On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Right

[p. 438]

|438| of a restricted principle, nevertheless dominate these attempts, – and also to see the empirical state of the world reflected in the ideal mirror of science.

For as to the latter, in the connection of all things the empirical existence and the state of all sciences will indeed likewise express the state of the world, but most immediately the state of natural right, because it relates directly to the ethical, the mover of all human things, and, insofar as the science of it has an existence, belongs to necessity, must be one with the empirical shape of the ethical, which is likewise in necessity, and must as science express the same in the form of universality.

As to the former, the only true difference in the principle of a science that can be recognised is whether it is in the absolute or whether it is outside the absolute unity, in opposition. In the latter case, however, it could not be science at all, if its principle were not some incomplete and relative unity or the concept of a relation, were it only the empty abstraction of relation itself, under the name of attractive force or force of being-one. To sciences whose principle is no concept of relation, or only the empty force of being-one, nothing ideal is left but the first ideal relation according to which the child is different as against the world, the form of representation, into which they put the empirical qualities and whose manifoldness they can recount; they would preeminently be called empirical sciences. But because practical sciences by their nature aim at something really universal or at a unity which is the unity of the different, so in practical empiricism too the feelings must include in themselves not pure qualities but relations, whether negative, like the drive to self-preservation, or positive, as love and hatred, sociability and the like; and the more scientific

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  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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