The role of logical sentiments in moral creativity: toward narrative reality in a Peircean semiotic-pragmatic approach

Abstract This paper aims to investigate the ethical implications in narrative to bridge the gap between theory and practice, drawing attention to religious ethics as a poetics of possibility. Based on Peirce’s account of conservative sentimentalism, a semiotic-pragmatic method of logical sentiments of charity, faith, and hope is employed for moral creativity. These sentiments are tied to self-control, leading to altruism, which is associated with Christian ethics for discovering the true and real Self. In connection with Paul Ricoeur’s idea of poetics of will, in which ethics and poetics interact, I illustrate Peirce’s developmental account of the Self as an autonomous self-controlling agent: the “I” imagining the Thou idea as a person in semiosis through narrative imagination. Thus, this paper implies the transference from narrative reality, which is associated with a vague and indeterminate sense of narrative meaning, to narrative truth, which is determined by way of narrative argument, generating narrative meaning-truth. In this regard, verification of this argument is confirmed in narrative meaning-truth in life, which actually emerges as the narrative therapeutic effect through practice.