The ancients would have never located happiness in an invisible world, and they never acted in accordance with rational and universal, or even scientific, principles (they inhabited a “more or less” world, in the words of Alexandre Koyré). Polytheism allowed for a mode of thinking capable of adapting itself to circumstances, morally orienting natural drives rather than seeking to eradicate them, above all in regard to the inclination toward pleasure. The more peoples follow principles that they believe to be universal, the more ruthless and cruel they become (Z 710–11); thus the modern conception of evil, philosophically or ideologically grounded, is “entirely new and more terrible [than the ancient one]” (Z 81); and in the same way, the greater a practical morality, the less a theoretical one (Z 2492–93). The “practical philosophy” proposed by Leopardi, following the path of Epictetus, is based on a critique of ideologies that looks toward the future, that is, to the moral barbarization of the hypercivilized person.
By using antiquity as his polestar, Leopardi is able to extend his thought far beyond the facts at hand: he finds in the French Revolution both the positive reawakening of illusions and of national consciousness (two cardinal elements of ancient politics) as well as an unwarranted rationalizing of the world. Such a double reading combines the republican enthusiasm of many European intellectuals and philosophers (Z 2334–35) with the critiques of Burke or Chateaubriand. What is more, Leopardi’s idea that individual differences were much more marked in antiquity, due to its being closer to nature, permits him to analyze, without having to take a step past his own front door, the dynamics of mass society (especially those of fashion and of the book market), thus anticipating Tocqueville, Balzac, and Baudelaire, all of whom were able to observe these phenomena close at hand. Leopardi exposes modern individualism as the egoism of a form of reason that places no limits on the “geometricization” of the world, thereby destroying its variety and individuality, reducing it to sameness and uniformity. In fact, pages 147–49 of the Zibaldone constitute perhaps one of the first discussions of the effects of globalization.
On the psychological and aesthetic level, Leopardi immediately underscores a crucial point: the ancients do not recognize the notion of the morbid satisfaction in suffering that was introduced by Christianity (Z 2456–57), that is, the withdrawal of the self into the bottomless pit of conscience: that typically modern “vague des passions.” Yet he remained fascinated by this owing to his reading of Mme. de Staël and Chateaubriand, because he recognized his own “sentimental” disposition in this emotion (it is unlikely that he read Schiller as well). And here we come to the point of greatest contradiction: Leopardi is aware that modernity requires a poetry radically different from that of the ancients, because the modern spirit cannot turn back (Z 2403, 4186–87), and yet he remains faithful to the notion that the “poetic”—that is, an imagination that does not devolve into abstractions, but remains, as in Homer, grounded in the horizon of things in themselves—is a form that belongs solely and inalienably to antiquity (Z 1174–75, 2944–46, 4497). For Leopardi, the modern age requires both the medium of prose—and not a poetic prose (Z 2171–72, 4497)—and a philosophy that has become by this time very distant from nature (Z 1359–60).
