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On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Right

[p. 462]

|462| insofar as such a one stands over against it. Each of the two determinacies is equally capable of being thought; which of the two it is to be, which is to be taken up into the unity or thought and which abstracted from, this is entirely undetermined and free; if the one is fixed as subsisting in and for itself, then the other indeed cannot be posited; but this other can just as well be thought and, since this form of thinking is the essence, pronounced as an absolute ethical law. That the commonest understanding without instruction can undertake that easy operation and distinguish which form in the maxim is suited for universal legislation or not, Kant shows by the example of the question whether the maxim, to increase my wealth by all safe means – in case such a means presented itself in a deposit – could count as a universal practical law, which would thus be of the content that anyone may deny a deposit the depositing of which nobody can prove to him; this question decides itself, in that such a principle as law would annihilate itself, because it would bring it about that there would be no deposit at all.2) But that there would be no deposit at all, what contradiction would lie in that? That there be no deposit will contradict other necessary determinacies, just as that a deposit be possible will cohere with other necessary determinacies and thereby be itself necessary. But other purposes and material grounds are not to be called in; rather, the immediate form of the concept is to decide the correctness of the first or the second assumption; but for the form the one of the opposed determinacies is as indifferent as the other; each can be conceived as a quality and this conceiving pronounced as law. If the determinacy of property in general is posited, then the tautological

2) Editors: Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, A 49

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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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