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On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Right

[p. 483]

|483| that it must be treated wholly negatively by it and remain subjected to its dominion; what is by its nature negative must remain negative and may not become something fixed. To prevent it from constituting itself for itself and becoming an independent might, it is not enough to set up the propositions that everyone has the right to live, that in a people the universal must see to it that every citizen has his livelihood, and that a perfect security and ease of acquisition be present; this last, thought as an absolute principle, would rather exclude a negative treatment of the system of possession and let it have its way completely and settle itself absolutely. But rather the ethical whole must keep it in the feeling of its inner nullity and hinder its shooting up, in respect of quantity and culture, to ever greater difference and inequality, towards which its nature tends; which, in every state too – more unconsciously and in the shape of an external natural necessity, from which the state itself would wish to be exempt, through the ever greater expense of the state itself, growing with the growth of the system of possession, and correspondingly rising imposts and thus a diminution of possession and a hampering of acquisition, most of all through war, which brings into manifold confusion whatever tends that way, as well as through the jealousy of other estates and the oppression of trade, partly with will, partly against their will through lack of understanding, etc. – is brought about to such degrees in which the positive ethical life of the state itself permits independence from the purely real system and the maintenance of the negative and restrictive posture.

Reality in the relationship in which it has just been considered, and of which physical need, enjoyment, possession and the objects of possession and enjoyment are different sides, is pure reality; it merely expresses the extremes of the relation. But the relation also contains an

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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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