Leopardi’s discovery of the Greek tragedians in 1823, while in Rome (Z 2672–73 and notes), certainly darkened his luminous view of the ancients (Z 1860–62, 3976). It is not by chance that this crisis, combined with his reading of the complete work of Plato, the most “modern” of the ancients, was then reinforced by his observations of the social dynamics of large cities, which he saw for the first time in that period. The combined effect of these discoveries resulted in the temporary desiccation of his poetic inspiration, while at the same time giving rise to a book of philosophic prose (the Operette morali), in which Leopardi dramatizes the destruction of all the values he once held dear. And yet the myth of the ancients remained steadfast, and indeed, his faith in this myth was strengthened in the fall of 1828 by his reading of Vico and of Wolf on Homer and oral cultures. For Leopardi the ancients and orality, uniquely endowed with the capacity to keep memory alive, were in fact one and the same thing (Z 4270 and note 2). And again, it is not by chance that the year 1828 marks the rebirth of his poetic inspiration; what is more, the new edition of his lyrics (1831) will bear the title Canti (Songs) for the first time. Leopardi wagers one more time on the paradox of a modern lyric capable of keeping alive the flame of a lost epoch that was for him both more divine and also more human, like his great everlasting love, Homer. In these last years, his notes and work projects that focus on the relations between the ancient and the modern intensify. At the same time, even if Leopardi recognizes that the distance between the ancient and the modern is, finally, insurmountable, he is all the more convinced of their affinity because a number of the most modern discoveries had already been known to the ancients (Z 4192–93). He continues to believe that despite the irreversible mutation of the human mind, there is indeed much “to be recovered” from their culture (Z 4289, 4477–78). His discussion of “the humanity of the ancients” is illuminating (Z 441), especially when he speaks with admiration and nostalgia about the right of exile according to which everyone is guaranteed sanctuary at the hearth of every temple or private home; and the respect for wanderers, enemies, the elderly, the dead—that is, for the most fragile casualties of the human condition. It is in this sense that we can speak of the ancients having received Leopardi, welcomed him, and offered him sanctuary in time; he never forgot that they knew well how to be hospitable, how to organize a truce, to respect values, burials, rituals, and above all to respect “words,” which constitute the body of all ideas (Z 2916). This means, in a Vichian sense (cf. Z 3430–32), that in their language, as well as in their monuments and their institutions, the ancients knew how to protect both humanity and the individual against the ferocity of nature and the barbarisms that are inherent in the ascendancy of Reason.
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Animals, Body, Senses, Passions
For Leopardi, experiencing one’s own body is a privileged point of access to knowledge. His enfeebled constitution, by intensifying his constant self-observation, and his tendency to hypochondria are key to an interpretation of the world that negates an idealistic or spiritual perspective of any kind. Man for Leopardi is first and foremost an animal, and his history is merely the last section of the much more ancient history of all living species, which in their turn are an integral part of the entire ecological system. The observation of animal behavior (frequently mediated through Buffon) is a thread that runs throughout the Zibaldone; worth mentioning is the hostility toward any attempt at artificial “manipulation”: training or teaching (Z 3974–75), “improvement” (Z 1699–1701), propagation and diffusion (Z 3649–51).
Man at the origins was not destined to be modified in this or that direction: the distinction between “disposition” and “faculty” (Z 1661–63, 2162–64), and the predominant role assigned to “habit” and to “exercise” (see Periander’s maxim “Everything is exercise” cited on Z 1717), make human history into an open-ended, unpredictable journey. All that can be ascertained is simply that the difference between man and the other animals lies in a greater conformability, or capacity to change and adapt, which goes hand in hand with a development of attention and memory (Z 1952) and an inhibition of natural energies (Z 4080–81, 4499). But how this deviation came about is impossible to say. Perhaps there is originally, as Leopardi already had a sense in 1819, a chance modification of certain organs, which allowed a greater capacity to socialize (Z 56 and note 5) and therefore to create experiences through imitation (Z 417). In this process of moving away from its origins, the speed of which Leopardi compares to that of accelerated motion (Z 1732), the body of the man-animal is not thereby perfected in any way; on the contrary, it has become weaker. The dogma of “perfectibility” is overturned from the ethical point of view as well. Animals are not capable of cruelty (Z 3794–95), and virtue dwells more readily in men
who are strong and healthy (Z 223, 453). It was able therefore to flourish more readily among the ancients because for them, as also for primitive men, the body was still “the principal part and almost the whole” (Z 3932–33) and they dedicated a great deal of time to physical exercises. Modern man is the fruit of an extraordinary development of “sensibility” and of thinking: a process of interiorization of his energies (“spiritualization”) which has as a presupposition inaction, the abandonment of bodily exertions and the superabundance of “refined” labors, that is, intellectual (Z 76, cf., e.g., Z 1597–602). In the interweaving pattern of the Zibaldone one can discern a model according to which, in the course of human history, “the organs of consciousness” (Onians) have shifted from the heart and lungs (thumos and phrenes) to the brain: this model, which also has aesthetic implications (see “Poetry, Voice, Music”), was formulated by Leopardi on the basis of his own experience, which brought him into personal contact with the effects of the excessive development of cerebral activity (frequent illnesses, curvature of the spine, the deterioration of his sight, the weakness of his nerves).
