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On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Right

[p. 476]

|476| real, nothing in itself, but this will become still clearer if we show it in it itself, according to its concept and according to the determinacy which the relation of this relationship has, – for that the relation in general is nothing in itself is partly for dialectic to prove, partly has been briefly presented above.

Of the concepts in general that are connected with coercion and express precisely this relation, it has partly already been shown that they are essenceless abstractions, thought-things or beings of the imagination, without reality; there occurs, in the first place, the null abstraction of a concept of the universal freedom of all, which would be separated from the freedom of individuals, then, on the other side, precisely this freedom of the individual, equally isolated. Each posited for itself is an abstraction without reality; but both, absolutely identical and then posited merely in this first underlying identity, are something wholly other than those concepts which have their meaning solely in non-identity. Then natural or original freedom is to restrict itself through the concept of universal freedom; but that freedom which can be posited as restrictable is for that very reason again nothing absolute; and then it is in itself contradictory to compose an Idea that, with absolute necessity, the freedom of the individual be adequate to the concept of universal freedom through the externality of coercion – which means nothing other than that it is represented that the individual is nevertheless, through something not absolute, absolutely equal to the universal. In the concept of coercion itself something external is immediately posited for freedom; but a freedom for which something truly external, alien, were, is no freedom; its essence and its formal definition is precisely that nothing is absolutely external.

The view of freedom is to be wholly rejected according to which it is supposed to be a choice between opposed determinacies, so that, if + A and – A were at hand, it

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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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