The universality of this will that is free for itself is formal universality – the self-conscious, otherwise contentless, simple relation to itself in its individuality; the subject is, to this extent, a person. It lies in personality that I, as this person, am, in every respect (in inner caprice, drive, and desire, as well as in immediate external existence), determinate and finite, yet am, absolutely, a purely self-related being, and thus know myself, in my finitude, as the infinite, universal, and free.

Personality only begins where the subject has not merely a self-consciousness of itself in general as something concrete and determinate in some way, but rather a self-consciousness of itself as a wholly abstract I, in which all concrete limitation and validity is negated and invalid. In personality, therefore, there is knowledge of oneself as an object – but as an object raised by thinking into simple infinity and thereby purely self-identical. Individuals and peoples do not yet have personality so far as they have not yet arrived at this pure thought and knowledge of themselves. Spirit that is in and for itself is distinguished from spirit as it appears in that, at the very same determination at which the latter is only self-consciousness – consciousness of itself, but only according to the natural will and its still external oppositions (Phenomenology of Spirit, Bamberg and Würzburg 1807, p. 101 f., and Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, § 344*) – spirit has itself as its object and end as an abstract and indeed free I, and is thus a person.

• Encyclopedia, 3rd ed., § 424