Abstract

The model of sincerity temathized in Rousseau's Confessions is understood as the culminating point of one of the great possibilities of modern thought to think the subject and its relation with truth. In our understanding, this is to be seen as an alternative, and so to say "karstic" line in respect to the predominant one which was started by the Cartesian turn and its reduction of the subject to a cold spectator of the given objectivity of the world. On the contrary, Rousseau's line, although a minority one, thematizes a different relation - or even an opposite one - between subject and object: the certainty - that is, that way Descartes describes truth as a relation of exact correspondence between a thinking subject and the objective world - gives way to sincerity.