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On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Right

[p. 445]

|445| not real, merely imagined and as a thing of thought, there as a fiction, here as a mere possibility, which is the hardest contradiction.

For the common understanding, which keeps to the turbid mixture of what is in itself and what is transient, nothing is more comprehensible than that it can find what is in itself in such a way that, if it separates off from the mixed image of the condition of right everything arbitrary and contingent, the absolutely necessary must remain to it immediately through this abstraction. If one thinks away everything that a turbid presentiment can reckon among the particular and the transient, as belonging to particular customs, to history, to culture and also to the state, then man remains, under the image of the naked state of nature, or the abstract of it with its essential possibilities, and one has only to look in order to find what is necessary. What is recognised as being in relation to the state must also be separated off for the reason that the chaotic image of the necessary cannot contain the absolute unity, but only the simple manifoldness, the atoms with the fewest possible properties, and therefore [that] which can fall under the concept of a linking and ordering of them, as the weakest unity of which the principle of plurality is capable, is excluded from it as what is first later and added to that plurality. Now in that separation empiricism lacks, in the first place, any criterion at all as to where the boundary runs between the contingent and the necessary, hence what is to remain in the chaos of the state of nature or in the abstraction of man and what must be left out. The guiding determination herein can be nothing other than that there be as much in it as one needs for the presentation of what is found in actuality; the judging principle for that a priori is the a posteriori. As to what is to be made valid in the representation of the condition of right

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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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