On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Right

[p. 453]

|453| has not itself extracted, distinguished and fixed its limitations, but is entangled in those which, having become firm in general culture, are present as healthy common sense and therefore seem to be taken immediately from experience. Between such a perversity of intuition that has become firm and the abstractions only now fixed, the picture of the conflict is necessarily just as motley as they themselves are; each uses against the other now an abstraction, now a so-called experience, and on both sides it is empiricism that shatters itself against empiricism, and limitedness that shatters itself against limitedness, – now a boasting with principles and laws against philosophy and an exclusion of it as an incompetent judge of such absolute truths, in which the understanding has run itself fast, now a misuse of it for ratiocination and an appeal to it.

This relative right, which has been conceded to empiricism, when intuition is the ruling element in it, against the mixing of the empirical and the reflected, relates, as was recalled, to its unconscious inner; but the middle between the two, between that inner and its outer, – consciousness, is the side towards which its deficiency and therefore its one-sidedness lies, and its driving towards the scientific and the incomplete connection and mere contact with the concept, through which it only contaminates itself in this way, stems from the necessity that multiplicity and finitude absolutely sink themselves into infinity or into universality.

[II]

Cross-reference: The formal manner of treatment (Kant and Fichte). The critique of “empty formalism” returns in the Remark to § 135.

But it is the side of infinity that constitutes the principle of the apriority opposed to the empirical, to the consideration of which we now pass over.

The going of empirical opining and of its mixing

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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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