When one heart can speak to another: the role of tenderness in Rousseau’s theory of passions

The aim of this paper is to show how tenderness (attendrissement) plays a key role in Rousseau’s theory of emotion. A deeper analysis of tenderness will shed light on the complex dynamics of Rousseau’s conception of the passions, which appears to be one of the principal means of understanding both the transition from the homme de la nature to the homme de l’homme and the development of human morality in the latter. Furthermore, the concept of attendrissement allows us to view from an unfamiliar, original standpoint a central problem of Rousseauian ethics, which has been debated, particularly in recent literature, namely that of recognition. Tenderness, thanks to its authentic and spontaneous nature, is able to retain the principles of the law of nature – pity and love of the self – while elevating them to an ethically superior height. For this reason, it might be considered a positive fulfillment of amour-propre capable of eliminating the pathological and competitive aspects that connote, from a historical but not constitutive point of view, the reciprocal interdependence of consciences.