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On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Right

[p. 460]

|460| – that which goes beyond the pure concept of duty and the abstraction of a law no longer belongs to this pure reason; as Kant, he who has presented this abstraction of the concept in its absolute purity, recognises very well that all material of the law is lacking to practical reason and that it can make nothing more than the form of the suitability of the maxim of arbitrary will the supreme law. The maxim of arbitrary will has a content and includes a determinacy in itself; the pure will, by contrast, is free of determinacies; the absolute law of practical reason is to raise that determinacy into the form of pure unity, and the expression of this determinacy taken up into the form is the law. If it is possible that the determinacy is taken up into the form of the pure concept, if it does not sublate itself through this form, then it is justified and has become absolute through negative absoluteness itself, law and right or duty. But the matter of the maxim remains what it is, a determinacy or individuality; and the universality which the taking-up into the form bestows on it is therefore an absolutely analytic unity, and if the unity bestowed on it is pronounced purely as what it is in a proposition, the proposition is an analytic one and a tautology. And in the production of tautologies consists, in truth, the sublime faculty of the autonomy of legislation of pure practical reason; the pure identity of the understanding, expressed in the theoretical as the principle of contradiction, remains, turned to the practical form, the very same. If the question “What is truth?”, put to logic and answered by it, presents Kant with the laughable sight of one milking the he-goat while the other holds a sieve beneath, then the question “What is right and duty?”, put to that pure practical reason and answered by it, is in the same case. If Kant recognises that a general criterion of truth would be that which would be valid of all cognitions without distinction

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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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