ABSTRACT

Although imagining oneself is a seemingly unproblematic and common activity, if one looks at this phenomenon closer, it seems necessary to distinguish several meanings that the phrase “imagining oneself” can assume depending on the phenomenology of imagining. This chapter aims at highlighting these different meanings. The main assumptions thereby are that imagination is an intuitive act and that imagining oneself belongs to the category of experiential imagination. On the basis of a phenomenological analysis of imaginative experience and its relation to self-experience, this chapter develops a taxonomy, including the different forms in which we imagine ourselves, as well as parts of what we consider to constitute ourselves. This taxonomy will then guide the thematization of the extent and the limits of self-imagination, i.e. of what counts as imagination of oneself. Finally, after a brief confrontation with Bernard Williams’s claim that we cannot imagine being another individual, the chapter implements Husserl’s idea that imagination plays a decisive role in eidetic intuition and points out what imaginary variations of ourselves can reveal us about the “essence” of the self and self-experience.