Wojciech Kaftanski is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland, and an Affiliate of the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University.
A post by Wojciech Kaftanski
Søren Kierkegaard is hardly a household name among the “imagination professionals.” One would look in vain for his name in the indexes of standard or classical analytic essay collections on imagination. For many outside the Kierkegaardian bubble, knowledge of the Dane is limited to a deranged religious thinker who publicly dumped his girlfriend Regine Olsen only to dedicate his corpus to her and send her veiled love letters long after she remarried. Wrapping one’s head around that romantic strategy requires a level of imagination few of us possess, I fear. Unsurprisingly, Kierkegaard is routinely reduced to a rite of passage for certain graduate students. Many of us have seen them: pacing the department corridors during a mandatory existentialist phase to debate the meaning of life while wearing heavy scarves, trench coats, and turtlenecks—wait, no, the turtlenecks are Foucault, my apologies.
But there is more to the Great Dane than the cheerful, late-night-dorm-room themes of suffering, death, anxiety, guilt, and martyrdom. Beneath the existential angst lies a highly sophisticated theory of the mind that speaks to contemporary debates. Crucially, Kierkegaard argues that imagination is not a peripheral cognitive luxury but the very engine of human selfhood. Writing under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus (I know, a bit lame) he drops this programmatic “bomb” in The Sickness unto Death:
The fantastic, of course, is most closely related to the imagination, but the imagination in turn is related to feeling, knowing, and willing; therefore a person can have imaginary feeling, knowing, and willing. As a rule, imagination is the medium for the process of infinitizing; it is not a capacity, as are the others – if one wishes to speak in those terms, it is the capacity instar omnium [for all capacities]. When all is said and done, whatever of feeling, knowing, and willing a person has depends upon what imagination he has, upon how that person reflects himself – that is, upon imagination. (Kierkegaard, 1849/1980).
For Kierkegaard, imagination is the structural condition for the possibility of all other mental operations. It is the mandatory psychological “medium” through which our affective states, epistemic commitments, and volitional drives are unified into a coherent self. Far from being a mere playground for counterfactual drift or aesthetic escapism, the imagination is the baseline coordinator of our propositional attitudes. Some history of philosophy here, bare with me. By framing imagination as the architectonic engine of the self, Kierkegaard stakes a definitive claim in a familiar historical debate. He positions his work as a rigorous response to the post-Kantian landscape, occupying the volatile space between his predecessors. Hume had splintered the self into a bundle of shifting perceptions. Kant bound it within the categories, while the German Romantics dissolved it into unreserved creativity. Kierkegaard absorbs all three positions, enforcing a strict structural discipline to ask a critical question: How can a fragmented bundle of experiences ever achieve the unity required for moral and existential agency without discarding the power of affect? His answer—yes, you guessed it—is the imagination.
Let’s unpack some of it.[1] For Kierkegaard, the imagination is fundamentally a moral faculty. It is intrinsically connected to the three critical pillars of the person/selfhood: feeling, thinking, and volition. We engage these three capacities in everyday functioning; they shape our preferences, structure our moral codes, and “color” how we relate to our past and future.
Consequently, while the imagination is busy with its standard cognitive duties—memory, spatial visualization, or recombining sensory data—it is simultaneously operating as the primary engine of self-making. Because constructing a self is our ultimate existential responsibility for Kierkegaard, the imagination inherits a heavy moral weight. Its ultimate target is the object of our deepest moral concern: the self.
Like a muscle, the imagination can be trained (though Kierkegaard declines to provide a practical workout routine), meaning it can operate both spontaneously and intentionally. However, it can easily lead us astray—and I will list some normative restrictions for the imagination in a second. Moreover, Kierkegaard does not equate imagination with pure knowledge operations, and he allows its contents—imaginary mental objects—to be both propositional and pictorial. Sometimes his goal is for us to picture something vividly; at other times, he simply wants us to consider a state of affairs or a situation without much emphasis on its imagistic aspect. However, he remains fundamentally committed to the view that the vivid-pictorial affects us more deeply than a simple proposition. This is because we are naturally hardwired to be moved by the visual—which is often inherently affective and therefore slips quickly underneath our usual cognitive register.
When Kierkegaard writes that “imagination is the medium for the process of infinitizing,” he is issuing a warning. Because the imagination supercharges our feelings, thoughts, and will, this “infinitizing” process can go beautifully right or catastrophically wrong. Here are some examples that illustrate the goods and the bads of ininitizing imagination with motion picture suggestions that take up these topics.