In the wake of a philosophical debate with which he was extremely familiar (cf. his dissertation on the “soul of beasts” written as a child), Leopardi dedicates a large part of the Zibaldone to the links between the body and what is called “animo” or “anima,” a word which has no single equivalent in English (and which is rendered by us variously as “spirit,” “soul,” or “mind”). He begins with the supposition that ideas and feelings, modifications of thought and changes of state of mind, all depend on the body and are body (Z 1719, 2455, 3202–206). Leopardi shares the sensistic principle of the correspondence between the physical and the moral (Cabanis), and adopts the critique of innate ideas that is present in Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, the translation of which Leopardi had read in 1821 (Z 1028 and passim), reversing the sense of the Platonic phrase “scire est reminisci” (“knowing is remembering,” Z 1675): no idea comes to us in “a form prior to the existence of the objects which contain it” (Z 1339–41, 2712–15), but is the product of a lengthy process of elaboration of sensory data, which is brought about by corporeal matter itself. In 1827 he will claim, in opposition to the spiritualism then prevalent, that “matter thinks” (Z 4288–89).
The analysis of the passions also develops from these premises. It may be that Leopardi owes his psychological acuteness to his habitual reading, in the years of his childhood and adolescence, of Christian devotional literature (for example, Thomas à Kempis, Francis de Sales), on which was later placed the imprint of classic moralists (Mme. Lambert and Pascal are the only ones for whom we have good evidence). But a much more decisive influence was probably that ancient rhetorical and philosophical outlook which aimed to integrate and direct the passions toward ethical and political goals rather than condemn and repress them. It is from this tradition that Leopardi acquires his style of empirical argumentation: his reflections do not take on a systematic form, but move through a process of continual inquiry in which the individual observation is subjected to assessment via the parameters of polarized interpretative categories: north/south, internal/external, action/inaction, but above all to those in which the pairings mirror each other: youth/old age and ancient/modern (cf., e.g., Z 266–67, 1648–49, 2107–10).
It would seem that Leopardi intended to compile a “Treatise on the passions” (one of the slips not referred to in his own index: see under Leopardi’s 1827 Index) which, as is clear from the overlap of elements in the indexes, largely corresponds to his project of “Memories of my life” and that of his “Manual of practical philosophy” (though many of these comments are also entered in the Index of 1827 under the headings “Social Machiavellianism” and “Moral etiquette.”) Leopardi’s reflections therefore are mainly the fruit of personal experience, but at the same time they aim to develop an empirical science of happiness and living in common, whose approach is derived from the paradoxical yet highly effective formula: converting “reason into passion” (Z 294).
