Zibaldone

by Leopardi, Giacomo

  It seems to me that my system supports Christianity rather than undermining it, indeed, that it requires it, and in a certain way supposes it. Nor outside of my system can the apparently very discordant and contradictory parts of the Christian religion, not only as regards the mysteries, but also as regards the law, the subsequent history of the religion, the dogmas of every kind, etc., be readily harmonized.

  Our faith wages war on reason. I demonstrate the absolute and essential impotence of reason, not only with respect to human happiness, to preserving, etc., society, to establishing and maintaining a moral code, but to the actual faculty of reasoning and conceiving.

  The plurality of worlds is something that has been almost physically demonstrated,1 and yet how can it be reconciled with Christianity outside of my system, which demonstrates that creatures can be of countless different species, and that, with God existing in relation to us as religion teaches, [1643] he still exists in all possible modes, and may have had, and still does have with very different creatures very different and contrasting relationships, or may not have any? How many physical, metaphysical, etc., truths conflict with religion, outside of my system, which denies every absolute truth and falsehood, but admits those that are relative, and among these religion?

  My system, embracing and admitting virtually the entire system of atheism, denying almost all the systems, etc., and yet eliciting from them the constant idea of God, religion, morality, etc., seems to me to be the ultimate and decisive proof of religion; or at least that argument by reason cannot show revelation to be false, which in any case, because it has factual proofs, must be held true, because fact in my system is decisive, and reason can never stand up against it.

  But if God is superior to morality, if the good or bad do not exist absolutely, cannot God deceive us in what he has revealed, promised, threatened, etc.? —No, because he forbids us to deceive. The law that he has given us, the mode of his being that he has [1644] manifested to us, the manner in which he has done it, the relationships he has entered into with us, the duties he has prescribed for us toward him, toward our fellows, toward our own selves, what he has prohibited us, the teachings he has given us, the truth that he has caused us to love, the nature in which he has formed us, the order of things he has established, etc., determine the mode in which he must act toward us, that is, has wished and will wish to act, has acted and will act. Otherwise his relationships in our regard would not be good, and therefore he would not be good or perfect, etc., that is, proper to and in complete harmony with us, and with this order of things which he could well have constituted altogether otherwise, but has constituted in this particular way whereby deceiving is evil. Our mode, our faculty of reasoning, is right and capable of truth, if it restricts itself to the order of things that we know or are able to know, and that in some way pertain to us, and to the things that have some relation to that order, inasmuch as they do have it. I do not destroy any principle of human reason (neither as regards morality nor as regards all the rest); [1645] I simply convert them from absolute principles into principles that are relative to our order of things, etc. The Christian Religion, as I have already said, still stands in its entirety (therefore also its consequences, promises, etc.), not as absolutely true and necessary independently of things as they are, and of the mode in which they are, etc., but relatively, and depending in origin upon the will of one who, though capable of establishing and ordering nature quite otherwise, or of not establishing it, etc., did however establish it, and in this particular guise, etc.1 So that so far as we, so far as effects, etc., are concerned, it is one and the same. (5‒7 Sept. 1821.)

  Since things are, possibility is primordially necessary, and independent of anything whatever. Since no truth or falsehood, negation or affirmation is absolute, as I demonstrate, all things are therefore possible, and infinite possibility is therefore necessary and preexists everything. But it cannot exist without a power which can so arrange it that things are, and are in any possible mode whatsoever. If infinite possibility exists, infinite omnipotence exists, because if the latter does not exist, the former is [1646] not true. Conversely, infinite omnipotence cannot stand without infinite possibility. The one and the other are, we might say, the same thing. If, then, infinite possibility, preexisting all, independent of everything, of every idea, etc., is necessary (and in actual fact, if there is no possible reason why a thing is impossible, and impossible in a particular mode, etc., infinite possibility is absolutely necessary), omnipotence is then also necessary. There, then, is God, and his necessity, deduced from existence, and his essence residing in infinite possibility, and hence formed out of all possible natures, etc. This idea is only sketched out. See p. 1623. (7 Sept. 1821.)

