On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Right

[p. 481]

|481| practical sciences will result. Since what matters here first is the determination of these relations contained herein, and the side of infinity must therefore be brought out, we presuppose the positive, that absolute ethical totality is nothing other than a people, which will also already make itself clear in the negative that we consider here, in the following moments of it.

In absolute ethical life, then, infinity or form, as the absolutely negative, is nothing other than the subduing itself, grasped above, taken up into its absolute concept, in which it does not relate to individual determinacies but to the whole actuality and possibility of them, namely life itself, so that the matter is equal to the infinite form, but in such a way that the positive of it is the absolutely ethical, namely belonging to a people, the oneness with which the individual proves in the negative, through the danger of death alone, in an unequivocal manner. Through the absolute identity of the infinite, or of the side of the relation, with the positive, the ethical totalities, such as the peoples are, take shape, constitute themselves as individuals and thereby place themselves as individual against individual peoples; this placing and individuality is the side of reality, and thought without it they are thought-things; it would be the abstraction of essence without the absolute form, which essence would be essenceless precisely thereby. This relationship of individuality to individuality is a relation and therefore a doubled one: the one the positive, the calm equal subsistence of both beside one another in peace, the other the negative, the excluding of the one by the other; and both relationships are absolutely necessary. For the second we have grasped the rational relation as a subduing taken up into its concept, or as absolute formal virtue, which is bravery. Through this second side of the relationship, the

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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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