On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Right

[p. 489]

|489| and is formal ethical life has been shown above. The concept of this sphere is the real practical, considered subjectively that of feeling or of physical need and enjoyment, objectively that of labour and possession; and this practical, as it can occur according to its concept, taken up into indifference, is the formal unity or right possible in it, above which two the third is the absolute or the ethical. The reality, however, of the sphere of relative unity or of the practical and of right is constituted in the system of its totality as an estate of its own.

Thus, according to the absolute necessity of the ethical, there form two estates, of which the one, as the estate of the free, the individual of absolute ethical life, whose organs are the single individuals and which, considered from the side of its indifference, is the absolute living spirit, from the side of its objectivity the living movement and the divine self-enjoyment of this whole in the totality of individuals as its organs and members, whose formal or negative side, however, must likewise be the absolute one, namely labour, which is directed not at the annihilation of individual determinacies but at death, and whose product likewise is not anything individual but the being and preservation of the whole of the ethical organisation. To this estate Aristotle assigns as its business that for which the Greeks had the name πολιτεύειν, which expresses living in and with and for one’s people, leading a universal life belonging wholly to the public, or else philosophising, – which two businesses Plato, in keeping with his higher vitality, wants to see not separated but absolutely bound together. – Then an estate of the unfree, which is in the difference of need and labour and in the right and justice of possession and property, whose labour is directed at individuality and therefore does not include the danger of death in

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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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