Abstract

Images are usually understood as something perceived: as something presented to us and different from us. But since Antiquity the concept has also been given a different meaning: it has been used to describe our own being, and indeed so much so that it also stands for our essential nature: we are ourselves an image ; and being an image is what is what really defines us. The experience of being oneself an image – or, as one might also say, this basic understanding of oneself as being just an image – plays an important role inter alia in Pre-Platonic thought, in the corpus platonicum, in the Christian idea of the imago Dei and, not least, in Fichte’s late philosophy.This paper focuses on two ancient Greek forerunners of some aspects of Fichte’s understanding of image, namely pre-platonic and platonic views on our own being-just-an-image.