On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Right

[p. 510]

|510| formally in this, that in the Idea there is immediately the law of the absolute form and of totality, according to which a determinacy is to be cognised and developed further. The real possibility, however, is present through this, that such a determinacy or potency not developed by philosophy is not an abstraction or a truly simple atom, but, like everything in philosophy, reality [is], and a reality is reality for this reason, that it is totality and itself the system of potencies; [to] present the potency as such is the development which belongs to the determinate science.

It follows from this that we could say for the time being that a good part of what is called the positive sciences of right, perhaps the whole of them, would fall within philosophy fully developed and expanded, and that they are therefore, because they constitute themselves as separate sciences, neither excluded from philosophy nor opposed to it; by the being-for-itself and the empirical distinction of this corps of sciences no true distinction of it from philosophy is posited. That they call themselves empirical sciences, which partly have their applicability in the actual world and also wish to make their laws and mode of procedure valid before the common mode of representation, partly relate to individual systems of existing constitutions and legislations and belong to a determinate people as well as a determinate time, determines no difference that would necessarily exclude them from philosophy, for nothing must be so applicable to actuality and so much justified before the general mode of representation, namely the truly general (for there are common modes of representation which are very particular in this), as what comes from philosophy, just as also nothing can [must] be so individual, living and existing as precisely the same. In order to be able to speak of the relation of these sciences to philosophy, a difference must first

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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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