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On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Right

[p. 505]

|505| of its nature, are negations, so ethical life, insofar as it expresses itself in the individual as such, is a negative. In the first place it cannot express itself in the individual unless it is his soul, and it is so only insofar as it is a universal and the pure spirit of a people. The positive is by nature prior to the negative, or, as Aristotle puts it, the people is by nature prior to the individual; for if the individual, separated, is nothing self-subsistent, he must, like all parts, be in one unity with the whole; but whoever cannot be communal or, from self-sufficiency, needs nothing, is no part of the people and therefore either beast or god.13) Then, insofar as it expresses itself in the individual as such, it is posited under the form of negation, i.e. it is the possibility of the universal spirit, and the ethical qualities that belong to the individual, such as courage or temperance or thrift or generosity etc., are negative ethical life – namely that in the particularity of the individual no individuality be truly fixed and no real abstraction be made – and possibilities or capacities to be in universal ethical life. These virtues, which are in themselves possibilities and in a negative signification, are the object of morals, and one sees that the relation of natural right and morals has in this way been inverted, namely that to morals falls only the domain of the in itself negative, but to natural right the truly positive, according to its name, that it is to construct how the ethical nature attains its true right; whereas – if both the negative and this as the abstraction of externality, of the formal moral law, of the pure will and of the will of the individual, and then the syntheses of these abstractions, such as coercion, the limitation of the freedom of the individual by the concept of universal freedom

13) Editors: Politik I, 2

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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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