Natural Law: The Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Law, Its Place in Moral Philosophy, and Its Relation to the Positive Sciences of Law

Translator's Note

Translator's Note This translation is based on Hegel's original periodical publication, now reprinted in the magnificient new edition of his Works. See vol. 4, ed. by H. Biichner and O. Poggeler (Hamburg, 1968). The page references in the foot of the translation are to the pages of this edition. One or two references in my notes to this edition are described as "Poggeler". However I have adopted some minor emendations to the text from the first edition of the collected Works and from the edition by G. Lasson (Leipzig, 1923). All the material enclosed in square brackets, whether in the text or the footnotes, is the translator's. A German scholar (Hegel-Studien 4 [Bonn, 1967], p. 177) refers to the "obscurities" in this essay, but unfortunately he does not provide the new light which might remove them, and this translation does not profess to remove them either. For substantial help I am much indebted to Professor Acton for his introduction, to Dr. Z. A. Pelczynski and Dr. R. Hausherr for reading and improving and correcting the translation. The obscurities in the essay arise partly from the abstraction on which Hegel always prided himself, and partly from the terminology. In 1802 he had not worked out his own but used terms drawn from Schelling and others; and he makes things more difficult by sometimes using a word in its ordinary German sense, and sometimes in his own technical sense. This is the case, for example with Sittlichkeit which means "morality," but later in the essay the distinction—clear in the later Philosophy of Right—from Moralitat occurs, and therefore I use "ethical life" to translate the word, where "morality" would be more naturalin English. And yet there are times when "morality," instead of "ethics" etc., seems imperative. 49 50 TRANSLATOR'S NOTE With hesitation I offer some comments on terminology: Anschauung—"intuition" in translations of Kant has become familiar. But although I have accepted this rendering at times, I have used, with misgivings, "perception," or "view." Alot may depend on the context. But when Hegel asserts that in Anschauung "particular and universal are identified," he seems almost to mean by the word what he later calls "reason," and we are reminded of Schelling's System of Transcendental Idealism (Tubingen, 1800), p. 50: "A knowing which is at the same time a production of its object is an intuition . . . not sensuous but intellectual intuition, the organ of all transcendental thinking." Absolute form is apparently "the concrete form of the Absolute"; thinking must embody itself in something concrete or it has no substantiality. Verhaltnis: "relation." So translated, or where the terms of the relation are not specified, "relationships" (but reference should be made to Hegel'sJenenserLogik in Ges.Werke [edn. cit. above], vol.7 [Hamburg, 1971].) Indiferenz—indifference. This Schellingian term seems to mean "identity." Negative absolute or identity. The negative absolute, unlike the true Absolute which is a unity of form and content, is a pure abstraction, the empty concept of unity. It is "infinite" in the sense that it is an endless succession of negatives. For example, morality is concrete and specific, but the immoral isvague and indefinite.There is one way to hit the mark, but many ways of missing it. A negative absolute, renouncing any concrete content, rejects from it, as immoral, ad inflnitum anything that does not correspond with it. Absolute concept. This is obscure. At one point it is identified with the "negative absolute." In Hegel's Aesthetics it is clearly a synonym for "God." It is not impossible that here it is identified with God as purely transcendent and therefore as the negative of the created world, though the indwelling essence, or concept, of that world. Infinity. Here problems multiply. At one point, for example, limitations have the form of infinity. This can only mean, so far as I can see, that limitations have no end. But, in that case "infinity" is what Hegel calls later (and did in his Jena manuscripts at much the TRANSLATOR'S NOTE 51 same date as this essay) the "bad" infinite, i.e. what goes on and on in a straight line instead of returning into itself like a circle. Yet elsewhere, "infinite" seems to be the genuine infinite which isnot just the negation of this and this and this ad infinitum, but which returns into itself out of these negations as the truly positive...