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On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Right

[p. 506]

|506| etc., expressed the determination of natural right – it would be a natural wrong, since, where such negations are laid at the foundation as realities, the ethical nature is placed in the highest ruin and misfortune.

But as these qualities are the reflex of absolute ethical life in the individual as the negative, yet as the individual that is in absolute indifference with the universal and the whole, hence its reflex in its pure consciousness, so there must also be a reflex of the same in its empirical consciousness, and such a reflex must constitute the ethical nature of the second estate, which is in fixed reality, in possession and property, and apart from bravery. It is this reflex of it for which the ordinary meaning of morality can fit more or less, – the formal setting-indifferent of the determinacies of the relation, hence the ethical life of the bourgeois or of the private person, for which the difference of the relations is fixed and which depends on them and is in them. A science of this morality is accordingly first of all the knowledge of these relations themselves, so that, insofar as they are considered in relation to the ethical, since this, for the sake of absolute fixity, can only be formal, precisely that enunciation of tautology mentioned above finds its place here: this relation is only this relation; if you are in this relation, then be, in reference to it, in it; for if in actions which have relations to this relation you do not act in reference to it, you destroy it, you sublate it. The true sense of this tautology includes at the same time immediately within itself that this relation itself is nothing absolute and hence also the morality that goes to it is something dependent and nothing truly ethical, which true sense, according to the above, results from this, that only the form of the concept, the analytic unity, is the absolute and hence negatively absolute on account of the content, which as a determinate contradicts the form.

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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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