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On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Right

[p. 509]

[IV]

Cross-reference: The estates and the relation of the ethical to the juridical: § 201 ff., § 303.

Having thus presented absolute ethical life in the moments of its totality and constructed its Idea, having also annihilated, as essenceless thought-things, the distinction prevailing in relation to it between legality and morality together with the connected abstractions of the universal freedom of a formal practical reason, and, not by some mixing of the two principles but by the sublation of them and the constitution of the absolute ethical identity, having determined the differences of the science of natural right and of morals according to the absolute Idea, we have established that their essence is not an abstraction but the vitality of the ethical and that their difference concerns only the external and negative and that this difference is at the same time the wholly inverted relation to the other, in that according to the latter natural right is to be given the formal and negative, morals however the absolute and positive as essence, but so that even this absolute, according to the truth, is no less a formal and negative and, what is here called formal and negative, is altogether simply nothing at all.

In order still to state the relation of natural right to the positive sciences of right, we now need only pick up its threads where we did not pursue it further, and designate the place where it runs out.

In advance we remark generally that philosophy, through the universality of the concept of a determinacy or of a potency, arbitrarily sets its boundary in relation to a determinate science. The determinate science is nothing other than the continuing presentation and analysis (the word taken in the higher sense) of how that which philosophy leaves undeveloped as a simple determinacy ramifies again and is itself totality. The possibility of such a development, however, lies

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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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