ABSTRACT
For Socrates, it entailed knowing that he knew nothing, and it resonates down through subsequent tradition as enjoining a knowledge of human limits and particularly of human mortality. Self-reflection in the middle Ages was pursued to great speculative heights, particularly by philosophers in the Arabic-Aristotelian tradition that saturated Dante's intellectual ambience. The bitter fate of Narcissus prefigures the nihilistic destination of philosophy and therewith of self-reflection in the Western speculative tradition wherever self-reflection is carried out as sufficient unto itself and without rupture opening it to an Outside. Two modern philosophers, Hegel and Heidegger, distinguish themselves as having continued in the tradition of making reflection on human mortality fundamental to the task of philosophy. In secular modernity, self-reflection becomes merely a means of constructing a self-enclosed sphere of immanence rather than a challenge placing the reader face to face with unassimilable alterity.
