THE UNITY OF IDENTITY AND DIFFERENCE AS THE ...

will. In the following passages, Hegel introduces the concept of personhood that informs
the standpoint of abstract right. The terms employed in these passages demonstrate a
clear relation between the concept of personhood and the first moment of the will. Hegel
describes personhood as follows:
The universality of this consciously free will is abstract universality, the selfconscious
but otherwise contentless and simple relation of itself to itself in its
individuality, and from this point of view the subject is a person [emphasis
added]. 28
Personality begins not with the subject’s mere general consciousness of himself as
an ego concretely determined in some way or other, but rather with his
consciousness of himself as a completely abstract ego in which every concrete
restriction and value is negated without validity. In personality, therefore,
knowledge is knowledge of oneself as an object, but an object raised by thinking
to the level of simple infinity and so an object purely self-identical [emphasis
added]. 29
Personhood, like the first moment of the will, deals with universality. Moreover, it deals
with abstract universality. Here the term “abstract” designates the fact that this point of
view considers universality in isolation from particularity. From the standpoint of
personhood, we consider the self or the will as “contentless,” a term more or less
synonymous with “indeterminate.” Hegel describes the first moment of the will as the
“pure indeterminacy” that involves the “dissipation of every restriction and every
content…immediately presented by nature, by needs, by desires, and impulses.”
Similarly, he describes personhood as a conception of the self as “contentless,” and he
contrasts it with a conception of the self as “concretely determined in some way or
other.” Here we see concrete determinateness contrasted with that which is contentless
and therefore indeterminate. Finally, Hegel describes personhood as a conception of the
28 Philosophy of Right, paragraph 35.
29 Philosophy of Right, paragraph 35R.
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