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On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Right

[p. 469]

|469| reproduces itself infinitely, allows only a relative identity, and thus is itself as infinity the opposite of itself, absolute finitude. And in that it is thus isolated, it is itself only the powerless form, abandoned by the truly annihilating might of reason, which takes the determinacies up into itself and harbours them without annihilating them, but on the contrary perpetuates them.

It is on the presented opposition, the fixing of it as a reality and its incomplete connection as a relative identity, that the more recent determination of the concept of natural right and of its relation in the whole science of the ethical depends, and we must consider what has so far been set out in general in this closer relation, how the separation, once posited as insurmountable, appears in the science of natural right in its peculiar way.

The absolute concept, which is the principle of opposition and opposition itself, presents itself, fixed as it is, in separation in such a way that, as pure unity, it is opposed to itself as plurality, so that it remains the absolute concept under the form of pure unity as well as of pure plurality, and hence in the form of plurality is not a manifoldness of differently determined concepts but, as under unity, so also under plurality is subsumed; in many determinate concepts it subsumes and is not a many but one. The absolute concept, as itself a plurality, is a multitude of subjects, and to these it is opposed, in the form of pure unity, as absolute quantity, against this its qualitative positedness. Both are therefore posited: an inner oneness of the opposed, which is the essence of both, the absolute concept, and a separatedness of the same under the form of unity, in which it is right and duty, and under the form of plurality, in which it is thinking and willing subject. That first side, according to which the essence of right and duty and the essence of the thinking and

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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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