On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Right

[p. 454]

|454| of the manifold with the simple towards the concept is, in the absolute concept or in infinity, removed from its wavering, and the incomplete separation is decided. In a lower abstraction, infinity has indeed also been singled out as the absoluteness of the subject in the doctrine of happiness in general and in natural right in particular, by those systems that are called anti-socialist and posit the being of the individual as the first and highest, but not in the pure abstraction which it has received in Kantian or Fichtean idealism.

It does not belong here to present the nature of infinity and of its manifold transformations; for as it is the principle of movement and of alteration, so its essence itself is nothing other than to be the unmediated opposite of itself, or it is the negatively absolute, the abstraction of form, which, in that it is pure identity, is immediately pure non-identity or absolute opposition; in that it is pure ideality, just as immediately pure reality; in that it is the infinite, the absolutely finite; in that it is the indeterminate, absolute determinacy. The absolute transition into the opposite, which is its essence, and the vanishing of every reality in its opposite cannot be halted otherwise than by empirically fixing the one side of it, namely reality, or the subsisting of the opposed, and abstracting from the opposite, the nothingness of this subsisting. This real opposite is on one side the manifold being or finitude and, over against it, infinity as negation of multiplicity and positively as pure unity; and the absolute concept, constituted in this way, yields in this unity that which has been called pure reason. The relation of this pure unity, however, to the manifold beings standing over against it

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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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