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On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Right

[p. 525]

|525| marriage laws, etc., wholly and solely from the character of the whole and its individuality, and thereby showed the empirical theorists, who believe they recognise the contingencies of their systems of the state and of laws from reason and have taken them from human understanding itself or even from universal experience, in a way comprehensible to them, that the reason and human understanding and experience from which the determinate laws derive are not a reason and human understanding a priori, nor an experience a priori, which would be an absolutely universal one, but wholly and solely the living individuality of a people – an individuality whose highest determinacies are again to be comprehended from a more universal necessity.

As it has been shown above, with regard to science, that every single potency can be fixed and science thereby become positive, so precisely this must be asserted of the ethical individual or the people. For according to necessity the totality, as the subsistence of the scattered determinacies, must present itself in it, and the individual link of the chain under which it is placed in the present must pass away and another enter. As the individual grows in this way, one potency stepping forth more strongly and the other receding, it happens that the parts which have organised themselves in the latter find themselves excluded and dead. This division, in which some reach out towards a new life, while the other, which has settled itself at the stage of a determinacy, stays behind and sees life flee from it, is possible only because the determinacy of a stage has been fixed and made formally absolute. The form of law, which has been given to the determinate custom and which is universality or the negative absolute of identity, gives it the semblance of something in itself; and if the mass of a people is great, then the part of it too that organises itself in that

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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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