Rousseau’s Herbarium, or The Art of Living Together

Abstract In his botanical writings, Jean-Jacques Rousseau repeatedly returns to the idea that botanising exercises our faculty of attentive observation and teaches us to “see well.” Through botanical practice, we learn to transfer our attention from the self to what lies outside it and, specifically, to perceive other individual realities as they really are. To Rousseau, seeing well is not a matter of mere accuracy, but of disinterestedness and attention to the particularities of others, and the perceptual competences that he thought we might attain from botany have parallels in moral perception. Teasing out some of these parallels, this article’s main objective is to establish that the botanical gaze that Rousseau cultivates in his final years is moral in character and that it promotes wisdom and virtues indispensable to the moral education of man.