This essay aims to indicate the intertwinement operated by Jean-Jacques Rousseau of philosophy, literature and painting in some of his writings to establish a genre of poetics which, among other impressions, suggests the aesthetic principles for understanding and conducting childhood. In other words, it examines whether Rousseau – by offering us a simultaneously intellectual, sensitive and plastic experience of certain concepts – suggests the basic elements for creating a pedagogy which combines the intelligible and the sensible in its way of theorizing and working on children. To illustrate this possibility, I take passages from Julie, or the New Heloise and Reveries of the Solitary Walker, as well as brief references to Emile and examine them by means of two different heuristic devices, namely: the praise of Eros expressed by Agathon in The Banquet, by Plato, and the painting “The Embarkation for Cythera”, by French painter Antoine Watteau. The text concludes that there is a poetics of the surface, which is simultaneously formative and formed, as it challenges and lets itself be manufactured by the one who feels it and thinks about it.
Aesthetics; Education; Pedagogy; Childhood