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On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Right

[p. 520]

|520| terms, now admonishing the right of the state of its determinacy through a slight preponderance of the civil, now making breaches and fissures through the preponderance of the former in the latter, and thus on the one hand reviving every system in general for a time through a more forceful indwelling, on the other reminding all of them, in their separation, of their temporality and dependence, – and also destroys their proliferating expansion and their self-organising by confounding them all at once in single moments, presenting them as drawn into itself and, reborn out of the unity, with the recollection of this dependence and with the feeling of their weakness if they want to be for themselves, letting them go forth again.

This character of positivity of the sciences of right concerns the form through which a potency isolates itself and posits itself as absolute; and from this side, like religion, and whatever else it may be, every philosophical science too can be perverted and contaminated. But we must consider positivity from the side of the matter as well. For although both what we earlier called positive and what we now consider as matter are something particular, nevertheless earlier we considered the external connection of the form of universality with particularity and determinacy, whereas now we consider the particular as such.

And in this respect we must above all take up the cause, against formalism, of that which can be posited as positive according to its matter; for formalism tears apart intuition and its identity of the universal and the particular, sets the abstractions of the universal and the particular over against one another, and what it can exclude from that emptiness but subsume under the abstraction of particularity counts for it as the positive, – without considering that through this opposition the universal becomes

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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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