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On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Right

[p. 444]

|444| as it is for pure empiricism, for which each has equal rights with the other and which prefers to the other no determinacy, one of which is as real as the other, to which we shall return below when comparing pure empiricism with this scientific kind of which we are here speaking.

After this formal totality we must consider how absolute unity appears in the reflex of empirical knowing, both as simple unity, which we can call the original one, and as totality; both unities, which in the absolute are one and whose identity is the absolute, must in that knowing be separated and occur as something different.

As to that unity in the first place, empiricism cannot be concerned with it as the essence of necessity, which for the appearance is an external bond of it; for in the unity which is the essential one the manifold is immediately annihilated and nothing; because manifold being is the principle of empiricism, it is denied it to penetrate to the absolute nothing of its qualities, which for it are absolute and, also through the concept according to which they are absolutely many, are infinitely many. That original unity can therefore signify only a, as far as possible, simple and small multitude of qualities, with which it believes it can suffice for the cognition of the rest. That ideal, in which what roughly counts as arbitrary and contingent is wiped out and the smallest necessary multitude of the manifold is posited, is for empiricism, in the physical as in the ethical, the chaos, which in the latter is represented, now more under the image of being by imagination as the state of nature, now more under the form of possibility and of abstraction, as an enumeration of the faculties found in man by empirical psychology, [as] the nature and vocation of man, and in this way what is asserted on the one hand as absolutely necessary, in itself, absolute, is at the same time on the other hand acknowledged as something

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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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