Rousseau e o sentimento de existência como recurso autobiográfico e autoformativo

Abstract

The Rousseaunian work embodies the feeling of existence when solitude appears in the expressive form observed in the following autobiographical works of the philosopher: Reveries of a Solitary Walker, The Confessions and Dialogues: Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques. Faced with the historical impossibility of recovering the lost unity in the mask of social relations and of achieving the happiness that mundane life had not afforded him, Jean Jacques turns to interiority by choosing isolation as an existential condition. Unable to transform the outer world, his resource is inner reform aiming for individual redemption. Our interest in Rousseau's work focuses on its dislocation begun as a philosophy of universal history towards a literature that imprints an “existential experience” (STAROBINSKI, 2011, p. 52). According to Burgelin (1978), Starobinski (2011) and Prado Jr. (2008) which consider Rousseau a precursor of the philosophies of existence, we intend to highlight this approach to existence in the Rousseaunian literary and autobiographical work, placing it as a philosophical problem to extract from it a philosophical educational problem that concerns self-formation. We intend to emphasize the view of an author character examining his vital experience and that, by identifying crucial and trivial situations, transforms them into the raw material for his thinking, philosophizing, and making of himself. We conclude that solitude for Rousseau is also a resource for the making of himself in both life and work. In autobiographical texts, solitude is a means for the individual to undertake the aesthetic examination of consciousness in order to better understand himself. We also conclude that the feeling of existence is equivalent to the awareness of existence, which, encompassing reason and feeling, means intention and attitude that find in language their most recurrent possibility of expression. Thus, in Rousseau’s work the feeling of existence establishes our existence in the sense that from it emerges self consciousness whose intensification needs solitude to exalt the feeling of existence. Rousseau's concept of existence is relevant only if understood in the concreteness of a feeling of existing in the context of the human condition of being in the world experiencing and inquiring into existence itself.