Imagination And Moral Becoming Of Man In Rousseau

Abstract

The main object of this article consists in describing the characteristics and the role that imagination plays in Rousseau’s thought. First of all, we will discuss Rousseau’s conception of imagination in the context of a paradoxical filiation taking into account that both Montaigne’s humanism and Pascal’s influence coexist in his thought. Secondly, we will show that this double filiation converges in human beings’s impossibility of developing an absolute knowledge of nature and in a switch from reason to imagination, which is involved in both the speculative and the practical use of reason. Finally, we will analyze imagination’s role in the configuration of piety.