La forza della tenerezza. La teoria “vettoriale” dell'eomozione secondo Rousseau

The Strength of Tenderness. Rousseau’s “vectorial” Theory of the Emotions. The aim of this paper is to show how the tenderness (attendrissement) plays a key role in Rousseau’s conception of the dynamics of passions. The author argues that the tenderness, thanks to its authentic and spontaneous nature, is invested with a determinant moral role: it can be in fact regarded as a positive realization of self-love (amour propre), able to eliminate the pathological and competitive aspects which connote – from an historical but not constitutive point of view – the mutual interdependence of men in society.