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On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Right

[p. 470]

|470| willing subject are absolutely one, is – like the higher abstraction of infinity in general – the great side of the Kantian and Fichtean philosophy; but it has not remained faithful to this oneness, but, while it does acknowledge it as the essence and as the absolute, it posits the separation into one and many just as absolutely, the one with equal dignity beside the other. Hereby it is, on the one hand, not the positive absolute that would constitute the essence of both and in which they would be one, but the negative, or the absolute concept; and, on the other, that necessary oneness becomes formal, and the two opposed determinacies, posited as absolute, fall hereby in their subsistence under ideality, which is to that extent the mere possibility of both. It is possible that right and duty have reality independently, as a particular, separated from the subjects, and the subjects separated from that; but it is also possible that both be connected. And it is absolutely necessary that these two possibilities be particular and be distinguished, so that each found a science of its own: the one concerning the oneness of the pure concept and the subjects, or the morality of actions, the other concerning the non-oneness, or legality, and indeed in such a way that, when in this separation of the ethical into morality and legality these two become mere possibilities, for that very reason both are equally positive. The one is indeed negative for the other, but in this way both are; it is not the one that is the absolutely positive, the other the absolutely negative, but each is both in the relation to the other, and because, in the first place, both are only relatively positive, neither legality nor morality is absolutely positive or truly ethical. And then, because both, the one being as positive as the other, are absolutely necessary, the possibility that the pure concept and the subject of duty and of right are not one must be posited unalterably and absolutely.

The fundamental concepts of the system of legality result

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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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