(Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)
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.