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On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Right

[p. 440]

|440| to bring it to a positive organisation. The exposition of the latter attempt will lead immediately to the consideration of the nature and the relation of the sciences of the ethical as philosophical sciences as well as of their relation to that which is called positive science of right, which indeed keeps itself outside philosophy and, in that it renounces it of itself, believes it can withdraw from its critique, yet at the same time also claims an absolute subsistence and a true reality, a pretension which is not to be indulged.

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Cross-reference: The empirical manner of treatment. On the critique of starting from the state of nature see § 194 Remark and § 258 Remark.

As for the manner of treatment of natural right which we have called the empirical, it cannot, in the first place, enter at all upon the determinacies and concepts of relation themselves, as to their matter, which it seizes upon and asserts under the name of fundamental principles, but it is precisely this separating and fixing of determinacies that must be negated. The nature of this separating brings with it that the scientific element can aim only at the form of unity and that, in an organic relation, out of the many kinds of qualities into which it can be divided, if they are not merely to be recounted – in order to attain a unity over this multitude – some determinacy must be singled out and regarded as the essence of the relation. But precisely thereby the totality of the organic is not attained, and the remainder of it, excluded from that chosen determinacy, comes under the dominion of the latter, which is raised to essence and purpose. Thus, for example, in order to cognise the relation of marriage, now the begetting of children, now the community of goods, etc., is posited, and from such a determinacy, which is made into the law as the essential, the whole organic relation is determined and contaminated; or of punishment [is]

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  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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