On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Right

[p. 451]

|451| such. On the other hand, when determinacies are fixed and their law is carried through consistently across the sides dug up by empiricism, intuition is subjected to them and in general what is usually called theory is formed, then empiricism is right to charge this with one-sidedness, and through the completeness of the determinacies which it asserts, it is in its power to force that theory by instances to a universality which becomes wholly empty. That limitedness of concepts, the fixing of determinacies, the elevation of a seized-upon side of the appearance into universality and the dominion bestowed on it over the others, is what in recent times has called itself no longer theory but philosophy, and, according as it raised itself to emptier abstractions and took possession of purer negations such as freedom, pure will, humanity, etc., metaphysics, and believed itself to have produced philosophical revolutions in natural right as well as especially in the right of the state and in criminal right, when it tugged these sciences to and fro with such essenceless abstractions and positively expressed negations as freedom, equality, pure state, etc., or with determinacies seized upon from common empiricism, which are just as essenceless as those, like coercion, especially psychological coercion with its whole train of opposition of practical reason and sensuous incentives, and whatever else is native to this psychology, and likewise forced such null concepts, as absolute purposes of reason, principles of reason and laws, with more or less consistency through a science. With right empiricism demands that such philosophising must orient itself by experience. It rightly insists on its tenacity against such a scaffolding and artifice of fundamental principles and prefers its empirical inconsistency, which is grounded on an, albeit turbid, intuition of a whole, to the consistency of

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  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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