If I have something in my power, I possess it. That is the external part.

Often I have a reason for this. I am hungry, I need a coat, or I simply feel like it. That is my particular interest in possession.

Where does the important part lie?

In possession my free will becomes visible. It stands outside before me, in a thing. Only in this way is it an actual will. That is the core of possession. And we call this property.

Means or end?

If you start from need, you take property to be a means. I need bread, so I must have bread. That is true, but it misses the core. Seen from freedom, it is different. Property is the first existence of freedom. That is why it is an end in itself.

A comparison: My bicycle takes me to work. But it is also my bicycle. No one may simply take it, even if he needed it more urgently. My will is in it.

Summary: To possess means to have something in your power. Property means that my free will is there in it. Property is not only a means for needs. It is the existence of freedom.

§ 489. The predicate of mine, which in itself is merely practical and which the thing receives through the judgment of possession, first of all in external appropriation, here has, however, the meaning that I place into it my personal will. Through this determination possession is property, which as possession is a means, but as existence of personality is a purpose.

§ 489. The predicate of mine, which in itself is merely practical and which the thing receives through the judgment of possession, first of all in external appropriation, here has the meaning that I place into it my personal will, which is absolute. Through this determination possession is property, which as possession is a means, but as existence of personality is a purpose.

§ 403. 2) For personality, because it is subjective and therefore is as an immediate person, the negation or the reality in its abstraction is an external existence which it finds already at hand. But as immediate, this reality is will-less, and the thing, which as against the subjectivity of intelligence and of arbitrary will is the objective, is, as against subjectivity insofar as it is person, something in and for itself null, which the person makes into its accident, the external sphere of its freedom; – possession.

§ 404. The predicate of mine, which the thing receives through the judgment of possession, first of all through external appropriation, here has the meaning that I place into it my personal will, which is absolute; through this meaning possession is property, which as possession is a means, but as existence of personality is a purpose.