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On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Right

[p. 458]

|458| it is also free in this relative identity, i.e. in its necessity; or because relative identity is not sublated by unity being the first, this second freedom is so determined that the necessary indeed is for ethical nature, but is posited negatively. If we were now to isolate this side of the relative identity of ethical nature and were to recognise as the essence of ethical nature not the absolute unity of indifference and of this relative identity, but the side of the relation or of necessity, we would stand at the same point at which the essence of practical reason is determined as having absolute causality, or that it is indeed free and necessity only negative, but precisely for that reason nonetheless posited, whereby precisely that freedom does not come out of difference, the relation or relative identity is made into the essence, and the absolute is conceived only as negatively absolute or as infinite.

The empirical and popular expression by which this representation, which grasps ethical nature merely from the side of its relative identity, has so greatly recommended itself, is that the real, under the names of sensibility, inclinations, lower faculty of desire etc. (moment of the multiplicity of the relation), does not agree (moment of the opposition of unity and multiplicity) with reason (moment of the pure unity of the relation), and that reason consists in willing out of its own absolute self-activity and autonomy and in restricting and dominating that sensibility (moment of the determinacy of this relation, that in it unity or the negation of multiplicity is the first). The reality of this representation is grounded on the empirical consciousness and the general experience of everyone, of finding both that discord and this pure unity of practical reason or the abstraction of the I in itself. Nor can there be any question of denying this standpoint, but it

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One response to “On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Right”

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    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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