  Let us suppose that the property-owning or well-to-do class stands overall in a ratio of 1 to 10 to the poor or laboring, etc., class. It is nonetheless certain that for every 30 illustrious and famous men with whatever reputation for ability, etc., who rise up through the first class, scarcely one will rise up through the second, and this one will probably have passed into the first while still a child, through favorable [1647] educational circumstances, etc. Scour the rural areas in particular (for cities always develop the mental faculties, including those of the poor, to some degree), and tell me, if you can, that such and such a peasant is a hidden genius. And yet it is certain that among the peasants there are as many people suited to becoming geniuses as there are in other classes, in proportion to the respective numbers of each class. And no class is more numerous than the peasantry. What does it then mean to say that genius comes to light through whatever barrier, and overcomes whatever obstacle? Genius does not exist in nature, that is to say, no person exists (except perhaps as a singularity) whose intellectual faculties are in themselves overwhelmingly greater than those of others. Circumstances and habit produce differences in intelligence through the very different development of not very different faculties. They produce genius in particular, which, because it rises so far above the ordinary (and is therefore seen as a most certain work of nature), is for that very reason the absolute child of habituation. (7 Sept. 1821.)

  [1648] It seems absurd, but it is true that the man most prone, perhaps, to succumbing to indifference and insensibility (and hence to the wickedness that stems from coldness of character) is the man who is sensitive, full of enthusiasm and of inner activity, and this in proportion, indeed, to his sensibility, etc.a1 Especially if he is unlucky, and especially in these times, when outer life does not correspond to, does not offer any sustenance or theme to the inner, when virtue and heroism are extinguished, and when the man of feeling, imagination, and enthusiasm is immediately disenchanted. The external life of the ancients was such that, in whirling great minds into its vortex, it ended up rather by submerging them than by allowing itself to be exhausted. Today, a man such as I have described, precisely on account of his extraordinary sensibility, will exhaust life in an instant. That done, he remains empty, profoundly and enduringly disenchanted, because he has experienced everything intensely and profoundly. He has not paused at the surface, he does not proceed to immerse himself in it gradually, he has gone straight to the bottom, he has embraced everything, and rejected everything as in reality unworthy and frivolous. There is nothing else for him to see, [1649] to try, to hope for.1 So it is that we see mediocre minds, and some that are sensitive and lively up to a point, endure for a long time and even forever in their sensibility, prone to affection, capable of caring for and sacrificing themselves for others, not content with the world, but hoping to be so, ready to embrace the idea of virtue, to believe that it still amounts to something, etc. (They have not yet lost their hope of happiness.) Whereas the great spirits I have mentioned subside from youth on into indifference, languor, coldness, fatal and irremediable insensibility, which gives rise to an uncaring egoism, a supreme inability to love, etc. The sensibility and ardor of the spirit is so constituted that, if it does not find sustenance in the things around it, it consumes a
nd destroys itself and is quickly lost, leaving a man as far below ordinary loftiness of spirit as previously it had lifted him above it. Whereas mediocre sensibility keeps going, because it requires little sustenance. So it is that the great virtues are not for our times. [1650] (7 Sept. 1821.) See p. 1653, end.

  Let us observe how much imagination contributes to philosophy (which yet is its enemy), and how true it is that in different circumstances the great poet could have been a great philosopher, promoter of that reason which is lethal to the genre professed by him, and how, conversely, a philosopher could have been a great poet. The ability to mine a rich vein of similes is proper to the true poet (Homer ὁ ποιητὴς [the poet] is the greatest and most fertile model). In a state of enthusiasm, in the heat of any passion, etc. etc., the mind discovers most vivid resemblances between things. Even the most fleeting vigor in the body, if it exerts some influence upon the spirit, causes it to see relationships between very disparate things, to find comparisons, extremely abstruse and ingenious similes (whether in serious or joking vein), shows it relations it had never thought of, in short gives it a marvelous facility to draw together and compare objects of the most distinct kinds, such as the ideal with the most purely material, to embody in a very vivid manner the most abstract thought, to reduce everything to image, and to create from it some of the most novel and vivid images you could think of. And not only by means of direct similes or comparisons, but also by means of very novel epithets, very bold metaphors, words containing in themselves a simile, etc. All faculties of a great poet, and all contained in and deriving from the ability to discover relations between things, even the most minimal, and distant, even between things that appear the least analogous, etc.1 Now this is the philosopher through and through: the faculty of discovering and recognizing relations, of binding particulars together, and of generalizing. (7 Sept. 1821.) See [1651] p. 1654, beginning.

