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On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Right

[p. 528]

|528| means for its purpose, no longer has the slightest adequacy, and thus this means has neither sense nor truth – for the truth of the means lies in its being adequate to the purpose, through which innermost untruth of the whole it then also follows that in the science of philosophy in general, in ethical life, equally in religion, little that is true can any longer be, – immediately with this the dissolution determines and fortifies itself and establishes itself in a system of the negative, thus giving itself the formal semblance both of cognition and of laws whose inner essence is nothing. When the cognition and science of such a people expresses itself in saying that reason recognises and knows nothing and is only in empty freedom, as a flight, in nothingness and its semblance, then the content and essence of the negative legislation is that there is no law, no unity, no whole; that first untruth is therefore the one which is unconscious and unreflective, but this second is the one which arrogates the form to itself and thereby fortifies itself.

It is thus not philosophy which takes the particular for a positive because it is a particular, but only insofar as, outside the absolute connection of the whole, it has won independence as a separate part. The absolute totality checks itself as necessity in each of its potenc[ies], brings itself forth upon it as totality, repeats there both the preceding potencies and anticipates the following ones; but one of them is the greatest power, in whose colour and determinacy the totality appears, without however being anything restrictive for life, as little as water is for the fish, air for the bird. It is at the same time necessary that the individuality progress, metamorphose itself, and that what belongs to the ruling potency grow weak and die off, so that all stages of necessity may appear in it as such; but the misfortune of the period of transition, that this strengthening of the new culture has not absolutely purified itself from the

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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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