Ethics, Immanent Transcendence and the Experimental Narrative Self

The framing question of this volume is: how should we think about the moral engines of ethical life? It might be argued that an engine is a highly problematic metaphor to capture moral life and its exigencies. An engine suggests something powerful, Lambek (this volume) protests, and it seems to privilege one version of ethics, a driving, striving sort of effort. Admittedly, its kinship with all things mechanical resonates uncomfortably with the host of industrial tropes that have infiltrated western modernity’s considerations of just about everything. Yet I find this ungainly figure alluring precisely because it conjures something that pushes,