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On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Right

[p. 521]

|521| a positive just as much as the particular, for, as was shown earlier, it becomes positive through the form of opposition in which it is present in that abstraction. But the real is absolutely an identity of the universal and the particular, and therefore that abstraction, and the positing of the one of the opposites which arise through the abstraction, of the universal as something existing in itself, cannot take place. In general, if formal thinking is consistent, then, when it grasps the particular as the positive, it must have absolutely no content at all; in the pure reason of formal thinking every multiplicity and distinguishability must drop out altogether, and it is not at all foreseeable how it should arrive even at the most meagre multiplicity of rubrics and chapters; just as those who grasp the essence of the organism as the abstraction of a vital force must, properly speaking, grasp the limbs and the brain and the heart and all the viscera as something particular, contingent and positive, and leave them out.

Because, like everything living, the ethical too is absolutely an identity of the universal and the particular, it is an individuality and shape; it bears particularity, necessity, relation, i.e. relative identity, within itself, but indifferentiated, assimilated, and thereby it is free in it, and this, which can be regarded by reflection as particularity, is not a positive nor something opposed to the living individual, which is thereby connected with contingency and necessity, but alive; this side is its inorganic nature, but in shape and individuality it an-organises itself. Thus, to name the most general, the determinate climate of a people and its period belong, in the formation of the general kind, to necessity, and of the widely extended chain of this necessity only one link falls upon its present, which is to be comprehended, on the former side, from geography, on the other from

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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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