Rousseau breaks the tie considered indissoluble between moral conscience and cultural conscience, replacing it by the relationship between nature and ethics. This revolutionizes the way man and his relationships with the world are understood. The philosopher, who is suspicious of reason which is not educated by feelings, in Emile proposes an education that will defend man's heart from error and vice coming from society. In Julia, or the New Heloise, a novel written in the form of letters, the author combines the discourse of passion with a moral discourse to show the conflict between love and duty, and to indicate that love and virtue are inseparable. He dramatizes philosophical positions, contributing to create a new ethics and a new esthetics, in which the education of the virtuous man is reaffirmed. The article concludes that the two works mark the decisive contribution of Rousseau to the creation of a new mentality which aspires to internalization and spontaneity arising from nature, arousing romantic sensibility.
Rousseau; virtue; love; new sensibility