grundlinien.de

On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Right

ON THE SCIENTIFIC WAYS OF TREATING NATURAL RIGHT, ITS PLACE IN PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY, AND ITS RELATION TO THE POSITIVE SCIENCES OF RIGHT.

First published 1802/1803 in the “Kritisches Journal der Philosophie” (ed. Hegel and Schelling), vol. 2, issues 2 and 3. German text after: G.W.F. Hegel, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 4 (Jenaer Kritische Schriften), Hamburg 1968. Passages printed with letter-spacing (Sperrdruck) in the original are rendered here in italics. This is an original English translation prepared for this site.

The science of natural right, like other sciences such as mechanics and physics, has indeed long been recognized as an essentially philosophical science, and — since philosophy must have parts — as an essential part of it; but it has shared with the others the common fate that the philosophical element of philosophy was located in metaphysics alone, and little share in it was granted to them, so that they, in their particular principle, were kept wholly independent of the Idea; the sciences cited as examples have finally been compelled to confess, more or less, their distance from philosophy, so that they acknowledge what is customarily called experience as their scientific principle, thereby renouncing any claim to be true sciences, and content themselves with consisting of a collection of empirical items of knowledge, and with making use of the concepts of the understanding on sufferance, without wishing thereby to assert anything objective. If that which called itself philosophical science was, at first against its will, excluded from philosophy and from the category of science as such, and then in the end acquiesced in this position, this exclusion has its ground not in the fact that those so-called sciences did not proceed from the science of philosophy itself and did not maintain themselves in conscious connection with it; for every part of philosophy is capable, in its singularity, of being an independent science and of attaining a complete inner necessity, because that through which it is a true science is the Absolute; in which shape alone it is the peculiar principle that lies above the sphere of its cognition and its freedom, and in relation to which it belongs to an external necessity; but the Idea itself remains free of this determinacy, and is able to reflect itself in this particular science as purely as absolute life expresses itself in every living thing; without the scientific character of such a science, or its

Next →

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63

DE

Comments

One response to “On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Right”

  1. Editorial Note Avatar
    Editorial Note

    Editorial Note:

    The following passages of this essay anticipate ideas that Hegel later developed at greater length in the Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Each link leads directly to the exact passage within this essay:

    • p. 427 f. (part 2, 1802) – “The state of nature, and the majesty and divinity of the whole of the condition of right …” → § 258 (on the relation between the state of nature, contract theory, and the state’s ethical substantiality)
    • p. 437 (part 2, 1802) – “If the determinacy of property in general is posited, then the tautological proposition …” → § 135 (on the critique of the empty formalism of the Kantian doctrine of duty (the example of property))
    • p. 439 (part 2, 1802) – “A maxim that, on this principle, is immoral because it contradicts itself, is, precisely …” → § 135 (on the critique of the empty formalism of the Kantian doctrine of duty (the example of helping the poor))
    • p. 449 (part 2, 1802) – “In this its determination, then, punishment is something in itself, truly infinite and …” → § 99 (on the theory of punishment: punishment as a work of freedom, against the mere idea of coercion or deterrence)
    • p. 458 (part 2, 1802) – “They received laws and commanders from the will of their monarch, and the descendants of …” → § 357 (on the Roman Empire as the disintegration of ethical life into private personhood and abstract universality)
    • p. 459 (part 2, 1802) – “It is this nothing other than the performance of tragedy within the ethical, which the …” → § 324 (on the ethical moment of sacrifice and the transience of the finite (compare the motif of war))
    • p. 464 (part 2, 1802) – “But that which we have set on one side under the outer form of the first estate is the …” → § 325 (on the estate of valor of its own, and the free, violent death as the highest abstraction of freedom)
    • p. 469 (part 3, 1803) – “There must also be a reflex of the same in his empirical consciousness, and such a reflex …” → § 204 (on the second estate (possession, property, bourgeois/formal ethical life))
    • p. 469 f. (part 3, 1803) – “Those properties, however, that are truly ethical, in that in them the particular or …” → § 150 (on virtue as ethical energy become individual (the examples of Epaminondas, Hannibal, Caesar))
    • p. 470 (part 3, 1803) – “It must also present itself in the form of universality and of cognition, as a system of …” → § 274 (on the relation between legislation and the living customs of a people)
    • p. 471 (part 3, 1803) – “We remark in advance, in general, that philosophy, through the universality of the …” → § 3 (on the boundary between philosophical and positive (historical) legal science)

Leave a Reply