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On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Right

[p. 466]

|466| universal legislation, will prove to be false, for it annihilates itself. If it is thought that the poor are helped universally, then there are either no poor at all any more or nothing but poor, and then there remain none who can help, and so in both cases the help would fall away; the maxim thus, thought as universal, sublates itself. But should the determinacy which is the condition of the sublating, namely poverty, remain, then the possibility of help remains, but as possibility, not as actuality, as the maxim states; if poverty is to remain so that the duty to help the poor can be exercised, then through that letting-remain of poverty the duty is immediately not fulfilled. Thus the maxim to defend one’s fatherland against enemies with honour, and infinitely many more, sublate themselves when thought as the principle of a universal legislation; for that one, e.g., thus extended, sublates the determinacy of a fatherland as well as of the enemies and of the defence.

Just as little as unity has the pure negative meaning of the mere sublating of determinacies, just as little is it the true unity of intuition or the positive indifference of determinacies, and the comparison with the latter will make the perverted essence of that unity clearer from another side. That unity of practical reason, namely, is essentially affected with a difference; be it that it is posited as the fixing of a determinacy, then others are immediately excluded by this, posited negatively, or as an analytic proposition, then the identity of it, this its form, contradicts its content. Which can also be grasped thus: as a proposition it contradicts, with its content, the demand made on the proposition to be a judgement; something was supposed to be said with the proposition, but with the identical proposition nothing is said, for it is not a judgement, because the relation of subject to predicate is merely formal and no difference of them at all is posited. Or let the unity be taken as universality, then it has altogether

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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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