Zibaldone

by Leopardi, Giacomo

  But since complete equality cannot be maintained for long, and since complete equality is the essential foundation, and the sole, indispensable custodian of democracy, such a state cannot endure, and naturally turns into monarchy, if it is not so fortunate as to lapse into oligarchy instead, or into government by optimates, that is, aristocracy, both of which, [570] however, are ordinarily, indeed one might say always, simply another step toward monarchy. See p. 608, paragraph 1.

  The only protection against excessive and harmful inequality in a free state is nature, that is, natural illusions, which lead selfishness and self-love not to wish for anything more than others, to sacrifice ourselves to the commonality, to keep within the bounds of equality, to defend the existing state of affairs, and to refuse every exceptional status and preeminence, save for those entailing sacrifices, dangers, and virtues conducive to conserving the liberty and equality of all. The sole remedy against the inequalities that do nonetheless arise is nature, that is, once again, natural illusions, which ensure both that these inequalities stem from virtue and merit alone and that the virtue and general heroism of the nation will tolerate them: indeed, look kindly on them, regarding them without envy and with pleasure, as the result of merit, and not strive to attain such superiority, except also through virtue and merit. And that those who have attained this same superiority, whether it be in glory or in offices and rank (since a superiority in riches, and other such advantages, does not occur so long as the influence of nature [571] in the republic endures), do not abuse it, do not strive to go still further, are content, indeed use their power to maintain equality and liberty, confide in others, and reduce the envy others feel for their advantages by shunning pride, greed, contempt for or oppression of their inferiors, etc. etc. etc. And all this, in fact, happened in the earliest and best periods of the ancient democracies, that is, in the periods closest to nature, both because of the kinds of institution and custom and, more tangibly, because of the times.1 But once illusions had been extinguished, once nature had become weak or been removed, and base selfishness had risen to the fore again, roused by the advantages and means of aggrandizement enjoyed by superiors and exacerbated in inferiors by their very inferiority, once riches, luxury, clientships, pledges, ambitiones [ambitions], philosophy, eloquence, the arts, and the countless other corruptions and πλεονεξίαι [manifestations of greed] of society had been added, the democracies grew weaker, crumbled, and in the end fell. And here I return to the beginning of my discourse, [572] that is to say, how governments that today appear to be, and in fact are, deeply imperfect, and sometimes unsustainable, were either perfect or good, and also very useful at the beginning, while natural customs endured. And how there is no greater or more certain scourge in any state than the corruption and extinction of nature. And how governments that were good while nature endured become, without a doubt, very bad once nature has ceased to be. And how one cannot replace nature, and how its absence cannot be remedied; and without it one can never hope for perfection or happiness in government until the end of time, but everything (even the most deeply studied, carefully constructed, and completely philosophical government) will always be utterly imperfect, full of discordant elements, ill-adapted to man (to whom nothing can be adapted, once he is no longer what he should be), and unsuited to true happiness, and therefore, either in fact or certainly in true theory, precarious, unstable, wrongly situated, badly built, shaky, illogical, incoherent, [573] false, etc. All of which may also be seen in what follows.

  All the various governments through which the human mind, or chance, or the force of particular circumstances successively or simultaneously strayed served merely to dismay the true philosophers (certainly few in number), convinced by experience of the necessary imperfection, unhappiness, contradiction, and impropriety of 1st all that lacked nature, the only true and invariable norm of every earthly institution; 2nd all that did not conform to the essence and logic of society, which requires absolute monarchy.

  Almost all of society’s various aberrations in the sphere of government reverted therefore to monarchy, the natural state of society, and the world, especially in recent centuries, had become, it is fair to say, entirely absolute-monarchical. In particular, a new absolute monarchy was born directly from the abuse and corruption of liberty and democracy, which was itself born directly from the abuse and corruption of [574] absolute monarchy. Not the original form, however, which was good and useful and suitable to society while nature’s influence endured, and through that influence alone, but the form that can exist in the absence of nature, that is to say, the form that is as essentially bad as the original form is essentially and simply good: in short, tyranny, because absolute monarchy without nature can only be tyranny of a more or less oppressive kind, and therefore perhaps the worst of all governments. And the reason is that, once natural beliefs and illusions have been removed, there is no cause, it is neither possible nor human, for one person to sacrifice even his most minimal advantage for the good of another, an act that would be essentially opposed to self-love, an essential attribute of all animals. Therefore, the interests of one and all are always without fail subordinated to those of a single man, when the latter has complete authority to make use of others, and their goods, for his own advantage and pleasure, if only on a whim, in short for his satisfaction in all things.

