Leopardi

Giacomo Leopardi

Giacomo Leopardi is honored as one of the greatest poets Italy ever produced, but he was also one of the most rigorous and original philosophical minds of the nineteenth century, a cosmic pessimist whose analysis of desire, happiness, and the indifference of Nature rivals and predates Schopenhauer's. To read him only as a melancholy singer is to miss the philosopher who reasoned his way, with terrible clarity, to the conclusion that Nature cares nothing for human happiness, and that the modern triumph of reason has stripped away the very illusions that once made life bearable.

The corpus and how the chat cites it. This room reads two public-domain works: the Operette Morali, Leopardi's philosophical dialogues and essays, in Charles Edwardes's 1882 translation under the title Essays and Dialogues, and the Canti, his collected poems, in a nineteenth-century English verse translation, both by way of Project Gutenberg. His enormous private notebook, the Zibaldone, was the workshop in which the thought took shape, but its full English belongs to our own century. The chat cites the dialogues by title and the poems by title. Expect citations of the form Operette Morali, Dialogue between Nature and an Icelander.

Life. Leopardi was born in 1798 in Recanati, a small town in the Papal States, into a noble but declining family. A child of staggering precocity, he shut himself away in his father's great library through what he called seven years of mad and desperate study, mastering Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and the whole of classical learning before he was out of his teens, at a lasting cost to his eyes and his health. He broke free of provincial Recanati at last for Rome, Bologna, Milan, Florence, and Naples, living in poverty and isolation and sustained by a few deep friendships. It would be a mistake to reduce his philosophy to his frail body: his pessimism is not a symptom but a reasoned position, argued and defended, and it stands or falls on its arguments.

Where to begin. Start with the Operette Morali, where the philosophy speaks in dialogue and fable, above all the "Dialogue between Nature and an Icelander." Turn then to the Canti for the same thought in verse, to L'infinito, A se stesso, and the late masterpiece La ginestra, and to the Zibaldone for the reasoning behind it all.

The theory of pleasure. At the base of Leopardi's philosophy lies a simple, devastating argument. The human desire for pleasure is by nature unbounded, infinite in how much it wants and how long it wants to keep it; but every actual pleasure is finite and passing. No real pleasure, therefore, can ever satisfy a desire that is infinite, and the human creature is condemned to perpetual dissatisfaction. Pleasure in any case is never something positive, only the brief ceasing of a pain or a want, and when even wants fall quiet what remains is not contentment but noia, boredom, the bare sensation of the emptiness of being. Happiness, strictly understood, is impossible.

Nature the stepmother. Leopardi came to see Nature not as the kindly mother of the optimists but as an indifferent, finally cruel stepmother, who produces and destroys her creatures in an endless mechanical round without the least regard for their happiness or their pain. In the "Dialogue between Nature and an Icelander," a man who has fled human society to escape its miseries meets Nature herself in a wilderness and is told that the world was never made for his sake, that suffering is built into the very machinery of a universe forever producing and destroying. It is easier to believe, the Icelander answers, that the world was made expressly as a place of torment. There is no providence here, no purpose, and no consolation written into the order of things.

The illusions, and the disease of reason. Here is Leopardi's most original and unsettling thesis. The ancients, he argues, were happier than the moderns not because they knew more but because they knew less. They lived by vivid illusions, of heroism and glory, of love and virtue and country and the gods, illusions Nature herself had planted to make existence bearable and to spur great deeds. The slow growth of reason and philosophy has dispelled these illusions one after another, leaving the modern mind lucid, disenchanted, and wretched, able to see clearly that the things it once lived for were dreams. Reason, for Leopardi, is the enemy of happiness, and civilization advances precisely by destroying the illusions that made life worth the living. It is a frontal assault on the whole Enlightenment faith in progress.

Against the optimism of the age. Leopardi set himself squarely against the confident progressivism of his century, its faith in the magnificent and progressive destinies of mankind. To him this optimism was simply a new illusion, and a shallower one than the old, because it dressed itself as hard-headed truth. With bleak courage he insisted on facing the real human condition without comfort: that the universe is indifferent, that happiness cannot be had, that the hope of a redeemed history is a fairy tale. His pessimism is never a passing mood; it is a conclusion, reached by argument and held against the whole spirit of his time.

La ginestra: solidarity without illusions. And yet Leopardi is not, in the end, a poet of mere despair, and his last great poem proves it. La ginestra, "The Broom," is set on the volcanic slopes of Vesuvius, where a humble broom-flower blooms among the lava that will one day bury it, and it turns his pessimism toward a clear-eyed and noble humanism. Since Nature is the common enemy of all, indifferent and destructive, human beings should give up their petty cruelties to one another and their hollow pride, recognize the shared condition that binds them, and join hands in a social chain of mutual aid against the one real adversary. Truth leads Leopardi not to nihilism but to compassion and to dignity: to stand, like the broom on the mountainside, with humble courage, neither grovelling nor boasting, and to face the truth together.

Reception, and adjacent reading. Read now, Leopardi is among the deepest philosophical pessimists in the Western tradition and a poet whose thought cannot be prised apart from his art, a thinker of desire, disenchantment, and the courage to look at a universe without meaning. He took his materialism and his cold clear gaze on nature from Lucretius, whose On the Nature of Things stands behind his world of atoms and indifferent law, and he took from Rousseau the contrast between a happier nature and a corrupting civilization, only to turn it far darker. His pessimism runs parallel to that of Arthur Schopenhauer, who praised him by name; Friedrich Nietzsche counted him among the great prose stylists of the century and wrestled with his diagnosis of a coming nihilism; and his unblinking account of the human condition stripped of illusion sets him beside Blaise Pascal, who saw the same wretchedness but found in it a road to God, where Leopardi found only the broom upon the slope. His question, how to live with dignity once every consoling illusion is gone, is one of the permanent ones.