On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Law

The essay in which Hegel charged Kant's moral law with emptiness and set the ethical life of a people in its place.

by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel173 passages held

German, the original language

Original title: Über die wissenschaftlichen Behandlungsarten des Naturrechts
First published: 1802(aged 32)
Original language: German

Overview

Two schools claimed to have made natural law — the theory of what is right by nature, before any statute — into a science, and Hegel set out to show that neither had. The empiricists imagined human beings stripped of custom, history and state, in a so-called state of nature, then added back whatever qualities they needed to derive a government; nothing in the method told them where to stop. Kant and Fichte began at the other end, with the pure form of a law that any rational will could give itself, and Hegel took Kant's own example to test it. Kant had argued that a maxim of keeping money left in one's care, whenever nobody could prove the deposit, destroys itself once everyone adopts it, because there would then be no deposits. Hegel asked where the contradiction was supposed to lie. A world without deposits contradicts nothing unless property is assumed in advance, so the bare form decides nothing and the content has been brought in from outside. That charge of emptiness became one of the standing objections to Kant's ethics, and Hegel made it again, in much the same terms, in his Philosophy of Right eighteen years later. Against both schools he set the ethical life of a people, in which the individual is part of a living whole, drawing on Aristotle, who held that the community comes before the individual by nature. At its high point the essay retells Aeschylus: the Furies, powers of vengeance, tried before the people of Athens and then given a home in the city.

Key concepts

What is natural law, the subject of this essay?

Natural law is the old theory of what is right by nature, before and above any statute a government passes. It asks what people owe each other simply as human beings. By Hegel's day two methods claimed to have made it scientific: one built it up from observed human traits, the other deduced it from pure reason. The essay argues that neither reached a real science of right.

Why does Hegel call Kant's moral law empty?

Because the test of asking whether a rule could hold for everyone checks only that the rule does not contradict itself, and that decides nothing. Kant argued that keeping a deposit nobody can prove was left with you destroys itself once universal, since there would be no more deposits. Hegel asks where the contradiction is: a world without deposits contradicts nothing unless property is assumed in advance.

What are the estates in Hegel's account of a people?

The estates are the broad social groups a people is made of. Hegel names three: the free, whose work is public life and whose virtue is courage in war; those who live by need, labour and property, where ordinary morality and law belong; and the peasants, whose work deals directly with the earth. Each has its place in one ethical whole, the way organs belong to one body.

What does it mean that a people comes before the individual?

Hegel borrows Aristotle's claim that a people is prior by nature to the individual person. It does not mean earlier in time. It means that a person cut off from every community is nothing complete or self-standing, and must be one with the whole as every part is. Whoever needs no community at all is no part of a people. Freedom is realised by living as a member of a people, not apart from it.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Two false sciences of right

Can reason tell us what is right by nature? Two schools claimed it could, one by imagining people before society, the other by the bare form of a law, and Hegel argues that both come away empty-handed.

The empiricists strip human beings of custom, history and state, picture the remainder as a state of nature, then add back what they need for a government; nothing says where to stop. Kant and Fichte start at the other end, with the pure form of a law any rational will could give itself. Hegel's test cases turn that form against itself: a world without deposits contradicts nothing, and a duty to help the poor, obeyed by everyone, abolishes poverty and with it the duty. The bare form decides nothing; content is smuggled in.

empiricism
formalism
moral formalism
practical reason
morality
natural law
philosophy of science
abstraction
law
coercion
necessity
philosophy of law
nature
negation
infinity

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A people as a living whole

Is the individual the starting point of political life, or a part of something prior? Against both schools, Hegel sets the ethical life of a people, in which a person is free only as a living member of the whole.

