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On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Right

[p. 449]

|449| understand by natural freedom, or giving up of ethical nature through the majesty’s being real, can be thought; the natural, however, which in the ethical relation would have to be thought as something to be given up, would itself be nothing ethical and thus would least of all present the same in its originality. Just as little is infinity or the nothing of the individual, of the subjects, fixed in the absolute Idea and in relative identity with the majesty as a relation of subjection, in which individuality too would be something absolutely posited, but in the Idea infinity is true, individuality as such nothing and absolutely one with the absolute ethical majesty, which true living, not subjected being-one is alone the true ethical life of the individual.

We have charged scientific empiricism, insofar as it is scientific, with positive nullity and with the untruth of its fundamental principles, laws, etc., because it bestows on determinacies, through the formal unity into which it transposes them, the negative absoluteness of the concept and pronounces them as positively absolute and being in themselves, as purpose and vocation, fundamental principle, law, duty and right, which forms signify something absolute. But in order to obtain the unity of an organic relation which offers to this qualitative determining a multitude of such concepts, a dominion over the other determinacies of the manifoldness must be given to one determinacy expressed as purpose, vocation or law, and these must be posited before it as unreal and null. It is in this application and consistency that intuition as inner totality is annihilated; it is therefore inconsistency through which that taking up of determinacies into the concept can rectify itself and sublate the violence done to intuition, for inconsistency immediately annihilates the absoluteness previously bestowed on a determinacy. From this side the old, thoroughly inconsistent

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    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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