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On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Right

[p. 529]

|529| past, is that wherein the positive lies. And nature, although within a determinate shape it proceeds with even, yet not mechanically uniform but uniformly accelerated motion, nevertheless also enjoys a new shape which it has won; as it leaps into it, so it lingers in it. As the bomb gives a jolt at its culmination and then rests in it for a moment, or as heated metal does not soften like wax but leaps all at once into flux and lingers in it – for the appearance is the transition into the absolutely opposed, hence infinite, and this stepping forth of the opposed out of infinity or its nothing is a leap, and the existence of the shape in its newborn strength is at first for itself, before it becomes conscious of its relation to something alien -, so also the growing individuality has both the joyfulness of that leap and a duration of the enjoyment of its new form, until it gradually opens itself to the negative and in its downfall too is all at once and breaking.

If now the philosophy of ethical life teaches us to comprehend this necessity and to recognise the connection of its content, as well as the determinacy of the same, as absolutely bound up with spirit and as its living body, and sets itself against formalism, which regards what it can subsume under the concept of particularity as contingent and dead, then the philosophy of ethical life recognises at the same time that this vitality of individuality in general, whatever its shape may be, is a formal vitality; for the limitedness of what belongs to necessity, although absolutely taken up into indifference, is only a part of necessity, not absolute total necessity itself, hence always a non-correspondence of the absolute spirit and its shape. For this absolute shape, however, it cannot flee to the shapelessness of cosmopolitanism, nor to 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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