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).