  What is more powerful in man, nature or reason? The philosopher never lives or thinks in an everyday sense, and with respect to what directly concerns him, nor does he live with himself (even if he lives with others),1 as a true philosopher; nor does the religious man live as a true and perfect man of religion. There is no man so sure of the malice of women, etc., that he does not feel a pleasurable impression and vain hope at the sight of a beauty who shows some kindness toward him. (Someone who is too accustomed to them may well be less, or perhaps not at all impressed, and this will chiefly be the case with the man of the world, whose soul will then conduct itself much more philosophically than that of the greatest philosopher, not by force of reason but by force of nature, which has given habituation the property of weakening and even of destroying sensations. Especially if the philosopher is not habituated to them, when he will be all the more liable to sin either in deed or in thought against his own principles.) He is always more or less prone to succumbing to all the most extravagant illusions of love, which he has known to be, and experienced as impossible, imaginary, vain. There is no man so profoundly persuaded of the vanity of all [1652] things, of the certainty and inevitability of human misery, whose heart does not open to even the liveliest joy (and all the more lively the vainer it is), to the sweetest hopes, to dreams however frivolous, if fortune smiles on him for an instant, or at the mere sight of a celebration, a joy in which another deigns to let him take part. On the contrary, a mere trifle suffices to make a tried and tested philosopher believe at once that the world amounts to something. Just a word, a glance, a charming gesture or compliment from a person, even one of no great standing, to a man sunk deep in reflection and despair of happiness, is enough to reconcile him to his hopes and to his errors. I am not speaking of bodily vigor; I am not speaking of wine, whose power is such that the most venerable and deep-rooted philosophy yields, and disappears. I also set aside the passions that if nothing else, at their height laugh off the longest held and deepest philosophical habit. A tiny unforeseen blessing, a new trouble that then arises, even if it is very trifling, is enough to convince the philosopher that human life is not a mere nothing. See Corinne, tome 2, bk. 14, ch. 1, last page, that is 341. (8 Sept., Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, 1821.) What I say of the philosopher I say of the man of religion, too, notwithstanding the fact that religion, which has something of the illusory, and therefore of the natural, about it, has so much more actual force in man.

  [1653] The child cannot contain his desires, or only with difficulty, according to whether he is more or less habituated to satisfying them. It is difficult for a grown man to conceive a desire as intense as the littlest one that children conceive. He can easily control them all, although his nature has certainly not changed, and human life is wholly composed of desires, and man (or animal) cannot live without desiring, because he cannot live without loving himself, and this love being infinite, he cannot ever be satisfied. Everything in man is therefore habituation. This observation can be extended to cover all the passions, and all the outward and inward parts of man and of his life. (8 Sept. 1821.)

  I have said elsewhere [→Z 714–17, 1176–79] that excess produces nothing, and have cited excessive passions and extreme misfortunes, present and inescapable danger that gives strength and tranquillity of mind even to the most cowardly, adversity that is sure and cannot be evaded, etc., all of which, rather than producing agitation, give rise to immobility, stupidity, a kind of unreasoning resignation, so that a man’s appearance in these cases is very often just like that of someone who is indifferent and a good painter would not distinguish him from the most heedless, etc., man but for an air of vacant meditation, with eyes fixed nowhere in particular. I add further [1654] that this should not only be restricted to the act, but also the habit of indifference, the resigning oneself to fate, the insensitivity, etc., which is produced by extreme unhappiness, and habitual despair, etc., and you can see p. 1648. (8 Sept. 1821.)