As a person, I am myself immediately a single individual; in its further determination this means, first of all: I am alive in this organic body, which, as regards its content, is my universal, undivided, external existence – the real possibility of all further determinate existence. But as a person I have, at the same time, my life and body, like other things, only insofar as it is my will.

That, on the side according to which I exist not as being-for-itself but as the immediate concept, I am alive and have an organic body, rests on the concept of life and that of spirit as soul – on moments taken from the philosophy of nature (Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, § 259 ff., cf. §§ 161, 164, and 298) ¹ and from anthropology (ibid., § 318).
I have these limbs, this life, only insofar as I will; the animal cannot mutilate or kill itself, but the human being can.

1. Encyclopaedia, 3rd ed. § 337 ff. ↩︎