grundlinien.de

On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Right

[p. 499]

|499| laid waste – and either suppose that it is their own efforts, hovering with reason and will above fate, which labour away in such material and which had brought about such changes, or else become heated over them as something unexpected and improper, and first call upon all the gods against such necessity and then submit to it. In both cases the ethical drive, which seeks in these finitudes an absolute infinity, gives only the farce of its faith and of its undying delusion, which – darkest where it is brightest – is already in loss and wrong where it supposes itself to rest in the arms of justice, reliability and of enjoyment itself.

Comedy separates the two zones of the ethical from one another in such a way that it lets each prevail purely for itself, so that in the one the antitheses and the finite are an essenceless shadow, in the other, however, the absolute is a delusion. The true and absolute relation, however, is that the one shines in earnest into the other, each [is] in bodily reference with the other, and that they are for one another reciprocally the serious fate; the absolute relation is therefore set forth in tragedy.

For although in the living shape or the organic totality of ethical life that which makes up its real side is in the finite and therefore, in and for itself, cannot indeed take up its bodily essence perfectly into its divinity, it nevertheless already in itself expresses its absolute Idea, though distorted. It does not indeed unite the moments of it, held apart as necessity, inwardly within itself into absolute infinity, but has this unity only as an imitated negative independence, namely as the freedom of the individual; yet this real essence is nevertheless absolutely bound to the absolute indifferent nature and shape of ethical life, and if it must intuit the latter only as something foreign, it nevertheless intuits it and is one with it in spirit.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97

DE

Comments

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)

Leave a Reply