The body, insofar as it is immediate existence, is not adequate to spirit; in order to be spirit’s willing organ and animated instrument, it must first be taken into possession by spirit (§ 57). – But for others I am essentially a free being in my body, as I immediately have it.

Only because I am alive as a free being in my body may this living existence not be misused as a beast of burden. Insofar as I live, my soul (the concept and, at a higher level, the free) and my body are not separated; the body is the existence of freedom, and I feel in it. It is therefore only an ideaeless, sophistical understanding that can make the distinction that the thing in itself, the soul, is not touched or attacked when the body is maltreated and the existence of the person is subjected to another’s violence. I can withdraw from my existence into myself and make it something external – hold particular sensation away from myself and be free even in chains. But this is my will; for the other, I am in my body; that to be free for the other is possible only as being free in existence is an identical proposition (see my Science of Logic, vol. I, p. 49 ff.) ¹. Violence done to my body by others is violence done to me.
That, because I feel, the touching of and violence against my body touch me immediately as something actual and present, constitutes the difference between personal injury and the violation of my external property – for it is in the body that my will is present in this immediate presence and actuality.

1. Science of Logic, vol. I: The Objective Logic (1812), pp. 49 ff. = GW 11, pp. 60–64: “Being-other” – “Being-for-other and being-in-itself” – “Reality” ↩︎