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On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Right

[p. 479]

|479| the possibility and the actuality of alien power, absolutely free. Since it negates + A as well as – A, it is subdued, but not coerced; it would have to suffer coercion only if + A were absolutely fixed in it, whereby an infinite chain of other determinacies could be shackled to it as to a determinacy. This possibility of abstracting from determinacies is without restriction, or there is no determinacy which is absolute, for this would contradict itself immediately; but freedom itself or infinity is indeed the negative, but the absolute, and its being-individual is absolute individuality taken up into the concept, negatively absolute infinity, pure freedom. This negatively absolute, pure freedom, is in its appearance death, and through the capacity for death the subject proves itself free and absolutely exalted above all coercion. Death is the absolute subduing; and because it is absolute, or because in it individuality becomes absolutely pure individuality – namely not the positing of a + A with exclusion of – A (which exclusion would be no true negation, but only the positing of – A as something external and at the same time of + A as a determinacy), but sublation of the plus as well as of the minus -, it is the concept of itself, thus infinite and the opposite of itself, or absolute liberation, and the pure individuality which is in death is its own opposite, universality. In subduing, then, there is freedom by its being directed purely to the sublation of a determinacy, both insofar as it is posited as positive and insofar as it is posited as negative, subjective and objective, not merely of one side of it, and so, considered in itself, keeps itself purely negative; or since the sublating itself can also be grasped and expressed positively by reflection, then the sublating of both sides of the determinacy appears as the perfectly equal positing of the determinate according to its two sides.

Applied to punishment, for example, in it alone is

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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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