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On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Right

[p. 522]

|522| history. But into this link the ethical individuality has organised itself, and the determinacy of this link does not concern it, but necessity; for the ethical vitality of the people consists precisely in this, that it has a shape in which determinacy is, but not as a positive (according to our use of this word so far), but absolutely united with universality and enlivened by it. And this side is also very important, in order that it may be recognised how philosophy teaches us to honour necessity, both because it is a whole and only limited insight clings to individuality and despises it as a contingency, and also because it sublates the view of individuality and contingency by showing of it how it does not hinder life in itself, but that life, in letting it subsist as it is according to necessity, at the same time also wrests it from this, permeates and enlivens it. Just as little as the element of water, to which one part of the animal world an-organises itself, and the element of air, to which another does, are, because they are individual elements, something positive or dead, the former for the fish, the latter for the bird, just as little is this form of ethical life, in which it organises itself in this climate and in this period of a particular and of the general culture, something positive in it. As the totality of life is in the nature of the polyp just as much as in the nature of the nightingale and of the lion, so the world-spirit has in every shape its duller or more developed, but absolute self-feeling, and has enjoyed, in every people, under every whole of customs and laws, its essence and itself.

Outwardly the stage is equally justified, – which outer side belongs to necessity as such, for even in this abstraction of necessity individuality is again absolutely sublated through the Idea; this individuality of the stage of the polyp and of the nightingale and of the lion is a potency of a whole, and in this connection

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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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