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On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Right

[p. 527]

But for the correct distinction between what is dead and has no truth and what is still living, one must recall a distinction which can escape the formal view and which must prevent that which is in itself negative from being taken for living law, and thus the dominion of the laws that are in themselves negative for the animation of the organisation. For laws which withdraw individual determinacies and parts from the sovereignty of the whole, exclude the power of the latter from them and constitute the exceptions of the individual from the universal, are in themselves something negative and signs of incipient death, which becomes ever more threatening for life the more negative things and exceptions there are, and the more these laws, which tend towards this dissolution, become too powerful for the true ones, which constitute the unity of the whole. To the positive and the dead, therefore, must be reckoned not only that which belongs wholly to a past and no longer has a living present and has only a senseless and, because it is without inner meaning, shameless power, but that too is without truly positive truth which fixes the negative, the dissolution and separation from the ethical totality; the former is the history of a bygone life, the latter, however, the determinate representation of present death. Thus in a dissolved people, as for example, indeed, in the German, the laws may seem to have truth if one does not distinguish whether they are laws of the negative and of separation or laws of the truly positive and of unity. Immediately with the fact that the laws organising a whole have significance only for a past and relate to a shape and individuality which has long since been stripped off as a dead husk, that they have interest only for parts and thereby posit not a living relation to the whole but a force and dominion alien to it, and that that in which a living bond and inner unity presents itself, as

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  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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