On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Right

[p. 511]

|511| be established and determined through which they are positive sciences.

In the first place, then, the positive sciences comprehend under the actuality to which they pretend to relate not only the historical but also the concepts, principles, relations and in general much that in itself belongs to reason and is supposed to express an inner truth and necessity. To appeal, with regard to such things, to actuality and experience and to hold them fast as a positive against philosophy must be recognised in and for itself as inadmissible. What philosophy proves to be not real, of that it is impossible that it should truly occur in experience; and if positive science appeals to actuality and experience, philosophy can equally, according to the empirical relation, pronounce its proof of the non-reality of a concept asserted by positive science and deny that what positive science pretends to find in experience and actuality is found in them. The opining that such a thing is experienced, a contingent subjective view, philosophy will indeed concede; but positive science, when it pretends to find and to point out its representations and basic concepts in experience, wants thereby to assert something real, necessary and objective, not a subjective view. Whether something is a subjective view or an objective representation, an opining or truth, philosophy alone can decide. To positive science it can, ad hominem, pay back its own way, and besides denying it the fact that a representation of it occurs in experience, assert on the contrary that only the representation of philosophy is to be found in experience. That philosophy can point out its representation in experience, the ground of this lies immediately in the ambiguous nature of what is called experience. For it is not immediate intuition

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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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