On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Right

subsisting-alongside-one-another of both in peace; the other the negative, the excluding of one by the other, and both relations are absolutely necessary. For the second we have grasped the rational relation as a subduing taken up into its concept, or as the absolute formal virtue that is courage. Through this second side of the relation, the necessity of war is posited for the shape and individuality of the ethical totality — a war which, because in it lies the free possibility that not merely individual determinacies but the entirety of them, as life, is annihilated, and indeed for the Absolute itself, or for the people, thereby preserves the ethical health of peoples in their indifference toward determinacies and toward the habituation and fixation of the same — just as the movement of the winds preserves lakes from the putrefaction which a lasting calm would produce in them, as a lasting, or even an eternal, peace would in peoples.

With the negative of infinity just now considered — since the shape of the ethical totality, and its individuality as a singular being turned outward, and this its movement, is determined as courage — the other side is immediately conjoined; namely, the subsistence of opposition; the one is infinity, negative, just as the other; the first is the negation of the negation, opposition against opposition; the second is negation and opposition itself in its subsistence as determinacies, or manifold reality. These realities in their pure inner formlessness and simplicity — that is, the feelings — are, in the practical sphere, feelings that reconstitute themselves out of difference and, out of the sublatedness of undifferentiated self-feeling, pass through an annihilation of intuitions and restore themselves; physical needs and enjoyments which, posited again for themselves within the totality, obey, in their infinite entanglements, one necessity, and form the system of universal mutual dependence with regard to physical needs, and of labor and accumulation for the same — which, as a science, constitutes the system of so-called political economy. Since this system of reality lies entirely within negativity and infinity, it follows for its relation to the positive totality that it must be treated by the latter in an entirely negative manner, and must remain subject to its dominion; what is by its nature negative must remain negative, and must not become something fixed. In order to prevent it from constituting itself for itself and becoming an independent power, it is not enough to set up the propositions that everyone has the right to live, that in a people the universal must see to it that every citizen has his livelihood, and that a perfect security and ease of acquisition should be present; this last, thought as an absolute principle, would rather

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  1. Editorial Note Avatar
    Editorial Note

    Editorial Note:

    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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