Tag: Concept

First Section. Property The person must give itself an external sphere of its freedom in order to be as Idea. Because the person is, in this first and still wholly abstract determination, the will that is infinite in and for itself, that which is distinguished from it, and which can constitute the sphere of its…

That which is immediately different from the free spirit is, for it and in itself, the external as such – a thing, something unfree, impersonal, and without rights. Thing, like the objective, has opposite meanings: on the one hand, when one says, that is the point – it is the thing, not the person, that…

The person, as the immediate concept and hence also as essentially a single individual, has a natural existence, partly within itself, partly as one to which it relates as to an external world. – Here, in the case of the person, which is itself still in its first immediacy, the discussion concerns only these things…

The person has the right to place its will into any thing, which thereby becomes mine; the thing, since it has no such purpose in itself, receives its determination and soul from my will – the absolute right of appropriation which human beings have over all things. That so-called philosophy which ascribes to immediate individual…

That I have something in my own external power constitutes possession, just as the particular aspect, that I make something mine out of natural need, drive, and arbitrary will, is the particular interest of possession. But the aspect that, as free will, I become objective to myself in possession and thereby first become an actual…

Second Section. Contract Property, of which the side of determinate being, or of externality, is no longer merely a thing but contains within itself the moment of a will (and hence of another will), comes about through contract — as the process in which the contradiction is displayed and mediated: that I am and remain…

I can alienate my property not merely (§ 65) as an external thing; rather, through the concept, I must alienate it as property, so that my will may be objective to me as existing. But according to this moment, my will, as alienated, is at the same time an other will. That, then, in which…

This relation is thus the mediation of a will identical in owners existing for themselves in absolute distinction, and it contains this: that each, through his own will and that of the other, ceases to be an owner, remains an owner, and becomes an owner; — the mediation of the will to give up one…

Third Section. Wrong In the contract, right in itself is present as something posited, its inner universality as something common to arbitrary will and particular will. This appearance of right, in which right itself and its essential determinate being, the particular will, coincide immediately — that is, contingently — proceeds, in wrong, into semblance —…

Right, which, as something particular and hence manifold, as against its universality and simplicity existing in itself, acquires the form of a semblance, is such a semblance, in part, in itself or immediately; in part, it is posited, through the subject, as semblance; and in part, it is posited simply as null — unwitting or…

A. Non-Malicious Wrong Taking possession (§ 54) and contract, taken by themselves and according to their particular kinds — at first merely different manifestations and consequences of my will in general — are, since the will is the universal within itself, in relation to the recognition of others, grounds of right. It lies in their…

B. Fraud Right in itself, in its distinction from right as particular and existent, is indeed determined, as something demanded, to be the essential factor, but is thereby at the same time only something demanded — on this side, something merely subjective, and hence inessential and merely apparent. Right, the universal, thus reduced by the…

C. Coercion and Crime That my will, in property, places itself into an external thing entails that it is, just as much as it is reflected into that thing, seized hold of within it and placed under necessity. In this it can, in part, suffer violence in general; in part, through violence, some sacrifice or…

As a living being, a human being can indeed be subdued — that is, his physical and otherwise external side can be brought under the power of others — but the free will as such cannot be coerced (§ 5), except insofar as he himself does not withdraw from the externality in which he is…

Because the will is Idea, or actually free, only insofar as it has determinate being, and the determinate being into which it has placed itself is the being of freedom, violence or coercion destroys itself immediately in its own concept, as a manifestation of a will that supersedes the manifestation or determinate being of a…

Coercion has, of this — that it destroys itself in its own concept — the real display in this: that coercion is superseded by coercion; it is, therefore, not merely conditionally rightful but necessary — namely, as a second coercion, which is the superseding of a first coercion. The violation of a contract through non-performance…

Abstract right is a right of coercion, because the wrong done against it is a violence against the existence of my freedom in an external thing, so that the preservation of this existence against the violence is itself likewise an external act and a violence superseding that first violence. To define abstract or strict right…

The first coercion, as violence exercised by one who is free, which violates the existence of freedom in its concrete sense — right as right — is crime, — a negatively infinite judgment in its complete sense (see my Logic, vol. II, p. 99), through which not only the particular, the subsumption of a thing…

The violation of right as right that has occurred is indeed a positive, external existence, but one that is in itself null. The manifestation of this nullity of theirs is the annihilation of that violation, entering into existence just as much — the actuality of right, as its necessity mediating itself with itself through the…

But the violation which befalls the will that exists in itself (and thus equally this will of the violator as much as of the violated and of all) has, in this will existing in itself as such, no positive existence, any more than in the mere product. For itself, this will existing in itself (right,…