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On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Right

[p. 436]

|436| connection and necessity and thereby itself be completely freed, – whereby alone it is also possible to cognise the limits of science, about which without this it must remain in ignorance, because otherwise it would have to stand above itself and cognise the nature of its principle according to its determinacy in the absolute form; for from this cognition there would follow for it immediately the cognition and certainty of the extent of the equality of its various determinacies. As it is, however, it can relate to its limits only empirically and must now make false attempts to overstep them, now think them narrower than they are, and therefore experience wholly unexpected extensions, as geometry likewise – which, for example, knows how to prove the incommensurability of the diameter and the side of the square, but not that of the diameter and the periphery of a circle1) -, still more arithmetic, and most of all the union of the two, gives the greatest examples of the groping of science in the dark at the limits.

1) Hegel’s footnote. Fichte prides himself (in the introduction to his work on natural right [Grundlage des Naturrechts nach Prinzipien der Wissenschaftslehre, Leipzig und Jena 1796/97; SW, Bd. III]) on the simplicity of his insight into the ground of the latter incommensurability: the curved, namely, is in earnest not straight. The superficiality of this ground is evident of itself and is also immediately refuted by the first incommensurability, that of the diameter and the side of the square, both of which are straight, as well as by the quadrature of the parabola. As for the help which is sought in the same place, in healthy common sense, against mathematical infinity, namely that a polygon of infinitely many sides, precisely because it is a polygon of infinitely many sides, cannot be measured, then partly the very same help would have to be available against the infinite progress in which the absolute Idea is supposed to realise itself, and partly nothing is thereby determined about the main point, the positive infinity, which is not an infinite multitude but identity, as to whether this is to be posited, which means as much as that nothing is determined about commensurability or incommensurability.

If the critical philosophy has had the important negative effect upon theoretical sciences of demonstrating that the scientific element

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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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