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On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Right

[p. 508]

|508| becoming of them through education, are an endeavour after peculiar and separate ethical life, and that the striving after a peculiar positive ethical life is something vain and in itself impossible, and that with regard to ethical life the saying of the wisest men of antiquity alone is true: that to be ethical is to live in accordance with the customs of one’s country, – and with regard to education that which a Pythagorean answered to someone who asked what was the best education for his son: if you make him the citizen of a well-ordered people14)

14) Editors: Diogenes Laertios VIII, § 16

If thus the absolutely ethical has its proper organic body in the individuals and has its movement and vitality in the common being and doing of all, absolutely identical as universal and particular, and we have considered it just now in particularity, but in such a way that its essence be the absolutely identical, but in general in that identity, then it must also present itself in the form of universality and of cognition, as system of legislation, – so that this system perfectly expresses the reality or the living present customs, lest it happen, as is often the case, that what in a people is right and in actuality cannot be recognised from its laws, which clumsiness in bringing the true customs into the form of laws, and the anxiety of thinking these customs, of regarding them as its own and avowing them, is the sign of barbarism. But this ideality of the customs and their form of universality in the laws must, insofar as it subsists as ideality, at the same time again be perfectly united with the form of particularity, and so the ideality as such receive a pure absolute shape, hence be intuited and worshipped as the god of the people, and this intuition itself again have its stirring and joyful movement in a cult.

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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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