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On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Right

[p. 459]

|459| has been determined above as the side of relative identity, of the being of the infinite in the finite; but this must be maintained, that it is not the absolute standpoint, as in which, as has been shown, the relation proves itself to be only one side and the isolating of it therefore to be something one-sided, and that, because ethical life is something absolute, that standpoint is not the standpoint of ethical life, but that in it there is no ethical life. And as regards the appeal to common consciousness, in that very same consciousness ethical life itself must just as necessarily occur as that standpoint which, since the relation is isolated for itself, posited as being in itself and not as a moment, is the principle of unethicality. Empirical consciousness is empirical because the moments of the absolute appear in it scattered, side by side, successive, fragmented; but it would itself be no common consciousness if ethical life did not just as much occur in it. Among these manifold appearances of the ethical and the unethical that occur in empirical consciousness, that formal philosophy had the choice, and it is not the fault of common consciousness but of philosophy that it chose the appearance of the unethical and supposed itself to have in negative absoluteness or in infinity the true absolute.

The execution of this practical philosophy rests on the presentation of that which this negative absoluteness is capable of, and we must follow the false attempt to show a truly absolute in the negatively absolute through its principal moments.

It follows at once that, since pure unity constitutes the essence of practical reason, there can be so little talk of a system of ethical life that not even a plurality of laws is possible, inasmuch as that which goes beyond the pure concept or – because this, insofar as it is posited as negating the many, i.e. as practical, is duty

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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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