Between the very early influence of Rousseau (though perhaps only the second Discourse) and striking similarities with the thought of Hobbes (which, however, does not appear in his list of readings), Leopardi’s social anthropology goes back to the origins of humankind to establish the primacy of love of self as the passion which generates all the others (Z 2490–91), even compassion (as Leopardi will admit—unlike Rousseau—only at a second stage; cf. Z 4283). Love of self is in constant conflict with a tendency to socialization which is by this point already acquired and cannot be shed (Z 669–74 and see also the entry “Communicating one’s own pleasures and displeasures to others” in the 1827 Index) but which becomes more and more problematic the closer we come to the present. The two cardinal passions derived from love of self are fear, the most egoistical of the passions (Z 2630), which is in direct opposition to hope (over which fear always prevails, cf. Z 458, 1303), and above all hatred (see the extremely full entry in the 1827 Index under “Hatred toward our fellows”). It can be said that the modern world is born when the scapegoat mechanism (later illustrated by the studies of René Girard), through which hatred is directed against fate, the gods, or some other external force, meets an obstruction which turns that hatred back on the self (Z 503, 4070–71). The arrival of Christianity then is a watershed in the history of the passions, since, by substituting “the fairy tale of universal love” for “national love,” it has ushered in the era of “universal hatred” of everyone against everyone (Z 890), that is, a model of “egoistical society” where the pressures of love of self (but more generally of all the passions) are not channeled into action and symbolically sublimated, and therefore lead man to a new barbarism, to the Hobbesian bellum omnium contra omnes (Z 930). The alternative (for more moral individuals, as Weininger will claim a century later) is hatred toward oneself, that is, the interiorization and extreme rationalization of aggressive drives (Z 2481–83), which if carried to an extreme lead to suicide because of boredom, desperation, or self-loathing: these are the most typically modern passions. It is significant that in a page of 1819 Leopardi defines as “innocent” not someone who does not sin, but someone who sins without remorse (Z 51), like the animal or primitive man (Z 249). If the analysis of the sense of guilt and the refinements of egoism (Z 3118) in the modern psyche is, on the road that will lead to Freud, one of the main vehicles of nineteenth-century philosophy from Kierkegaard to Nietzsche, via Dostoevsky, Leopardi is certainly a forerunner.
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Experience, Autobiography, Memory
The Zibaldone is the product of a continuous tension between poles of opposition: abstraction and concrete data, systemization and individual experience, synchrony and diachrony. According to Leopardi, the philosopher is one who generalizes and collects individual facts primarily for the purpose of revealing the analogies, rules, and inescapable laws that connect them (Z 66, 947, 1650, 1870, 3649). The philosopher gazes at himself from a distance, as the Stoics taught us, and loses very quickly “the natural habit of excluding himself and his behavior from what he has learned in general about men and their behavior in the world” (Z 1870). This sentence, perhaps the key to the entire Zibaldone, should be understood in two ways: if it is indeed true that whoever cannot generalize cannot think philosophically, it is also true that making oneself the exception is a very “natural” habit, born from a primal and ongoing vital impulse. By turning experience into a predictable geometrical theorem, thought destroys the possibility of actually living—that is, of having illusions, which is to say, of harboring the hope that one is, after all, an exception. This explains why Leopardi’s diary ends at the very point when thought has completely circumscribed experience, when the self discovers that even one’s own particular life is already inscribed in a book without exceptions and, above all, without leaving any space for what Ernst Bloch called “the principle of hope” (Z 4106, 4145–46). The Zibaldone concludes with this sentence: “Man is stupef
ied to see in his own case that the general rule is shown to be true” (Z 4525–26). Seeking relations between things, comparing, classifying, and generalizing—the very intellectual tools that Leopardi had inherited from the Enlightenment as proper to the faculty of reason—these processes are transformed into a nightmare in which reason becomes, as Leopardi had already written to his friend Pietro Giordani on 14 December 1818, the executioner of the human race.
The diary thrives because of the tenacity with which Leopardi grounds his own “systems” in experience and individual experiments, in personal episodes, in intimate feelings and memories of things seen or heard (“and I know this from my own experience,” Z 2415; “Develop this thought, applying it to my own case,” Z 1541). Given his modesty, these experientially grounded perceptions often appear in cryptic forms, or as oblique comments, as, for example, when he speaks indirectly about himself while commenting on Galileo’s nobility (Z 4241) or on the unhappy life of a hunchback (Z 2442). His generalizations never precede the experience, even if the allusion to the experience is indirect, but rather, always follow it (Z 947–48, 3825); and they tend to refer to an actually lived experience, or, in any case, a documented one, even if in an approximate or partial way (scientific findings, announcements, readings, stories, anecdotes, compilations of data). Leopardi inherits, on the one hand, the rhetorical tradition (which never departs from the specific example, from the pragmatic context), and, on the other hand, the experimental attitude that gives birth to modern science: according to the latter, there exists a reciprocal relation in which every experience is a verification de facto of the laws or theoretical principles which justify it de jure: “Science may never supplant experience.” (Z 1586–87).
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