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On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Right

[p. 437]

|437| in them belongs not to something objective but to the intermediate thing between nothing and reality, the mixture of being and non-being, and of bringing about their confession that they are only in empirical opining, then its positive side has turned out from this aspect all the poorer and has not been able to give those sciences back to philosophy. On the other hand it has placed the absolute wholly in practical philosophy, and in this it is positive or dogmatic knowing. We must regard the critical philosophy, which also calls itself transcendental idealism, in general, but particularly in natural right, as the culminating point of that opposition which, as the circles on the surface of water spread out concentrically from the point where it is set in motion, finally lose in small movements the relation to a centre and become infinite, grew ever greater in earlier scientific endeavours out of the closedness of barbarism from weaker beginnings, until in the critical philosophy, through the absolute concept of infinity, it came to an understanding with itself and, as infinity, also sublates itself. All significance for the essence of science must therefore be denied to the earlier manners of treatment of natural right and to what would have to be regarded as different principles of it, because they are indeed in opposition and in negativity, but not in absolute negativity or in infinity, which alone is for science, but have the positive as little pure as the negative and are mixtures of both. Only the interest of a curiosity about the history of science could linger over them, both in order to compare them with the absolute Idea and to behold, in the distortion of it itself, the necessity with which the moments of the absolute form, warped by a determinacy which is principle, present themselves and, even under the dominion

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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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