Zibaldone

by Leopardi, Giacomo

  First, any attempt to effect a return to a previous state of plenitude is revealed to be pure illusion, and this intellectual clarity inhibits even the experience of nostalgia. The earlier myth of nature as a harmonious and “stupendous” order (Z 2936–38) is reversed, with the resultant vision of a blind mechanistic world of production and destruction in which evil and monstrosity (or what man perceives to be so) are connatural with it (Z 4510–11). Even if one admits the existence of a demiurge, it would be indifferent, stupid, and evil (Z 4258, and note that Leopardi even wrote a hymn to Arimanes). From this point on, until the end of the diary, Leopardi adheres to the materialism of the eighteenth century, above all that of Baron d’Holbach, and to his fierce polemic against Rousseau, the tutelary god of the first part of the Zibaldone. Similarly, the myth of the untainted happiness of the Greeks has been dimmed, especially by the poet’s discovery of the Greek tragedians. However, Leopardi’s instinctive sympathy for the “humanity of the ancients” (Z 4441), which rests on their privileged position of not having had to face the truth of metaphysics, continues to remain alive.

  Second, after Leopardi’s vision of the “garden” of universal “souffrance” (Z 4175–77), the movement and variety of the world, originally viewed as the vital possibility of growth, will now be seen as pure chaos. Entropy increases with this vitality and therefore with the increase in our desire for happiness, and runs parallel to the recognition that this type of happiness will never be realized. Philosophy becomes transformed into a cruel historical analysis of modernity; its destiny consists in an always greater self-awareness that can only contribute to an always greater unhappiness. The only solution is a regression into the insensate character of matter itself; or a type of forgetfulness, tragic in nature (dullness, sleep, insensitivity, death, inebriation, or risk and adventure). Importantly, the solution can never consist in any type of hedonism because, for Leopardi, the unhappiest moment is precisely that of pleasure itself (Z 172, 2861). Another solution might be an increase in human activity to the vertiginous point of a total eclipse of all consciousness: a continual distraction (Z 4186–87). While the first solution recalls Schopenhauer, the second comes up against the problems raised by Goethe’s Faust, partly composed during the very same years, and also foreshadows the modern society described a few years later by Balzac in Les illusions perdues.

  It is characteristic of Leopardi never to be satisfied with any definitive solution, nor with the theorems and systems that he continues to construct: his hypotheses always serve to reopen the question. In his very long poetic-philosophical last will and testament, the poem “La ginestra” (“Broom, or the Flower of the Desert”), composed in Naples in 1836, one year before his death, Leopardi proposes a new truce between sentient beings and nature, imagining a world sustained by “right and pity.” The Zibaldone, however, ends before this moment, in 1832.

  The third from last entry of the Zibaldone highlights the triple nulla: “two truths that man will generally never believe: one, that we know nothing, the other, that we are nothing. Add the third, which depends a lot on the second: that there is nothing to hope for after death.” (Z 4525). The penultimate entry of the diary makes a mockery of the impossible desire to return to some hypostasized infancy and childhood; and the last entry emphasizes that there is no room for an exception to the general rule. In the diary, which is beyond the realm of poetry, metaphysics wins: the Zibaldone, preeminent space of openings, of investigation, of wonderment, and of hope, no longer has a reason to exist.

  [FD]

  Nature, Culture, Society

  Among the virtual files under which Leopardi grouped the separate slips that were not included in his Index of 1827, the one entitled “On the nature of men and of things,” though not the most copious, is certainly one of the densest. This is due in part to the very complexity of the abstract notion of nature itself—a power, a force, a generating, life-giving principle that is both inextricably entwined with the life of each individual animal or thing and at the same time impersonal and out of the reach of sentient beings. Nature is first and foremost “the existence, the state of being, the life, sensory or not, of things […] [T]here can be no thing or purpose more natural, nor more naturally appealing and desirable and sought after, than existence and life, which is almost one and the same thing as nature itself, nor can there be a more natural nor naturally greater love than that of life” (Z 3814). But Leopardi will also distinguish between life and existence, albeit in a special sense, meaning by the former “internal life,” the life lived and formed by civilization, and by the latter “external life,” and in this sense “nature is not life, but existence, and tends to the latter, not the former” (Z 3936). The distinction marks out the shadowy borderland between nature and culture (to use an anachronistic term where Leopardi says “civilization”), between how man ought to live, and perhaps once did live, in nature, and how he lives now, remote from nature, and against it.

