ABSTRACT
The historical structure of self-reflection, as bequeathed by Italian humanist and German idealist traditions alike, entails both solitariness, or sufficiency unto oneself, and an orientation to a transcendent Source. The great achievement of self-reflexivity in the mystic experience of the Paradiso is the emergence of the self. The Paradiso’s speculative self-reflection belongs in a tradition stretching from ancient pre-Socratic sources through medieval Scholasticism and continuing with Renaissance humanism and German idealism down to our own post-secular times. Centering on the autobiographical disclosures of Dante’s encounter with his great great grandfather, the heroic martyr-warrior Cacciaguida, in the Heaven of Mars, the Paradiso unfolds an apotheosis of the self. Much of the Paradiso is taken up by Dante’s affirmation of his own historical existence. In the Paradiso, the immediately concrete and subject-centered world appears as but a mediation of an other world.
