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On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Right

[p. 507]

Those qualities, however, which are truly ethical, in that in them the particular or negative appears, taken up purely into indifference, may be called ethical qualities and only then virtues when they individualise themselves again in a higher energy and, yet within absolute ethical life, become as it were proper living shapes, like the virtues of an Epameinondas, Hannibal, Caesar and some others. As such energies they are shapes and hence not in themselves absolute, any more than the shapes of the other organic formations, but the stronger emergence of one side of the Idea of the whole, and the morals of the virtues or – if we wish to assign morals in general to morality and were to take for the presentation of virtue the name ethics – ethics must therefore be only a natural description of the virtues.

Now as this has relation to the subjective or negative, so the negative in general must be distinguished as the persistence of difference and as the lack of it; that first negative is what was spoken of a moment ago, but this other negative, the lack of difference, presents the totality as something enveloped and non-unfolded, in which movement and infinity are not in their reality. The living under this form of the negative is the becoming of ethical life and education, according to its determinacy, the appearing continuing sublation of the negative or subjective, for the child, as the form of the possibility of an ethical individual, is a subjective or negative, whose coming to manhood is the ceasing of this form and whose education is the discipline or subjugation of it; but the positive and the essence is that, nursed at the breast of universal ethical life, it lives in its absolute intuition at first as of an alien essence, comprehends it ever more and so passes over into the universal spirit. It is evident from this of itself that those virtues as well as absolute ethical life, no more than the

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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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