Narrative and experience between anthropology and ethics

Abstract

Ethics and narrative are linked by a network of connections, explored by several disciplines, whose contributes – however different as regards methods, aims and languages – sometimes seem to overlap and focus on the same topics. This is the case of two recently published books, Shaped by Stories by M.W. Gregory and La generazione del bene by F. Botturi, the former belonging to the field of ethical criticism and the latter inquiring into philosophical anthropology and moral philosophy. both, in fact, seem to offer a similar characterization of human experience as conscious and meaningful living, to point out the dynamic unity of experience as a whole and to suggest that such a concept of experience could be the interface between narrative and ethics and among the multiple meanings of “narrative ethics”. The paper considers this hypothesis and assumes that narrative, either as literature or as a philosophical concept (narrativity, narrative identity), always includes – displaying or implying it – a “grammar of human experience”, a reference to its conditions of possibility and constitutive rules, thus situating on the threshold between anthropology and ethics and marking out the ground where ethics can emerge as an expression of a properly human form of life.