Reading of the “Confessions”
© INCOPROM SA Geneva
With book IV of the Emile, Jean-Jacques Rousseau affirms that “the suitable study of the man is that of his reports”. These reports define initially the relation of the physical individual in the material things, and this relation discovers with the child a blind, rebellious need with its whims.
For the modern man, on the other hand, these reports are determined by the opinion and are strengthened by imagination. The man of the man exhausts all his forces in the satisfaction of a clean love which consists, according to the second Speech on the Inequality, in “a relative feeling by which one compares oneself, who asks for preferences (...) which does not seek any more to be satisfied by our own good, but only by the evil of others”.
Such is precisely the object of the Confessions, to provide to the posterity a new point of comparison, which restores an authentic image of the man “a man in all the truth of nature”, writing Jean-Jacques Rousseau, instead of varied and degraded opinions: the work can thus “serve as first part of comparison for the study of the men, which certainly is still to start” (Confessions). One of the functions of the autobiographical account would be thus to express the permanence of an authentic humanity, within corrupted reports which alienate the individual.