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On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Right

[p. 519]

|519| self-contradictory if for the right of nations the relation of absolutely self-subsistent and free peoples, which are ethical totalities, is to be determined according to the relation of the civil contract, which goes immediately to the individuality and dependence of the subjects. Thus the right of the state too could relate as such simply to the individual and, as a perfect police, want wholly to permeate the being of the individual and so annihilate civil freedom, which would be the harshest despotism; as Fichte wants all doing and being of the individual as such to be supervised, known and determined by the universal and abstraction opposed to him. The moral principle too could want to force its way into the system of absolute ethical life and place itself at the head of public as well as private right and also of the right of nations, – which would be as much the greatest weakness as the deepest despotism and the total loss of the Idea of an ethical organisation, since the moral principle, like that of civil right, is only in the finite and the individual.

Just as in science such a fixing and isolating of the individual principles and their systems, and their encroachment upon others, is prevented by philosophy alone, in that the part does not recognise its limit but rather must have the tendency to constitute itself as a whole and an absolute, whereas philosophy, in the Idea of the whole, stands above the parts and thereby both holds each within its limit and also, through the loftiness of the Idea itself, prevents the part from proliferating, in its partitioning, into endless pettiness; so too in reality this restricting and positing-as-ideal of the potencies presents itself as the history of the ethical totality, in which it, firm in its absolute equilibrium, both sways up and down in time between the opposed

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    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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