Rousseau giudice di sé stesso. L’autenticità autobiografica tra filosofia e politica

This article aims to investigate the ideal of authenticity that emerges in Rousseau’s autobiographical writings, namely the Confessions, the Dialogues of Rousseau Judge of Jean-Jacques, and the Reveries of the Solitary Walker. After shedding light on the historiographical ambiguity of the authenticity category, the author firstly attempts to highlight the intrinsic theoretical value of life writing. Autobiographical inquiry shares with philosophical inquiry both the object of study, namely authentic human nature, and the method of inquiry is necessarily fictional, since the knowledge of the state of nature is precluded from the experiential dimension. Secondly, the author explores the two conceptual poles that encapsulate the autobiographical vision of authenticity: sincerity and truth. In the former case, it is absolute sincerity, which is at the expense of the subject itself and epistemologically assumes the role hitherto assigned to Cartesian certainty. In the latter case, it is moral truth rather than factual truth, which eludes any intersubjective verification. In the final part of the article, the author addresses the relationship between autobiographical writings and political writings, challenging the separation between the two areas that has long characterized Rousseauian criticism. The aim is to show how there is no de jure contradiction between the autobiographical gesture and political inquiry, but rather that the two stances reflect the same need for authenticity.