Proiectul autenticității la Rousseau: între plenitudinea existenței și viața golită de sens
Rousseau’s Project of Authenticity: Between the Fullness of Existence and the Emptiness of Life

Summary/Abstract: This article examines the emergence of the modern concept of authenticity within the ambivalent legacy of the Enlightenment, highlighting that the very project of rationalization, while emancipatory, simultaneously generated conditions for a profound crisis of meaning in modernity. Within this context, Jean-Jacques Rousseau emerges not as a counter-Enlightenment figure, but as an internal critic who first articulated the modern ideal of authenticity as a remedy for the impending crisis. The central thesis is that Rousseau both established the discursive framework of authenticity – conceptualized through the tension between being (être) and appearing (paraître) – and diagnosed its principal pathology in amour-propre, the socially mediated and comparative form of self-love that displaces self-worth onto the judgment of others. This displacement subjects existence to a regime of theatricality, wherein intrinsic being is subordinated to the external gaze, thereby producing a condition of alienation that anticipates later analyses of nihilism. As a corrective, Rousseau proposes a turn inward toward an irreducible inner certainty and self-worth – le sentiment de l’existence – accessed through conscience. By analyzing key texts, particularly the Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar, this article demonstrates how Rousseau enacts a methodical suspension of inherited prejudice, grounding authenticity in a pre-rational, existential foundation. Ultimately, the article contends that Rousseau’s concept of authenticity should be understood not as the recovery of a pre-existing essence, but as an ongoing existential praxis aimed at recentering the self, thereby prefiguring key themes in Kantian autonomy, Nietzschean thought, and 20th-century existentialism.

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