  Unhappiness is the blatant symptom of a malady that affects modern man, to the point of triggering self-destruction. In his first sustained reflection on the theme (Z 56), Leopardi notes that the primary instinct of all beings is “concern for preserving their own existence.” Looking upon this instinctual need from the perspective of civilization, it would appear that there is no contradiction between a being’s self-preservation and the same being’s unhappiness with its existence. But “such a thing cannot be in nature unless nature has become totally corrupt,” least of all can it be so in the creature that “is manifestly the highest rung” of the animal order, man (and cf. Z 2900–901). A number of reflections follow from this important entry, which sets a template for the more detailed and sophisticated thoughts that will follow on and around the same theme. First, corruption, the degradation of man, is not in nature but in man. Apparently in agreement with the Christian narrative of the fall (Z 393–420, 1004), Leopardi will execute a delicate maneuver in November 1821 with his claim that “all these authorities” (such as the Church Fathers) “favor my system, with the difference that whereas they believed nature to be corrupt and corrupting I believe that reason is. […] And whereas they came to place man outside nature, where everything is perfect of its kind, I put him back inside, and say that he is outside only because he has abandoned his primitive being etc. etc.” (Z 2115–16). Second, Leopardi—in this early entry at Z 56—imagines a space in which man could live satisfactorily in the way that the animals do, with a “more or less constant and moderate” contentedness, save for the accidental misfortunes—accidental, but not substantial—to which all beings in nature are liable (cf. Z 1957–59). But that space is now denied us because “we have experienced the emptiness of things and the illusoriness and nothingness of […] natural pleasures, which we ought not even to suspect.” This is the proclamation on the one hand of the curse of noia, boredom, “the passion most contrary to and farthest from nature,” “the feeling of nothingness, and of the nullity of what exists, and of the very one who conceives and feels it, and in whom it subsists” (L’s emphases), the acme of human corruption, perhaps the one ill that cannot find its analogue among the animals, who know no boredom (Z 2220; in the same vein: Z 1554–55, 2599–602), an ill that is perhaps less marked in country people and the uneducated, and especially in children, still capable of naturalness, spontaneity, simplicity, and natural pleasures, including those of physical vigor (Z 358) and vivacity (Z 2017–18, 3813–15) and natural reactions to pain or grief (Z 4243–45). On the other, it alerts us to the destruction, the “massacre” of the illusions given by nature—virtue, glory, love of country, and so on—a theme more fully developed in the anti-Genesis “History of the Human Race,” which opens the Operette morali. The illusions invoked in Z 56 form part of the composition and order of things. Since nature is the supplier of illusions, they are not an exception to the natural order. The corollary is that, if they are destroyed (by man himself, or by a more anonymous “reason”), man is de-natured (Z 22, 51).


  The third area opened up by the thought on Z 56 concerns man’s social organization compared with that of other animals. But before confronting that central question, we must touch on an argument upon which Leopardi expends some care. This concerns different kinds of natural disposition and the particular phenomenon of man’s conformability and adaptability. Nature creates almost nothing but dispositions in man. But it is important to distinguish, Leopardi notes (Z 3374), between dispositions “providing the potential to be” and dispositions “to be.” If, in the latter case, man follows his natural inclinations he will become what he ought to be. Insofar as dispositions that supply only potential are concerned, “man acquires many qualities not intended for him by nature, many qualities which may even be counter to nature’s intention, and becomes what he ought not to be, that is, what nature did not intend him to become in creating that disposition in him” (Z 3375). The potential to be, or to become, is much greater in man than in any other being, and correspondingly great is his potential to deviate from what nature would have wanted for him. But the corollary to this in man is what Leopardi describes as “more life than there is in other living creatures,” and life itself may be defined as “a greater or lesser degree of adaptability, a number and value of dispositions prevailing in some way (more or less) over the number and value of innate qualities” (Z 3381). From this “supreme conformability” of man (Z 2902) there spring two consequences: his enhanced power to develop in ways not intended by nature even if it had given him the potential, or rather the disposition to the potential, to do so, as we have seen; and a further potential, greater than that in any other creature, to alter and refashion nature itself (Z 1558–62), adapting it, not in accordance with the myriad patterns of adaptation nature allows for in its system, but following other criteria, and doing violence to nature, which, in Leopardi’s view, in 1821 at least, is blameless (Z 1957–59).

  It is this rampaging humanity, with all its attendant misery and unhappiness, that has taken the organization of society far beyond its “natural” confines. Existing society travels in the opposite direction from nature, to which it can never return. If there ever was a perfect society, it was for only a brief and irrecoverable moment. Leopardi’s concept of the natural state took the form, not of an imaginary topography, but of an idea of what is left when all that is corrupt about modern society is stripped away, a fiction that starts, not from the remotest past, about which we know nothing, but from the world that we actually see and touch. This world comprises, on the one hand, the “close-knit” integration of human individuals bound one to another “by the clearest and most detailed, specific, numerous, mathematical, etc., laws, agreements, and obligations (moral or material)” (Z 555), while each one of these individuals is motivated by self-love, and is at constant and open war with his fellows; and, on the other, a sign or vestige perhaps of a natural order that still pertains, notably in the social organization of insects and animals such as “bees, ants, beavers, cranes, and other similar creatures, whose society is natural, and at the level intended by nature” (Z 3774–75). “Their individuals,” Leopardi continues, “all work always toward the common good, and they help each other mutually, the only aim, the only reason for uniting in society”; mutual harm is occasional and accidental. The continuation of the essay-long entry from which these quotations are taken (Z 3773–810) comes to focus on the detail of man’s hatred toward man, for which close-knit society is the perfect culture. (Leopardi uses the same term, società stretta, for a rather different concept in his unfinished Discorso sopra lo stato presente dei costumi degl’Italiani, probably drafted in 1824, where it is used to refer to a socioeconomic elite that uses its rentier leisure to form a network of intellectuals that has international as well as national cohesion in contemporary Europe.) But his purpose in these opening pages of the entry is not to idealize the society of animals, rather it is to sketch a blueprint of what humanity in the natural state might have been like.

