'UN SOIN QUE JE ME DOIS': SELF-REGARDING VIRTUES IN ROUSSEAU'S DIALOGUES'

Abstract

The article sets itself three interconnected tasks: first, to provide a fresh interpretation of the ethical and political status and meaning of Rousseau’s Dialogues, both independently and in the light of Rousseau’s other writings; second, to offer a revisionary commentary on Jean Starobinski’s reading of the same text, which it holds to be fundamentally misconceived; third, to show how the quest for a private good in the context of Stoic and Epicurean horizons defines that work’s moral possibilities. The Dialogues convey no aesthetic retreat from Rousseau’s earlier philosophy, as Starobinski argues, but rather its vindication as an ongoing task for moral liberty. Through his principal alter ego, ‘Jean-Jacques’, Rousseau practises a rationally disciplined spiritual hygienics for personal autonomy, one advanced by the cultivation of marked dispositions through the virtues appropriate to his condition. Wisdom, justice, simplicity, temperance and prudence are exercised in the pursuit of the ‘vie simple et laborieuse’ by which ‘Jean-Jacques’ services the purity of intention that wills according to a Providential order.