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On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Right

[p. 500]

|500| It is, even for that real essence, absolutely the first that the wholly pure and indifferent shape and the ethical absolute consciousness be, and the second is the matter of indifference, that it as the real should relate itself to it only as its empirical consciousness, – as it is the first that an absolute work of art be, and only the second whether this determinate individual be its author or merely intuit and enjoy it. As necessary as that existence of the absolute is, so necessary also is this distribution, that some be the living spirit, the absolute consciousness and the absolute indifference of the ideal and the real of ethical life itself, but another its bodily and mortal soul and its empirical consciousness, which may not perfectly unite its absolute form and the inner essence, but yet enjoys the absolute intuition as of something, as it were, foreign to it and, for the real consciousness, through fear and trust as well as through obedience is one with it, for the ideal consciousness, however, in religion, the common god and the service of him, unites itself wholly with it.

But that which we have placed on the one side under the outward form of the first estate is the real absolute consciousness of ethical life. It is consciousness and as such, according to the negative side, pure infinity and the highest abstraction of freedom, that is, the relation of subduing driven to its sublation, or the free violent death; – according to the positive side, however, consciousness is the individuality and particularity of the individual. But this in itself negative, namely consciousness in general, of which the indicated distinctions are only its two sides, is absolutely taken up into the positive, its particularity and infinity or ideality absolutely into the universal and real in a perfect manner, which being-one is the Idea of the absolute life of ethical life. In this being-one of infinity and reality in the ethical organisation the divine nature – of which Plato says that it is an immortal animal,

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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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