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On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Right

[p. 465]

It is well to note here that the taking-up of the determinacy into the concept is understood in such a way that this taking-up is something formal, or that the determinacy is to remain, so that matter and form contradict each other, of which the former is determinate, the latter infinite. But were the content truly equated with the form, the determinacy with unity, no practical legislating would take place, but only an annihilating of the determinacy. Thus property itself is immediately opposed to universality; equated with it, it is sublated. – Immediately this annihilation of the determinacy through the taking-up into infinity, universality, also becomes troublesome to practical legislating. For if the determinacy is of such a kind that it itself expresses the sublating of a determinacy, then through the elevation of the sublating into the universal or into being-sublated both the determinacy which is to be sublated and the sublating are annihilated; so a maxim which relates to such a determinacy, which, thought in universality, annihilates itself, would not be capable of becoming the principle of a universal legislation, and would thus be immoral. Or: the content of the maxim, which is the sublating of a determinacy, raised into the concept, contradicts itself; if the determinacy is thought as sublated, the sublating of it falls away; or else this determinacy is to remain, and then again the sublating posited in the maxim is not posited, and the determinacy may thus remain or not, in no case is its sublating possible. But a maxim that is immoral according to the principle (because it contradicts itself) is, since it expresses the sublation of a determinacy, absolutely rational and thus absolutely moral; for the rational is, from its negative side, the indifference of determinacies, the being-sublated of the conditioned. Thus the determinacy of helping the poor expresses the sublation of the determinacy which is poverty; the maxim whose content is that determinacy, tested by elevating it to the principle of a

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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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