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On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Right

[p. 513]

|513| as coercion, but philosophy proves the nullity of this concept and positive science claims experience and actuality, that coercion is after all really something real, that coercion really takes place, the non-reality of it proved by philosophy can, with just as much right and with appeal to experience and actuality, be expressed thus: that there is no coercion at all and never is a human being coerced nor has ever been coerced. For here it depends entirely on the explanation of the appearance, whether for the purpose of the representation of coercion something is regarded as a merely external or rather as an inner. Wherever, then, the existence of coercion is to be demonstrated, from one and the same appearance precisely the opposite can be shown, namely that it is not a coercion, but rather an expression of freedom; for by its being taken up into the form of representation and thereby determined through the inner, the ideal, the subject is in freedom relative to it. And if that which is to be regarded as external and as coercion is transposed into the inner itself, in order to remove the opposition of the inner or freedom, and a psychological coercion is accordingly asserted, this taking up of the external into the inner helps just as little. For thought remains absolutely free, and psychological or thought-coercion is unable to bind it. The possibility of sublating the determinacy which is represented and is to serve as coercion is absolute; it is absolutely possible that the loss of a determinacy with which punishment threatens be taken upon oneself and that be given up which the law wants to wrest away in the punishment. If, therefore, in the explanation of an appearance the representation of a determinacy is to act or to have acted as coercion, then the explanation from the opposite, that the appearance is an expression of freedom, is just as absolutely possible. That the sensuous incentive, whether it be that which is to drive to the action or that which is to

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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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