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On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Right

[p. 486]

|486| indeed is in itself; but insofar as it is in itself, it is empty, or there is in it nothing absolute but precisely the pure abstraction, the wholly contentless thought of unity. It is not, say, an inference from previous experience, nor is it to be regarded as a contingent imperfection of the concrete and of the execution of an Idea true a priori; rather it is to be recognised that what is here called Idea, and a hope for a better future in this regard, is in itself null, and that a perfect legislation, as well as a true justice in the concrete of judicial power corresponding to the determinacy of the laws, is in itself impossible. As for the former, since the absolute is supposed to be in the determinacies as such, it is only the infinite, and there is posited precisely the same empirical infinity and in-itself endless determinability which is posited in the thought of a comparison of a determinate measure with an absolutely indeterminate line, or of a determinate line with an absolutely indeterminate measure, of the measuring of an infinite line or of the absolute dividing of a determinate line. As for the other, of the likewise infinitely many and infinitely variously formed intuitions which are the object of the judicial, each is determined more manifoldly with the growing multitude of determinations; that cultivation of distinctions by legislation makes each individual intuition more distinguishable and more cultivated, and the extension of legislation is not an approach to the goal of a positive perfection, which here, as shown above, has no truth, but only the formal aspect of increasing culture. And so that, in this manifoldness, the one of the judicial intuition of right and of judgement may organise itself, become a true one and whole, it is absolutely necessary that each individual one of the determinacies be modified, i.e. precisely as an absolute, being-for-itself, which is what it declares itself to be as law, be partly sublated, that is, that its being-absolute not be respected; and of a

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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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