  The world has festered in more or less this state from the beginning of the Roman Empire up until our own century. In the last century, philosophy, the knowledge of things, experimentation, study, the scrutiny of histories, of men, comparisons, parallels, the reciprocal communication of all kinds of men, nations, customs, sciences of every type, arts, etc. etc., have made such progress that the whole world, enlightened and educated, has taken to reflecting upon itself and its condition, and therefore mainly [575] upon politics, which is the most interesting, most valid part, with the greatest and most general influence upon human affairs. At long last we see philosophy, that is, human reason, taking to the field with all its forces, with all its possible power, all its possible means and insights and weapons, and embarking upon the great venture of standing in for a nature that is lost, compensating for the evils that are derived from that loss, and restoring that happiness which was lost along with nature for ages immemorial.1 For, in short, happiness and nothing else is or ought to be the object of our now perfect reason, in all its works, just as it is the object of all human faculties and actions.

  What will this human reason, now that it is at long last worthy of being compared to nature, contribute to the principal purpose of society? I will set aside the experiments conducted in France in the final years of the past century, and the early years of the present one. Having recognized monarchy as indispensable, but absolute monarchy [576] as equivalent to tyranny, modern philosophy has adopted the expedient (and what else could it do?) of propping things up. Away with ideas of perfect government, inventions, discoveries, forms of essential and necessary perfection. Modifications, additions, distinctions, expanding on the one hand, curtailing on the other, dividing, and then racking one’s brains in order to balance the parts of the division, taking away here and adding there: in short, miserable compensations, and supports, patches, and keystones, and devices of every kind, designed to maintain a building that, once its original and pristine condition has been lost, can no longer hold up without solutions that have nothing to do with the initial idea of its construction. In many countries, absolute monarchy has turned into constitutional monarchy (and even as I write the expectation is that the same thing will happen throughout Europe).1 I do not deny that in the present state of the civilized world this may well be the best solution. But when all is said and done, this is not an institution that has its foundation and its justification in the idea and in the essence of either society in general and absolutely or [577] monarchical government in particular. It is an arbitrary, borrowed institution, arising out of men and not out of things, and it is therefore bound to be unstable, mutabl
e, uncertain, in its form, and in its duration, and in the effects to which it gives rise, if it is to serve its purpose, namely, the happiness of the nation.

  1st. Anything that is not grounded in the nature of that entity leads an essentially precarious existence. The entity may remain, and the modification perish, be altered, be forgotten, be abandoned, assume a thousand different guises, not attain its purpose, remain in name and appearance but not in fact. In short, all those properties which are ascribed in the schools to accident, and which define it, are appropriate to such an entity. Furthermore, for as long as it remains, and remains in all its relative perfection or integrity, it is unlikely to be useful, and valuable, and to turn out well, when it does not have its own justification in the essence and nature of the entity.

  2nd. The justification and essence of monarchy lies in the fact that society needs [578] unity. Unity is not true if the leader or prince is not actually and entirely one and the same. This simply means an absolute being, that is to say, the master himself of all that has to do with his purpose, that is, the common good. The more power is divided, the more unity is prejudiced, and therefore the more the justification and the perfection of both monarchy and society are violated, distanced, and excluded.

  So it is that constitutional states do not correspond to the nature and logic either of society in general or of monarchy in particular. And it is plain that a constitution is simply medicine for a sick body. Which medicine would be alien to that body, and yet the latter could not live without it. So the imperfection of the illness has to be compensated for with another imperfection. And thus the constitution is merely a necessary imperfection of the government, an indispensable evil serving to remedy or to obstruct a greater evil, much like a cauterization in an individual suffering from rheumatism, etc. So that even if cauterization enables that individual to live, [579] where otherwise he would not have lived, and even if he is free from the evil against which the remedy was directed, nonetheless that same remedy is an evil, a vice, an imperfection; and even if the first evil no longer does him any harm, the remedy does, and that individual is in no way perfect or healthy. So it is with a wooden leg for someone who has lost his natural one. He may indeed walk with that leg, where otherwise he would not be able to stay upright, yet it nonetheless remains the case that he is imperfect.

  And so we see (to bring my argument to a conclusion) how governments and any manner of things that would have been and were perfect in the beginning and in accord with nature can no longer be so, in spite of all the efforts of reason, knowledge, art. These cannot fill the place of nature and slip perfectly into its role. Indeed, by treating one ill, they introduce another. Because they themselves, once they are brought into any kind of matter, create an imperfection in it, and make that thing imperfect simply by virtue of the fact that it contains them. (22–29 Jan. 1821.)

