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On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Right

[p. 463]

|463| proposition can be made from it: property is property and otherwise nothing else, and this tautological production is the legislating of this, the practical reason: property, if property is, must be property. But if the opposite determinacy, negation of property, is posited, then through the legislation of the very same practical reason the tautology results: non-property is non-property; if there is no property, then that which wants to be property must be sublated. But it is precisely the interest to prove that property must be; it is concerned solely with that which lies outside the capacity of this practical legislating of pure reason, namely to decide which of the opposed determinacies must be posited; but that this have already happened before and one of the opposed determinacies be posited in advance, pure reason demands, and only then can it carry out its now superfluous legislating.

But the analytic unity and tautology of practical reason is not merely something superfluous, but, in the turn which it receives, something false, and it must be recognised as the principle of unethicality. Through the mere taking-up of a determinacy into the form of unity the nature of the being of it is supposed to change; and the determinacy which by its nature has another determinacy against it, the one of which is the negation of the other and for that very reason neither is something absolute (and it is indifferent to the function of practical reason which of the two it is, for it gives merely the empty form), is supposed, through this connection with the form of pure unity, itself to be made absolute, to be made law and duty. But where a determinacy and individuality is raised to an in-itself, there unreasonableness is posited and, in relation to the ethical, unethicality. – This transformation of the conditioned, unreal into an unconditioned and absolute is easy to recognise in its illegitimacy and to trace out on its sly path. The determinacy, taken up into the form

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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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