On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Right

[p. 435]

|435| in the fact that those so-called sciences did not proceed from the science of philosophy itself and did not keep themselves in conscious connection with it; for every part of philosophy in its individuality is capable of being an independent science and of gaining a perfect inner necessity, because that through which it is true science is the absolute, – in which shape it is alone the peculiar principle which lies above the sphere of its cognition and its freedom and in relation to which it belongs to an external necessity. But from this determinacy the Idea itself remains free and is able to reflect itself so purely in this determinate science as absolute life expresses itself in every living thing, without the scientific element of such a science, or its inner rationality, raising itself out into the light of day into the pure form of the Idea, which is the essence of every science and is, in philosophy as the absolute science, this pure Idea; of that peculiar and yet free scientific development of a science geometry gives a brilliant example, envied by the other sciences. Nor, likewise, is it on the ground that all reality must be denied to the sciences which are constituted like those named above, because they are properly speaking empirical; for as every part or every side of philosophy is capable of being an independent science, so each is immediately thereby also an independent and complete image, and can, in the shape of an image, be taken up and presented by an intuition which purely and happily abstains from contamination with fixed concepts.

The perfection of science, however, requires that intuition and the image be just as much united with the logical and taken up into the purely ideal, as that the separated, though true science be relieved of its individuality and its principle be cognised in its higher

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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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