SKC Workshop Spring 2025

Ioana Moraru

(University of Bucharest, Romania)

Kierkegaard and the Existential Imagination

My doctoral project is centered around the assumption that Kierkegaard’s authorial activity is grounded in the pauline spiritual concern of the possibility of becoming a new man. The fundamental question for me is therefore: What is the role of imagination in the emergence of this existential novelty in one’s own personal life, taking into account that Kierkegaard is a poet-philosopher of a „special kind”? In this line of interpretation, the route of Kierkegaard’s thinking seems to direct the reader from a purely aesthetic use of imagination to a new one, which I named the existential imagination ; Following this point of view, Kierkegaard's originality lies in the fact that he roots the imagination in the soil of everyday life, or with other words, in the essence of our temporality from which his romantic predecessors tried to escape precisely with the help of art. My thesis also aims at tracing the influence of Kierkegaard’s new understanding of the imagination on the existential anti-rationalist thinking of less known philosophers, such as the romanian-jewish poet and thinker Benjamin Fondane or Leo Chestov.