy (1801), clearly reflected the influence of Schelling’s philosophy of nature. During this period, the two thinkers shared a common interest in Greek philosophy, a desire to advance the work of Immanuel Kant, and a mutual status as iconoclasts. In 1802, they even coedited the Kritisches Journal der Philosophie (Critical Journal of Philosophy), signaling a period of close collaboration and shared philosophical goals.12

However, Hegel’s intellectual independence quickly emerged. While he adopted some of Schelling’s terminology for a short time, he remained critical of Schelling’s romantic enthusiasms and his tendency to posit the Absolute without explicitly demonstrating how one could ascend to it. By the time Hegel published The Phenomenology of Mind in 1807, he had moved significantly away from Schelling’s system, famously criticizing his conception of the Absolute as a night in which all cows are black.12