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On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Right

[p. 516]

|516| but the one is simply tied to the other, and thereby each can immediately be derived from its opposite. But the logic of opining supposes, when one determinacy, an opposite, is posited, that the other, opposed determinacy can really be abstracted from and dispensed with, just as that logic, by virtue of the nature of its principle of contradiction, cannot comprehend at all that in such determinacies the opposite of each is wholly indifferent for the determination of intuition, and in this abstracting and negative essence the opposite is wholly equal to its opposite, still less that both together, like the freedom which is over against sensuousness, and sensuousness and coercion, are simply nothing real, but mere thought-things and entities of the imagination.

Insofar, then, as a science of right is positive by holding to opining and essenceless abstractions, its appeal to experience or to its determination of applicability to actuality or to common sense and the general mode of representation, or even its appeal to philosophy, has not the slightest sense.

If we now consider more closely the ground through which science becomes positive in the manner indicated, and weigh the ground of semblance and of opining in general, it turns out that it lies in the form, – namely in that what is ideal, an opposed, one-sided, and has reality only in absolute identity with the opposed, is isolated, posited as being for itself and pronounced as something real. It is this form by which intuition is immediately sublated and the whole, dissolved, ceases to be a whole and something real; this difference of the positive and the non-positive thus does not concern the content. It is possible through this form that not only, as in what was indicated above, a purely formal abstraction is fixed and falsely asserted as a truth

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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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