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On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Right

[p. 434]

On the scientific ways of treating natural right, its place in practical philosophy, and its relation to the positive sciences of right

First published in 1802/03 in the “Kritisches Journal der Philosophie” (edited by Hegel and Schelling), vol. II, parts 2 and 3. Translated from the German text of the Werke (vol. 2, “Jenaer Schriften”). The division into four parts is the editors’.

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Cross-reference: The essay out of which the Groundlines grow: Hegel examines the empirical and the formal (Kantian and Fichtean) treatment of natural right and sets absolute ethical life against them. The critique of empty formalism returns in the Groundlines in the Remark to § 135, the critique of the state of nature in § 194 Remark and § 258 Remark; ethical life itself in § 142 ff. The German text is on the German side of this edition.

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Contents

The science of natural right, like other sciences such as mechanics and physics, has indeed long been recognised as an essentially philosophical science and, because 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 solely in metaphysics and little share in it [was] granted to them, but that they, in their particular principle, were held entirely 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 usually called experience as their scientific principle, thereby renounce the claims to be true sciences, and content themselves with consisting of a collection of empirical items of knowledge and with making use of concepts of the understanding on sufferance, and without wishing to assert anything objective thereby. If that which has called itself philosophical science has first been excluded, against its will, from philosophy and from the category of science in general, and has then in the end let itself be content with this position, this exclusion has its ground not

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

  1. Cross-reference Avatar
    Cross-reference

    Cross-reference:
    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)

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