In this chapter, we retain the focus of Chapter 2 on the significance of the 1801 controversy with Eschenmayer for Schelling's subsequent metaphysical constructions, focusing on another central concept of his emergent identity philosophy – identity itself. Attending to the concept of identity allows us to examine the essential viewpoint of the Presentationand various reactions to it: Eschenmayer's Fichtean response in a letter penned to Schelling in July 1801 (translated in Appendix 1 of the present volume); Fichte's own response to the Presentationin correspondence and unpublished notes; and finally, Hegel's Differenzschrift, written in late spring 1801 with a copy of On the True Conceptand perhaps the Presentationin front of him. What will prove most significant about this triangulation of the 1801 Schelling–Eschenmayer controversy with Schelling's identity philosophy and subsequent reactions to it by Eschenmayer, Fichte and Hegel is the way it recasts Schelling's thinking of identity: it foregrounds the radical manner in which Schellingian philosophy of the period severs any analytic connection between difference and non-identity. Differences, Schelling maintains in 1801, can be constructed without appeal to the non-identical or antithetical.

Identity and difference from On the True Conceptto the Presentation

As we have seen, in the wake of Kant, Eschenmayer seeks to reduce the multiplicity of material qualities to various quantitative ratios between two opposed forces. Eschenmayer's models always presuppose this foundational dualism – that is, the fundamental opposition between repulsion and attraction – and, as he will readily admit in a letter penned to Schelling in July 1801, the models thereby presuppose that non-identity (between the two forces) is to be postulated as a primary ontological principle. This is significant, because – from the First Outlineto the Presentation– Schelling expresses dissatisfaction with such a dialectical ontology: he wishes to retain Eschenmayer's idea of a series of potencies without their dialectical ground. Part of Schelling's initial polemic against Eschenmayer in the First Outlineand its Introductionis directed precisely against the latter's use of repulsive and attractive forces to construct qualitative determinacy, and his short-lived appeal to actants is meant as an alternative to Eschenmayerian dynamics – a way to construct natural diversity without perpetual recourse to a dialectical interplay of antithetical forces.