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On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Right

[p. 504]

|504| From this Idea of the nature of absolute ethical life there now results a relation of which something remains to be said, the relation of the ethical life of the individual to real absolute ethical life, and the relation of the sciences of these, of morals and natural right. For since real absolute ethical life comprehends within itself, united, infinity or the absolute concept, pure individuality simply and in its highest abstraction, it is immediately the ethical life of the individual, and conversely the essence of the ethical life of the individual is simply real and therefore universal absolute ethical life; the ethical life of the individual is a pulse-beat of the whole system and itself the whole system. Here we also notice an intimation of language which, otherwise rejected, is perfectly justified by what has gone before: that it lies in the nature of absolute ethical life to be a universal or customs, that thus the Greek word which designates ethical life, and the German one, excellently express this its nature, but that the more recent systems of ethical life, since they make a being-for-itself and individuality their principle, cannot fail to exhibit their relation in these words, and this inner intimation proves so powerful that those systems, in order to designate their matter, could not misuse those words for it, but adopted the word morality, which indeed, according to its origin, likewise points that way, but, because it is more a word merely coined, does not so immediately resist its worse meaning.

Absolute ethical life, however, according to what has gone before, is so essentially the ethical life of all that one cannot say of it that it is mirrored as such in the individual; for it is so much his essence as the ether pervading nature is the inseparable essence of the shapes of nature, and as the ideality of their appearing forms, space, in none of them particularises itself in the least; but as the lines and corners of the crystal, in which it expresses the outer form

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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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