Hägerström’s description of Kelsen’s ideas amounts to the description of a notion of law made up of Begriffsjurisprudenzin combination with statute-positivism (Gesetzpositivismus). As shown earlier (Parts II and III), scientific theory demands that the concepts applied by science must be logically determinate. If they lack this characteristic, then they lack use as descriptive tools, and are thus of no use in scientific discourses. Accordingly, the intelligible use of the jurisprudential concepts rights and duties must also refer to something determinate.Any reference to rights and duties predicated to exist independently of reality falls outside the context of reality, and is either, or both, epistemologically (as a reference to that which cannot be known) and ontologically (by reference to that which cannot exist, the super-sensible) unreal, amounting to legal metaphysics. From a scientific point of view, such (mis)use of the terminology of rights and duties indicate conceptual indeterminacy and epistemological invalidity.207 NB.What must be noted is that when Hägerström speaks of real law, reality, and so on, he refers to positive law - a system of law that is real only insofar as it, either or both, has and has had historical existence, while natural law is a non-empirical category of law that asserts its claims for reality, as well as its subsequent ideal validity and existence, not on historical facts, but on ideal conditions, such as the intrinsic value and apodictic validity of its material rules.208 In contrast, the system of natural law p a r t v, c h a p t e r 3 356 3. 7 [4] cri t ique of legal sci ence : “The idea of rights in another sense than the advantages which the individual is granted through the system of rules, is an idea of super-sensible powers. And since the super-sensible cannot be conceived alongside the sensible, every such idea is false.”206 206 Hägerström, “Hägerström.”; “The Philosophy of Axel Hägerström.” 207 Cf. Hägerström, “Hägerström.”; “The Philosophy of Axel Hägerström.” 208 See, e.g., Hägerström, “Rättsidéers uppkomst (1917),” pp. 63-65.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjYyNDk=