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On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Right

[p. 498]

|498| but also the nearness of the death of this body that bore it, and that the antitheses which it evoked in general, and which before, even in their more serious and more far-reaching appearance, such as wars, it could rouse and pursue as contingencies and with like levity, it had no longer to take for shadow-images but for a fate growing overpowering.

On another side, however, there is the other comedy, whose entanglements are without fate and without true struggle because the ethical nature is itself caught up in that; the knots are tied here not in playful antitheses but in antitheses serious for this ethical drive, yet comic for the spectator, and the rescue against them is sought in an affectation of character and absoluteness, which constantly finds itself deceived and deposed. The ethical drive (for it is not the conscious absolute ethical nature that plays in this comedy) must, to put it briefly, transform what subsists into the formal and negative absoluteness of right and thereby give to its anxiety the opinion of firmness for its possession, raise its belongings through treaties and contracts and all conceivable hedgings-in of clauses to something secure and certain, deduce the systems concerning them from experience and reason, as from certainty and necessity themselves, and ground them with the most profound ratiocinations, – but, as subterranean spirits in the poet saw the plantations which they laid out in the infernal wastes swept away by the next storm wind, so through the next turning over or even upheaval of the earth-spirit see half and whole sciences, which had been proved from experience and reason, washed away, one system of right displaced by another, here humanity take the place of harshness, there at the same time the will of power take the place of security of contract, and in the scientific as in actuality the best-acquired and most assured possessions of principles and rights

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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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