Praise of Polytheism, in the vision of Odo Marquard

Abstract

In this exposition of the central argument of the essay On Monomiticity and Polimiticity, by Odo Marquard, several key notions in the humanist vision of the German philosopher appear: a) the assessment of the power of language, and particularly narrative language, to shape our understanding of the world and our own sense of identity, in a form unattainable from the simple theoretical exposition; b) the confirmation of the multiplicity of languages, of discourses, of ways of life, of values, and therefore of different narratives, to account for the boundless set of human experience, impossible to reduce to a single dogma or theory, allegedly «universal»; c) distrust, therefore, regarding any dogma, whether religious or theoretical, that pretends to be able to reach a definitive truth about the world and about our life experience; d) the praise of the diversity of ideas and points of view, the only possible guarantee of the true freedom of man.