La statua di Glauco. Riflessioni sulla natura umana durante la pandemia

The statue of Glauco that the sea and the storms have disfig- ured so as to make its appearance more like a ferocious beast than a god, is the famous image with which Jean Jacques Rous- seau, in the Discourse on the origin of inequality, questions himself on Human Nature, in a reflection that will have its purpose both in the political project of the Contract and in the pedagogical project of the Emilio. The image serves in fact to reiterate that that dete- rioration, that ugliness, is only external and that the statue (the man) has remained in its depths beautiful and good, since in him the feeling of piety, of his own and of his remains unchanged. dignity and the vocation to freedom of others. If this were not the case, there would be no possibility for political democracy and democratic education. The growing social inequalities, the ar- tificialization of feelings and relationships due to technology, as well as the spread, after the pandemic, of a sort of mass “claus- trophilia”, a love for the clos