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On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Right

From this Idea of the nature of absolute ethical life there now follows a relation still to be discussed, the relation of the ethical life of the individual to real absolute ethical life, and the relation of the sciences of these, of morals and of natural right. For since real absolute ethical life comprehends within itself infinity, or the absolute concept, pure singularity taken simply and in its highest abstraction, unified within itself, it is immediately the ethical life of the individual, and conversely, the essence of the ethical life of the individual is absolutely the real and therefore universal absolute ethical life; the ethical life of the individual is a pulse-beat of the whole system, and itself the whole system. We note here also a hint given by language, one otherwise dismissed, but which is fully vindicated by what has preceded — namely, that it lies in the nature of absolute ethical life to be a universal, or customs [Sitten]; that, accordingly, the Greek word that designates ethical life [Sittlichkeit], and the German word as well, excellently express this its nature; but that the newer systems of ethics, since they make a being-for-itself and singularity into their principle, cannot fail to expose their own relation to these words; and this inner hint proves itself so powerful that those systems, in order to designate their own matter, could not misuse those words for the purpose, but instead adopted the word morality [Moralität], which, though by its origin it points in the same direction, being more a word freshly coined, does not so immediately resist its worse meaning.

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

  1. Editorial Note Avatar
    Editorial Note

    Editorial Note:

    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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