  Agreeing with Rousseau in the Discourse on the Foundations of Inequality, Leopardi imagines our earliest ancestors enjoying the bare minimum of society, coming together only incidentally and as the need arose. While Leopardi mocks the philosophers forever trying, and ever failing, to describe the perfect society, he does not wholly escape the teleological pull of his own fiction. Something must have induced these scattered, and seemingly ruminant, individuals to form a closer social union. It is clear that society could not have become established without the development of language, but even if language were to prove the instrument of man’s “perfection,” it was not of itself disposed by nature (Z 2896–97). The relatively pacific vision of the earliest human society endorsed by Rousseau contradicts the earlier natural-law view of Locke and Hobbes among others that the earliest individuals must have lived in fear of each other, requiring from the start that their unfettered equality be curbed by the establishment of a single, artificial government. Rousseau argues that inequality was established by a trick or a hoax, on the part of the individual or individuals who claimed private rights over common property, and who had the linguistic skills to say “This is mine.” Leopardi overleaps this phase, and is not much concerned with the origin of private property or of inequality. But the space between the very limited (if any) “loose-knit” society of natural man and the fearsomely constricted “tight-knit” society of civilized man is also difficult to negotiate. There are three overlapping terms in play: the primitive, the savage, and the barbarous. Leopardi distinguishes between the first and the third of these: “The primitive and the barbarous are different things. The barbarous is already spoiled, whereas the primitive is not yet mature” (Z 118). In other words, the primitive has not yet reached, or even aspired to, the rank of civilization; the barbarous is already a sign of the latter’s decline (cf. Z 22). The primitive is closer, in Leopardi’s mind, to the origins and implicitly antithetical to the civilized, as in another relatively early passage: “Civilization has introduced refined labors, etc., that consume and exhaust and extinguish human faculties such as memory, sight, strength in general, etc., labors that were not required by nature. And it has taken away those labors which conserve and improve the faculties, such as agriculture, hunting, etc., and primitive life, which were willed by nature and necessary for such a life” (Z 76). This seems fairly clear-cut; elsewhere, Leopardi conflates the barbarous and the savage, as in Z 3882–84, but also distinguishes between them in what is probably the lodestar of his thought on the matter: barbarism is the necessary prelude to civilization, incorporating all that is worst about human society, and also the sign of its decline, as in one of the several passages that document Leopardi’s fascination with the European conquests and interpretations of the Americas, from which he concludes: “Their ills [of the savage tribes of America who destroy one another with their deadly wars] come from a beginning of civilization. There is certainly nothing worse than a civilization either in its early stages or past maturity, degenerate, corrupt. Both are barbarous states, but neither is a savage state in the pure and strict sense of the word” (Z 4185).

  But at a certain point, Leopardi extricates himself from these definitional tangles, and works toward a radicalization of his thought that takes place over a number of years. In the first instance, he draws consequences from his writing of the “Dialogue Between Nature and an Icelander” that give rise to an immediate need to nail down and develop the implications of that operetta, most notably in the entry in the Zibaldone dated 2 June 1824, three days after the drafting of the dialogue was complete (a rare example of Leopardi using the Zibaldone to comment on a work in progress), where he poses again a fundamental question: “that the essence of being should include within itself the necessary cause and principle of being in an ill fashion, how can that be the case, if ill by its very nature is contrary to the respective essence of things and for that reason alone is ill? If being unhappily is not being in an ill fashion, unhappiness will therefore not be an ill to anyone who suffers it nor
contrary and inimical to its subject, rather it will be a good since everything which is contained in the particular essence and nature of an individual being must be a good for that being. Who can understand these monstrosities?” Can not being be better for living things than being? How do the contradictions of nature and the proposition that “a thing cannot both be and not be” coexist? (Z 4099–100). A few years later, particularly between 1828 and 1829, Leopardi will return insistently to the denunciation of nature as indifferent if not actively evil (for the latter, see Z 4428, 4485–86, and 4511). At Z 4510, he directly challenges the primacy of self-preservation in nature, in light of the immense wastage of seeds not germinated, sentient beings destroyed before they have lived: a wasteland of abortion to set against the wanton and no longer charming childishness of nature itself at Z 4421. And behind these dramatic interventions there stands the figure of a writer who has already understood that he will not resolve the mysteries of social life and man’s decline in time by immersing himself in purely social or historical questions. On the contrary, it is in solitude that he may devote himself to “speculation and knowledge about himself as himself; about men as part of the universe; about nature, the world, existence, things that for him (and actually) are much more serious than the deepest questions relating to society,” and turn in consequence from the “philosophy of society” to “metaphysics” (Z 4138–39; cf. “Metaphysics, Theology, Philosophy”), as if it were nature itself, and man in nature, not in society, that was the ultimate mystery, and perhaps monstrosity, to be confronted.