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On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Right

[p. 442]

|442| unity of opposites, considered in relation to these as real, is their necessity. But because the matter of the formal unity of which we are speaking is not the whole of the opposites but only one of the opposites, a determinacy, the necessity too is only a formal, analytical one and relates merely to the form of an identical or analytical proposition in which the determinacy can be presented, through which absoluteness of the proposition, however, an absoluteness of the content is also obtained by stealth, and thus laws and fundamental principles are constituted.

But since this empirical science finds itself in the manifoldness of such fundamental principles, laws, purposes, duties, rights, none of which is absolute, there must at the same time hover before it the image and the need of the absolute unity of all these unconnected determinacies and of an original simple necessity, and we consider how it will satisfy this demand descending from reason, or how the absolute Idea of reason will be presented in its moments under the dominion of the opposition of the many and the one, which is insurmountable for this empirical knowing. It is partly interesting in itself to behold, in this scientific endeavour and in its turbid medium, even the reflection and the dominion of the absolute, but at the same time its perversity; partly the forms which the moments of the absolute have received therein have become a kind of prejudices and of undoubted, generally valid thoughts, whose nullity critique must show, in order to justify science in taking no regard of them, – which demonstration of their nullity takes place most evidently by pointing out the reality-less ground and soil out of which they have grown and whose taste and nature grow into them.

In the first place, what hovers before empirical science is scientific

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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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