1. Feeling:
The Positive (Passion): Imagination develops a momentary, reflexive feeling(s) into an enduring, intensive passion, such as a sustained commitment to caring for others. This commitment is what structures the self over time. See The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007).
The Negative (Sentimentality): Imagination inflates a passing emotion into a detached sentimentality divorced from reality. This is someone who weeps over abstract human suffering but callously ignores a homeless person on the street. They love the concept of humanity, but bypass actual humans. See Amélie (2001).
2. Thinking:
The Positive (Strategic Projection): Imagination transforms concrete perceptions into abstract concepts and infinite possibilities, such as mapping out the creative, long-term steps needed to achieve a career goal. See The Beat That My Heart Skipped (De battre mon cœur s'est arrêté) 2005.
The Negative (Cognitive Bubbles): Reflection morphs into an endless, ever more refined, yet dizzying maze of possibilities. The thinker retreats into a bubble of pleasurable wishful thinking, morally and psychologically unconcerned with the immediate present and entirely blind to the limitations of reality. See Synecdoche, New York (2008).
3. Volition:
The Positive (Autonomy): Imaginatively-enhanced volition synthetically presents the will with high-level reasons for large commitments—acting as a 19th-century precursor to Harry Frankfurt’s second-order volitions. See Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004).
The Negative (Imaginative Paralysis): The will is paralyzed by an infinite buffet of choices where everything looks equally appealing. Because choosing one concrete path requires killing off all other options, the individual chooses nothing at all. See Black Mirror: Bandersnatch (2018).
On an ending note, I want to mention a recent book that perhaps is the sign that the tides are moving into the cognitive exploration of Kierkegaard’s imagination. In her Kierkegaard and the Structure of Imagination: Rethinking Thought Experiments with Kant and Ørsted (CUP, 2025), Eleanor Helms brings attention to Kierkegaard’s use of “imaginary constructions,” presenting them as a systematic philosophical method shaped by Kantian transcendental philosophy and Ørsted’s scientific framework. She frames the Kierkegaardian imagination as a structured cognitive faculty essential for clarifying abstract and existential truths. Kierkegaard’s thought experiments operate like imaginative variation to make unrepresentable concepts accessible. (Editor’s note: Look out for a Junkyard post from Eleanor Helms later this month.)
To explore further the scholarship on Kierkegaard’s imagination, dive into the works of Patrick Stokes (2010, 2015), Anthony Aumann (2023, 2026), Jeffrey Hanson (2021), Hjördis Becker-Lindenthal (2021), and yours truly (2021, 2024).
Notes:
[1] For those suffering from insomnia or chronic existential boredom: shameless self-promotion alert. Keep an eye out for a volume in the Cambridge University Press Elements series dropping online at the end of this year, under the working title Kierkegaard’s Moral Imagination: Feeling, Knowing, Willing, authored by yours truly.
References:
Aumann, Antony. (2023). Art, Imagination, and Experiential Knowledge. Synthese, 201(3), 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04109-2
Aumann, Antony. (2026). How Art Transforms Us: A Philosophical Inquiry. Bloomsbury Academic.
Becker-Lindenthal, Hjördis. (2021). Kierkegaard on imagination: possibility, hope, and the imitation of Christ. History of European Ideas, 47(3), 484–499. https://doi.org/10.1080/01916599.2020.1799558
Helms, E. (2025). Kierkegaard and the structure of imagination: Rethinking thought experiments with Kant and Ørsted. Cambridge University Press
Hanson, Jeffrey (2021). Imagination, Suffering, and Perfection: A Kierkegaardian Reflection on Meaning in Life. History of Philosophy Quarterly, 38(4), 337–356.
Kaftanski, Wojciech T. (2021). Introduction: Imagination in Kierkegaard and Beyond. History of European Ideas, 47(3), 405–413. https://doi.org/10.1080/01916599.2020.1799552
Kaftanski, W. (2024). Imagination, Mental Representation, and Moral Agency: Moral Pointers in Kierkegaard and Ricoeur. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 23(1), 179–198. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-022-09813-x
Kierkegaard, Søren (1949/1980). The Sickness unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening (H. V. Hong & E. H. Hong, Eds. & Trans.). Princeton University Press.
Stokes, Patrick. (2010). Kierkegaard’s Mirrors: Interest, Self and Moral Vision. Palgrave Macmillan.
Stokes, Patrick. (2015). The Naked Self: Kierkegaard and Personal Identity. Oxford University Press.