  From all the above you may deduce the following corollary. Man is naturally, originally, [580] and essentially free, independent, and equal to others, and these qualities belong inseparably to the idea of the nature and constitutive essence of man, as of the other animals. Society is by the same token originally and essentially dependent and unequal, and without these qualities it is not perfect; indeed, it is not a true society. Hence man in society must necessarily divest himself of, and lose, some qualities that are essential, natural, inborn, constitutive, and inseparable from what he himself is. He may well lose such qualities in practice, but not in principle, for how can one even contemplate a being divested of one of the qualities that is intrinsic to it, constitutive, and wholly independent of circumstances and forces, whether external or accidental, since that same quality, being original and natural, is necessary and must logically last as long as the being that contains it, and of which it is an element? That would be tantamount to envisaging a man without the faculty of thought, which is likewise independent of accidents. On that hypothesis, he would be another [581] kind of being, but not a man. Accordingly a man who was in principle deprived of liberty and equality would be deprived of his human essence, and would not be man, which is impossible.1 Nor can he be condemned to lose this quality really and radically, not even of his own volition, and no promise, contract, or free expression of his own will can ever divest him in the least of the right to abide fully by his own will, today in one way and then tomorrow in another; and just as now he could willingly have obeyed, and promised to obey forever, so the next instant he is within his rights to disobey, and cannot not do so. See p. 452, paragraph 1. Thus society, since in practice it divests man of some of his essential and natural qualities, is a condition that does not suit man and does not accord with his nature; therefore, it is originally and essentially imperfect and consequently inimical to his happiness, and in contradiction with the order of things.

  On the other hand, all my remarks about the need for unity, and hence for dependence, [582] subjection, and inequality in society, do not pertain or do not apply to that truly primordial society which is part of the essence, order, and nature of the human species and the animals, which is imperfect as a society but perfect in regard to the true and original essence of man and the animals, and to the order of things, where nothing is absolutely perfect but only relatively so. If one should wish to clarify the idea of society, the above-mentioned consequence directly follows, that is, the need for unity, and therefore for monarchy, etc. But these clarifications, paraphrases, refinements, pedantries, quibbles, dialectical ploys, and mathematical concepts do not exist in nature, and ought not to enter into our consideration of the natural order, because nature has not in fact abided by them. And not only is something that does not correspond geometrically to the aforesaid ideas not imperfect, provided, however, that it is natural, but furthermore anything that has been reduced and adjusted to fit the aforesaid ideas cannot be perfect, because it is no longer consistent with its [583] essential and original state. And wherever mathematical perfection occurs, a genuine imperfection occurs (even where the latter remedies other, more serious problems and forms of corruption), namely, discordance with nature and with the original order of things, which was achieved in a different manner, and outside of which there is no perfection, although the latter is never absolute but only relative. Strict precision has to do with reason and derives from it; it did not have to do with the plan of nature and was not to be found in the effect. It is necessary, however, to our own times, in which the order of things is corrupted, and it is a fact as noteworthy as it is obvious and indeed noted that strict precision in laws, institutions, statutes, and governments, etc., in short, in things in general, has always increased the more depraved men and times have become; and now we have plumbed the depths, because the corruption, too, is excessive and has overstepped all limits. The almost, the easily, and other such ideas do not fit with present-day systems, where nothing exists if it is possible for it not to exist; but they fit all too well [584] with nature, where countless things existed that might not have done, but nature had made sufficient provision when it provided for them not to exist, and indeed they did not. How otherwise could nature, and the order of things, have been corrupted, in the fashion in which we find it to have been corrupted? About which corruption more or less everyone must be agreed. But that could not have happened if all that was did not have the capacity not to be, or to be or to behave otherwise. Such is the purpose of reason and the systems in use nowadays, which are always designed to make opposites impossible, if the system pertains to the practical sphere, and to show that they are impossible, if the system pertains to the speculative sphere.1

  This too is a major source of error in philosophers, especially modern philosophers, who, being used to accuracy and mathematical precision, so routine and so much in fashion nowadays, approach and measure nature with these same norms, and believe that the system of nature should correspond to these principles, and do not believe that anything that is not precise and mathematically exact is natural; whereas, on the contrary, [585] it could well be sa
id that everything precise is not natural, that indubitably it is a key attribute of nature not to be precise. But this same error is akin to that entailed by supposing that the true, the beautiful, the good, absolute perfection are to be found in the world of things.