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On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Right

[p. 524]

|524| if it has therefore preferred the misfortune and disgrace of the loss of independence to struggle and death, if it is so crudely sunk in the reality of animal life that it does not even raise itself to formal ideality, to the abstraction of a universal, and thus in the determination of the relations for the physical need cannot endure the relation of right but only that of personality, – or equally, if the reality of the universal and of right has lost all faith and all truth and it is unable to feel and enjoy the image of divinity in itself but must posit it outside itself and be content with it with a dull feeling, or with the wholly painful feeling of the wide distance and sublimity, then the feudal constitution and servitude have absolute truth, and this relation is the only possible form of ethical life and therefore the necessary and just and ethical one.

From this individuality of the whole and the determinate character of a people the whole system too, into which the absolute totality organises itself, is to be recognised; it is to be recognised how all parts of the constitution and of legislation, all determinations of the ethical relations are absolutely determined by the whole and form an edifice in which no connection and no ornament has been present for itself a priori, but each has come to be through the whole and is subordinate to it. In this sense Montesquieu founded his immortal work on the intuition of the individuality and character of peoples and, even if he did not raise himself to the most living Idea, yet absolutely did not deduce the individual institutions and laws from so-called reason, nor abstract them from experience and then raise them to something universal, but comprehended, like the higher relations of the parts belonging to the right of the state, so also the lower determinations of civil relations, down to testaments,

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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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