Kierkegaard's Mirrors: Interest, Self, and Moral Vision

by P. Stokes

Overview

What is it to see the world, other people, and imagined situations not just as morally compelling, but as making personal demands of us? What is it to experience stories as speaking to us individually and directly? Kierkegaard's Mirrors explores Kierkegaard's unique and challenging answers to these questions.

Beginning with the structural account of consciousness offered in Johannes Climacus, this book develops a new phenomenological interpretation of what Kierkegaard calls 'interest': a self-reflexive mode of thought, vision, and imagination that plays a central role in moral experience. Tracing this concept across Kierkegaard's work takes us through topics such as consciousness, the ontology of selfhood, ethical imagination, admiration and imitation, seeing the other, metaphors of self-recognition and mirroring, our need for transcendent meaning, and the relationship between scholarship and subjective knowledge. 'Interest' equips us with a new understanding of Kierkegaard's highly original normative, teleological account of moral vision.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781349316328
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan UK
Publication date:	11/18/2009
Edition description:	1st ed. 2010
Pages:	223
Product dimensions:	5.51(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.02(d)

About the Author

PATRICK STOKES is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Sren Kierkegaard Research Centre at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and an Honorary Fellow in the School of Philosophy, Anthropology and Social Inquiry, University of Melbourne, Australia.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Sigla x

Introduction 1

Part I Structures of Subjectivity

1 The Interesting and the Interested: Stages on a Concept's Way 17

2 The Structure of Consciousness 29

3 Consciousness as Interest 47

4 The Ontology of the Self 61

Part II Moral Vision

5 Imagination and Agency 73

6 Self-Recognition 95

7 Mirrors 111

8 Seeing the Other 134

Part III Knowledge and Meaning

9 Concern, Misfortune, and Despair 147

10 Interest In the Postscript: The Telos of Knowing 160

Conclusion 179

Notes 186

Bibliography 203

Index 213

Editorial Reviews

'In a wonderful exhibit of archival retrieval, Patrick Stokes has written a fine account of an underappreciated theme, interesse, as it crops up here and there through the course of the Kierkegaardian oeuvre, its systematic implications heretofore largely unnoticed. This careful and creative tracking allows us to see anew the familiar philosophical motifs that become the bread and butter of so much Kierkegaard commentary subjectivity, selfhood, passion, love, imagination, and so forth. It is no small achievement to have opened the door to a reassessment or reconfiguration of this presumably familiar territory. But I found in working slowly through the successive chapters of this book that Stokes was accomplishing just that. He's found a powerful new prism through which to cast the beams of the enigmatic texts that concern us.' Kierkegaard Newsletter

'...Stokes's book is, without doubt, one of the, if not the, best account of Kierkegaard as a philosopher and moral psychologist ever written. Kierkegaard's Mirrors is essential reading for anyone interested in Kierkegaard, and the continuing debate about how his work and thought is to be understood.' Jamie Turnbull, British Journal for the History of Philosophy

'...Interesting and original...' - Meta: Research in Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, and Practical Philosophy

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