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

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... 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.