Fin, finalité, finalisme. Le rôle de l'imaginaire chez Rousseau et Bernardin de Saint-Pierre

Rousseau's epistemological revolution can be seen as a transformation of the status of finality for humans. Its basis in nature is there only to justify liberty, which is now the sole responsibility of humans, and nature, based on imagination, is only its vehicle, where liberty and reality ought to be finally reconciled. Education should be in imagination the route to this reconciliation. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Rousseau's generous disciple, disrupts this subtle dialectic reconciling in the imagination the aim of liberty and natural finality, and adopts a finalism which absorbs everything in Nature as Providence, both natura naturata and natura naturans. Liberty, the prisoner of this organic harmony, is now only another name for nature. Education loses all grip on reality and all fictional power. The romantic imagination is on the horizon, finally replacing reason and the reasoning power of humans over nature.Soëtard Michel. Fin, finalité, finalisme. Le rôle de l'imaginaire chez Rousseau et Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. In: Dix-huitième Siècle, n°33, 2001. L'Atlantique, sous la direction de Marcel Dorigny . pp. 528-538