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Mirror metaphors crop up throughout Kierkegaard's authorship, and this should come as no surprise given his emphasis on self-recognition. The mirror represents the paradigmatic experience of self-recognition, where I literally see myself, and so where awareness of "what I look like" is generated and altered in an immediate way. Obviously, the experience is mediated on a physical level (through carefully arranged glass surfaces), but on the subjective level, the experience is immediate. We do not, under normal circumstances, stop to consider whether the mirror is accurate, or whether imperfections in its construction distort the image in it. We typically do not even notice that the image in the mirror is precisely that, a "mirror image," inverted along its vertical axis. We might think that's simply a product of familiarity with the experience of seeing ourselves in the mirror, where we only ever see our image in its inverted form. However, that we rarely notice the difference between how we look in the mirror and how we look in photographs (where we"re not inverted) suggests that the specifics of the image qua image are not what we attend to when looking at images of ourselves. In the usual, unreflective run of things, we simply see ourselves, rather than an image of ourselves. This fact, with its curious volatilization of the subject/object schema, makes the mirror a powerful metaphorical and exploratory tool in Kierkegaard's phenomenology of moral perception.¹

DOI: 10.1057/9780230251267_8

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