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As we"ve just seen, self-referentiality plays a crucial regulatory role in Kierkegaard's picture of moral imagination (at least in the Anti-Climacan writings), in that it tethers our otherwise flighty imagination to the reality of our lived experience. Central to this is an experience of identifying oneself with an ideal self posited in imaginative moral contemplation. So it should come as no surprise, then, that Kierkegaard's writings contain a persistent concern with self-recognition as a key description of moral imagination. The ability to experience oneself as essentially involved in the subject matter of contemplation turns crucially on an ability to see oneself in what one imagines, apprehending ourselves under ethical and religious determinants. In Kierkegaardian moral psychology, the Socratic "know thyself" becomes an injunction to see yourself in idealistic self-presentations, and the conditions of possibility for this sort of self-recognition are thereby brought into issue.

DOI: 10.1057/9780230251267_7

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