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On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Right

[p. 464]

|464| of pure unity or of formal identity, produces, when the determinate concept is expressed as a proposition, the tautology of the formal proposition “the determinacy A is the determinacy A”. The form, or in the proposition: “the identity of subject and predicate is something absolute”, [brings] however only something negative or formal [forth], which does not concern the determinacy A itself at all; this content is for the form something thoroughly hypothetical. The absoluteness that is in the proposition according to its form, however, acquires in practical reason an entirely different meaning; it is namely also transferred to the content, which by its nature is something conditioned, and this non-absolute, conditioned thing is raised, contrary to its essence, to an absolute through that mixing. It is not the practical interest to produce a tautology, and on account of this idle form, which is nevertheless its only force, not so much fuss would be made of practical reason; through the mixing of the absolute form with the conditioned matter, however, the absoluteness of the form is unawares foisted on the unreal, conditioned element of the content, and in this perversion and sleight of hand lies the nerve of this practical legislation of pure reason. To the proposition “property is property” there is foisted, instead of its true meaning: “the identity which this proposition expresses in its form is absolute”, the meaning: “the matter of it, namely property, is absolute”, and forthwith every determinacy can be made duty. Arbitrary will has the choice among opposed determinacies, and it would be only a clumsiness if for some action no such ground could be found, one which no longer has merely the form of a probable ground as with the Jesuits, but receives the form of right and duty; and this moral formalism does not go beyond the moral art of the Jesuits and the principles of the doctrine of happiness, which coincide.

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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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