This also explains Leopardi’s interest in ideograms (anticipating Ezra Pound, inspired, a full century later, by an essay by Fenollosa), or in those languages composed of “a string of unconnected images, whose relationships the reader has to guess at” (Z 944–45). For Leopardi, the most learned and grammatical of the great modern poets, style is dialogue, writing is action, language is the most beautiful of all human cults (Z 2916), and, crucially, the most powerful antidote to boredom.

[FD]

Metaphysics, Theology, Philosophy

The Zibaldone serves as Leopardi’s privileged arena for a tormented clash between Christian thought and the classical-pagan world. The severe religious education provided by his family, above all by his mother, as well as the continuous study of the works of the Catholic apologists, left an indelible mark on Leopardi’s thought. But religious rigor was unable to survive the impact of the sensuality and the luminosity of Greek poetry, read by Leopardi in the original as early as 1814, when he was still an adolescent. The crisis came to a head in 1819, when, in the grip of a deep depression and having become almost totally blind, Giacomo attempted to flee Recanati. The Zibaldone, born in 1817, took shape in 1820, precisely as an attempt to provide an intellectual elaboration of the nature of this crisis.

The one tenet of the Christian vision that Leopardi initially saves is, in essence, the idea of the fall of man due to his insatiable desire for knowledge, according to the poet’s own personal rereading of Genesis (Z 393–429). Yet this idea was also part of the patrimony of the Greeks, which accounts for Leopardi’s interest in the myth of Psyche (Z 637–38, 2939–41). As a matter of fact, by hypothesizing a perfect world beyond this life, Christianity contributed to the rationalization of faith (Z 1059–60, 1065), thereby destroying what for the Greeks had been a natural tendency for self-illusion and the belief in happiness in this life. Indeed, Leopardi was one of the first to perceive in Christianity the cause of secularization (especially in views similar to those of the early nineteenth-century priest Hugues Felicité Robert de Lamennais). Only early Christianity remained a period of powerful illusions and intense passion. For Leopardi, science and religion were but two aspects of the same trajectory of mankind’s spiritualization.

The above considerations lead to two fundamental trains of thought that will permeate the entire system of the Zibaldone:

1. The idea of a return to a pre-metaphysical condition, that is to say, to a time preceding the fall (Z 304–305). But because this return is impossible without a miracle (Z 403), man is doomed either to live forever in a state of nostalgia or to attempt to return to nature and to antiquity by other means (Z 416). The goal of philosophy can only be to neutralize itself (Z 304–305), which leads Leopardi to conceptualize an “ultra-philosophy” or a “half-philosophy” (Z 114–15, 520) that might bring man back to a pre-metaphysical state. This regressive tendency is then oriented primarily around two poles: first, the myth of nature as a universal order, not constructed by man (opposed therefore to reason), in which meaning coincides with things as they are. This leads the poet beyond any theological perspective and toward an anthropological interest in the primitive (sustained in his early phases by Rousseau’s strong influence on him), in the attempt to establish whether the perfection of man (due to his greater adaptability) was preordained by nature, or whether it was an accidental development of the trajectory (see “Nature, Society, Culture”). The second direction of this regressive tendency revolves around the myth of a specific historical human society, that of antiquity, and in particular that of the Greeks, in which beliefs (or illusions) remain purely within the horizon of the sensible (rituals, adherence to a national identity, the cult of heroes, and so on) and in which there is no urge to construct a separate world beyond that of the real. In this view, Leopardi is in harmony with a large part of eighteenth-century European culture, above all German, from Winckelmann to Goethe, from Hölderlin to the young Schlegel. Ancient polytheism is viewed as a religion of the senses, not of reason, which allows both plurality and the valorization of earthly things; indeed, it allows them to be fully enjoyed (see “Ancients and Moderns”).

2. The dominant axis of Leopardi’s thought is therefore its marked anti-idealism (Z 601–606, 4111), which can be characterized as an anti-Platonism, especially because of its opposition to the notion of innate ideas. His philosophical target could not have been Hegel, at that time, as it was for Arthur Schopenhauer, whose first edition of Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (The World as Will and Representation) was published in 1819, at the very moment that the Zibaldone was taking shape. Leopardi never followed the path of academic philosophy, and did not know very much about Kant. He returns directly to the origins, to Greek philosophy, and finds his main antagonist in Plato. Even as he praises Plato’s gifts as writer and poet, Leopardi attributes to him the invention of metaphysics, with the same boldness that readers will find, many years later, in Nietzsche’s Die Geburt der Tragödie (The Birth of Tragedy, 1872).

Once the Platonic theory of innate ideas is destroyed, Leopardi avers, the notion of God is also destroyed (Z 1342), as well as the concept of the absolute (Z 1462–63). The tension between the absolute and the relative is the underlying framework of the Zibaldone. Leopardi’s thought is unquestionably oriented toward the second pole, that of anti-idealism and relativity, despite being accompanied by many ambiguities (above all in regard to the notion of the poetic function). It draws its inspiration from the Aristotelian–Theophrastian line of thought (for its ethical pragmatism and its tendency to observe data scientifically), and from eighteenth-century empiricism as derived from Locke (whom Leopardi reads in the light of ancient skepticism). “There is almost no other absolute truth, except that All is relative. This must be the basis for all metaphysics.” (Z 452).

All of Leopardi’s fundamental categories derive from this early discovery of relativism: unity vs. multiplicity, perfection vs.