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On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Right

[p. 471]

|471| from this immediately in the following way. It is a condition of pure self-consciousness, and this pure self-consciousness, I, is the true essence and the absolute, notwithstanding which, however, it is conditioned, and its condition is that it proceed to a real consciousness, which [two forms] in this relation of being conditioned remain absolutely opposed to one another. That pure self-consciousness, the pure unity or the empty ethical law, the universal freedom of all, is opposed to real consciousness, that is, to the subject, the rational being, the individual freedom – which Fichte expresses in a more popular way as the presupposition that good faith is lost3), and upon this presupposition a system is founded through which, notwithstanding the separation of the concept and the subject of ethical life, but precisely for that reason only formally and externally – and this relation is called coercion – both are to be united. Since hereby this externality of oneness is absolutely fixed and posited as something absolutely in itself, inwardness, the rebuilding of the lost good faith, the oneness of universal and individual freedom, and ethical life are made impossible.

3) Editors: Naturrecht, T. I, S. 166 f.; SW, Bd. III, S. 139 f.

In the system of such an externality – and here we refer to the Fichtean as the most consistent presentation, which is the least formal, and instead really attempts a consistent system that would not need an ethical life and religion foreign to it – there can, as in everything that proceeds from conditioned to conditioned, either be shown no unconditioned, or, if one is posited, then it is the formal indifference, which has the conditioned differing outside itself: essence without form, might without wisdom, quantity without inner quality or infinity, rest without motion.

The supreme task in the arrangement

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One response to “On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Right”

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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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