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On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Right

[p. 477]

|477| would consist in determining itself either as + A or as – A, and were absolutely bound to this Either-Or. Something like this possibility of choice is absolutely an empirical freedom, which is one with empirical common necessity and absolutely not separable from it. It is rather the negation, or ideality, of the opposed, of + A as well as of – A, the abstraction of the possibility that neither of the two is; something external would be for it only insofar as it were determined solely as + A or solely as – A, but it is precisely the opposite of this and nothing external for it, and so no coercion is possible for it.

Every determinacy is, according to its essence, either + A or – A, and to the + A the – A, as to the – A the + A, is indissolubly chained; as soon as the individual has placed itself in the determinacy of + A, it is also bound to – A, and – A is something external for it and not under its power, but it would be, for the [sake] of the absolute connection of + A with – A, immediately through the determinacy of + A under an alien power of – A, and the freedom which would consist in choosing to determine itself either as + A or as – A would not get out of necessity at all. If it determines itself as + A, it has not annihilated – A, but this subsists, with absolute necessity, as something external for it, and so conversely, if it determines itself as – A. It is freedom solely in that it, positively or negatively, unites – A with + A and so ceases to be in the determinacy + A. In the union of both determinacies both are annihilated; + A – A = 0. If this nothing is thought only relatively to + A and – A, the indifferent A itself as a determinacy and a plus or minus against another minus or plus, then absolute freedom is just as exalted above this opposition as above every other opposition and every externality, and absolutely incapable of any coercion, and coercion has no reality at all.

But this Idea of freedom seems itself to be an abstraction,

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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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