« La connaissance de soi chez Vauvenargues et Marivaux: du sentiment à la réflexion »

This article focuses on the thematics of self-knowledge in the tradition of the French moralists. The difficulty to achieve self-knowledge according to the moralists of the seventeenth century, has to be understood against the background of a pessimistic antropology, which depreciates sentiment and self-love and which defends a dualistic paradigm, opposing reason and nature. The author argues that according to the new antropology defended by Vauvenargues and Marivaux in the Enlightenment, self-love and the passions become the source of the dynamics of the personality. Moreover, this writers replace dualism by a monistic paradigm, inspired by or close to spinozism. According to this new antropology, the thematcis of self-knowledge develops as a program of conrol of self-esteem, conceived as a mean to acheive a greater inensity of existence.