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On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Right

[p. 523]

|523| it is honoured. Above the individual stages hovers the Idea of totality, which however reflects itself back out of its whole scattered image and beholds and recognises itself therein; and this totality of the extended image is the justification of the individual as something subsisting. It is therefore the formal standpoint that brings the form of particularity to bear on an individuality and sublates the vitality in which particularity is real, – but the empirical standpoint that, where the reality of a determinate stage is posited, demands a higher one. The higher one, even in its developed reality, and empirically, is equally present; the higher development of the life of the plant is in the polyp, the higher development of the polyp in the insect, etc. It is only empirical unreason that wants to see in the polyp the empirical presentation of the higher stage of the insect; the polyp that were not a polyp remains nothing but this determinate dead piece of matter standing in an empirical relation with me, which is dead and matter in that I posit it as an empty possibility of being something else, which emptiness is death. If it is absolutely without an empirical relation that the concern is with the higher presentation, then it is to be found, for it must be present according to absolute necessity. – Thus, e.g., the feudal constitution may well appear as something wholly positive; but in the first place, from the side of necessity, it is not an absolute individual but absolutely within the totality of necessity; inwardly, however, in regard to life itself, whether it is positive depends on whether the people has truly organised itself in it as an individuality, completely fills the shape of that system and vitally permeates it, whether the law of these relations is custom. If, then, the genius of a nation is in general lower and weaker – and the weakness of ethical life is hardest in barbarism and in formal culture – if they let themselves be defeated by another, must lose their independence,

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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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