Historically, from Aristotle’s paideia to Aquinas’s cultivation of virtue to Confucian self-cultivation, moral life was structured around formation—the long, difficult process of shaping the self in relation to truth, the good, and a teleologically ordered cosmos. Formation was not expressive, but transformative. It demanded submission to standards beyond the self: disciplines, exemplars, institutions, and traditions that structured the path toward moral maturity.
Modernity dismantled the metaphysical infrastructure that made such formation intelligible. With nominalism, being lost its intrinsic order. With Descartes, the self was severed from the world, and knowledge internalized as representation. Liberalism privatized the good: ethics became a matter of preference; education, an imposition. Formation came to be seen as coercion, not liberation.
Into this ontological vacuum stepped “narrative.” From Maslow and McAdams to Ricoeur and Taylor, narrative was reimagined as the primary site of meaning-making. In the wake of the linguistic turn, language became constitutive, and the self became a reflexive narrator. Storytelling promised coherence without obligation, authorship without telos.
But this shift came at a cost. Narrative, untethered from truth, often collapses into self-legitimation. It displaces formation with fabrication, virtue with voice, growth with performance. In psychoanalytic terms, the symbolic order is evacuated, and identity becomes a fantasy sustained by repetition and audience validation. In sociological terms, we are left with a therapeutic culture: allergic to authority, hostile to tradition, and obsessed with authenticity.
The problem is not narrative per se. It is narrative in place of moral development. We no longer ask: What is the good life? What kind of person am I called to become? Instead, we ask: What story will get me noticed? What version of myself will maximize my impact
This epistemic pivot is not neutral—it is normative. It reflects a moral metaphysics in which coherence has replaced truth, visibility has displaced integrity, and autonomy is defined by aesthetic control rather than ethical accountability.
It is time to recover formation—not as dogma, but as the architecture of moral becoming. No narrative can save us if we are not becoming the kind of selves capable of bearing its weight.
The tyranny of "Narratives": how storytelling replaced development
In today’s culture, "narrative" is the new currency of identity. Strategy decks demand a storyboard. Leaders are urged to “own their crucible.” Politicians are coached to deliver “transformational narratives.” Even trauma is expected to be “re-narrated” as catharsis. But this obsession with narrative—while superficially empowering—is symptomatic of a deeper epistemic and moral collapse: the disintegration of personal development.
Pubblicato il 29 maggio 2025