Drawing on Aristotle, for whom a people comes before the individual by nature, Hegel describes ethical life as a living whole: an estate of free men who live for the public good and risk death in war, an estate that lives by work, possession and property, and a third that works the land. Ordinary morality, the ethics of the private person or bourgeois, fits the second, not the whole. At the essay's height Hegel retells Aeschylus, in whose ending Athens honours the Furies, the powers of vengeance, and gives them a seat in the city.

ethical life
freedom
individuality
state
totality
social estates
community
political philosophy
tragedy
universality
justice
property
absolute
ethics

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Within this work

passages held: 173
distinct concepts: 260
by passages held, corpus-wide: #383

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “coercion” and “freedom”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 19 pairings. 86 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
coercion	freedom	10
ethical life	individuality	10
ethical life	freedom	8
empiricism	formalism	6
ethical life	necessity	6
ethical life	property	6
freedom	individuality	6
empiricism	necessity	5
freedom	necessity	4
ethical life	formalism	3
formalism	necessity	3
coercion	ethical life	2
coercion	individuality	2
coercion	necessity	2
individuality	necessity	2
coercion	formalism	1
empiricism	ethical life	1
formalism	individuality	1
individuality	property	1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1801 The Difference Between Fichte's and Schelling's System of Philosophy (Differenz des Fichteschen und Schellingschen Systems der Philosophie)
The book that opened Hegel's Jena years and first put his name before the public — as Schelling's ally, a role his essays for their Critical Journal continued.
DE
1802 Faith and Knowledge (Glauben und Wissen)
Written at the height of the alliance with Schelling: the longest of Hegel's pieces for their journal, and his fullest early reckoning with Kant.
DE
1802 How the Ordinary Human Understanding Takes Philosophy (Wie der gemeine Menschenverstand die Philosophie nehme)
Of Hegel's reviews for the Critical Journal, the most openly mocking: the journal's programme of severity turned on a single named Kantian.
DE
1802 On the Essence of Philosophical Criticism (Über das Wesen der philosophischen Kritik überhaupt)
Unsigned, and claimed for both editors ever since: the programme at the head of the journal Hegel and Schelling ran in 1802–03, which Hegel's reviews in its later issues put into practice.
DE
1802 On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Law (Über die wissenschaftlichen Behandlungsarten des Naturrechts) you are here DE
1802 Relationship of Skepticism to Philosophy (Verhältnis des Skeptizismus zur Philosophie)
Between the Krug review and Faith and Knowledge in the Critical Journal's run, the essay in which Hegel first says what doubt does for philosophy.
DE
1807 Phenomenology of Spirit (Die Phänomenologie des Geistes)
Written as Napoleon's army entered Jena and published in 1807, the book Hegel meant as the doorway into his system — and the one many readers still enter him through.
DE
1812 Science of Logic (Wissenschaft der Logik)
The larger of Hegel's two versions of the Logic, written away from any university while he ran a Nuremberg school; the metaphysical core the rest of the system rests on.
DE
1817 Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline (Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse)
The frame for Hegel's other books: its first part condenses the Science of Logic, and the Philosophy of Right expands one section of its third part. Hegel taught from it and rewrote it twice.
DEEN
1821 Elements of the Philosophy of Right (Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts)
The last book Hegel published in his lifetime apart from new editions of the Encyclopaedia: the textbook of his Berlin law lectures, and the one of his books most argued over by political readers.
DE
1831 On the English Reform Bill (Über die englische Reformbill)
Some three decades after his first, unpublished pamphlets on Württemberg and on the German constitution, Hegel's last venture into the politics of the day.
DE
1833 Lectures on the History of Philosophy (Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie)
Among the posthumous lecture books, the course Hegel carried through nearly his whole teaching life, and the one that closes on his thanks to the students who had followed it.
DE
1835 The Philosophy of Fine Art (Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik)
Not a book Hegel wrote but Berlin lectures assembled by a student after his death — the most influential philosophy of art of the nineteenth century, and a contested reconstruction of it.
EN
1835 Who Thinks Abstractly? (Wer denkt abstrakt?)
Hegel in the manner of a magazine essayist: short, comic and aimed at the general reader, though he never published it himself.
DE
1837 Lectures on the Philosophy of History (Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte)
For decades the most widely read of Hegel's works, and now the most contested — lectures on world history, published after his death, reading it as the growth of human freedom.
DE

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