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216

For a public code of laws, simple, universal determinations are to be demanded, on the one hand; on the other, the nature of finite material leads to an endless further determination. The compass of the laws should, on the one hand, be a finished, closed whole; on the other, it is the ongoing need for new legal determinations. But since this antinomy falls within the specification of the universal principles, which remain firmly in place, the right to a finished code of laws remains, through this, undiminished, as does the fact that these universal, simple principles, in themselves, distinguished from their specification, are comprehensible and can be set forth.

A chief source of the entanglement of legislation is, indeed, when, into the original institutions, which contain an injustice and are thus merely historical, the rational, that which is right in and for itself, gradually penetrates over time — as was remarked above, in the case of the Romans (§ 180, Remark), and as is the case with the old feudal law, and so on. But it is essential to see that the nature of finite material itself brings with it that, in it, the application even of determinations that are rational in and for themselves, and universal within themselves, leads to a progress into the infinite. — To demand of a code of laws the perfection of being absolutely finished, capable of no further determination — a demand that is chiefly a German malady — and, on the ground that it cannot be so perfected, to refuse to let it come to something so-called imperfect, that is, to actuality at all — both rest on a misconception of the nature of finite objects, such as private right is, in which so-called perfection is the perennial process of approximation, and on a misconception of the distinction between the universal of reason and the universal of the understanding, and its application to the material of finitude and singularity, which goes on into the infinite. — Le plus grand ennemi du bien c’est le mieux [The greatest enemy of the good is the better] is the expression of true, sound common sense against vain reasoning and reflection.

DE

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One response to “216”

  1. Eduard Gans (Additions) Avatar
    Eduard Gans (Additions)

    Completeness means the finished collection of every particular that belongs to a sphere, and in this sense no science or body of knowledge can be complete. If one now says that philosophy, or any science, is incomplete, the view readily suggests itself that one must wait until it has completed itself, since the best part might still be missing. But in this way nothing is advanced, neither geometry, which seems closed and yet in which new determinations still emerge, nor philosophy, which indeed has to do with the universal Idea, but can nevertheless always be further specialized. The universal law used always to be the ten commandments; that one should not, because a code of laws cannot be complete, therefore refrain from laying down the law “Thou shalt not kill,” is at once evident as an absurdity. Every code of laws could still be better — idle reflection is entitled to assert this, for the most glorious, the highest, the most beautiful can still be thought more gloriously, more highly, more beautifully. But a great old tree branches out more and more without thereby becoming a new tree; yet it would be foolish to want to plant no tree at all for the sake of the new branches that might come.

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