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On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Right

[p. 450]

|450| empiricism must be justified, not in relation to absolute science as such, but in relation to the consistency of the empirical scientificity of which there has so far been talk. A great and pure intuition can in this way express the truly ethical in the purely architectonic of its presentation, in which the connection of necessity and the dominion of the form do not step forth into the visible – like a building which presents the spirit of its author mutely in the scattered mass, without its image itself, gathered into one, being set up in it as a shape. In such a presentation made with the help of concepts it is only a clumsiness of reason that it does not raise to the ideal form what it comprehends and penetrates and does not become conscious of it as Idea. If intuition only remains true to itself and lets itself not be confused by the understanding, it will, insofar as it cannot do without concepts for its expression, conduct itself clumsily with regard to them, assume perverted shapes in passing through consciousness, and be both incoherent and contradictory for the concept; but the arrangement of the parts and of the determinacies modifying themselves let the inner rational spirit, though invisible, be guessed, and insofar as this its appearance is regarded as product and result, it will agree perfectly with the Idea as product.

For the understanding nothing is easier here than to fall upon this empiricism, to set other grounds against those clumsy ones, to point out the confusion and the contradiction of the concepts, to draw from the isolated propositions consequences which express what is hardest and most unreasonable, and in manifold ways to lay bare the unscientific character of empiricism, in which it has its right done to it, especially if it either has the pretension to be scientific or is polemical against science as

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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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