Another solution might be an increase in human activity to the vertiginous point of a total eclipse of all consciousness: a continual distraction (Z 4186–87). While the first solution recalls Schopenhauer, the second comes up against the problems raised by Goethe’s Faust, partly composed during the very same years, and also foreshadows the modern society described a few years later by Balzac in Les illusions perdues.

It is characteristic of Leopardi never to be satisfied with any definitive solution, nor with the theorems and systems that he continues to construct: his hypotheses always serve to reopen the question. In his very long poetic-philosophical last will and testament, the poem “La ginestra” (“Broom, or the Flower of the Desert”), composed in Naples in 1836, one year before his death, Leopardi proposes a new truce between sentient beings and nature, imagining a world sustained by “right and pity.” The Zibaldone, however, ends before this moment, in 1832.

The third from last entry of the Zibaldone highlights the triple nulla: “two truths that man will generally never believe: one, that we know nothing, the other, that we are nothing. Add the third, which depends a lot on the second: that there is nothing to hope for after death.” (Z 4525). The penultimate entry of the diary makes a mockery of the impossible desire to return to some hypostasized infancy and childhood; and the last entry emphasizes that there is no room for an exception to the general rule. In the diary, which is beyond the realm of poetry, metaphysics wins: the Zibaldone, preeminent space of openings, of investigation, of wonderment, and of hope, no longer has a reason to exist.

[FD]

Nature, Culture, Society

Among the virtual files under which Leopardi grouped the separate slips that were not included in his Index of 1827, the one entitled “On the nature of men and of things,” though not the most copious, is certainly one of the densest. This is due in part to the very complexity of the abstract notion of nature itself—a power, a force, a generating, life-giving principle that is both inextricably entwined with the life of each individual animal or thing and at the same time impersonal and out of the reach of sentient beings. Nature is first and foremost “the existence, the state of being, the life, sensory or not, of things […] [T]here can be no thing or purpose more natural, nor more naturally appealing and desirable and sought after, than existence and life, which is almost one and the same thing as nature itself, nor can there be a more natural nor naturally greater love than that of life” (Z 3814). But Leopardi will also distinguish between life and existence, albeit in a special sense, meaning by the former “internal life,” the life lived and formed by civilization, and by the latter “external life,” and in this sense “nature is not life, but existence, and tends to the latter, not the former” (Z 3936). The distinction marks out the shadowy borderland between nature and culture (to use an anachronistic term where Leopardi says “civilization”), between how man ought to live, and perhaps once did live, in nature, and how he lives now, remote from nature, and against it.

Unhappiness is the blatant symptom of a malady that affects modern man, to the point of triggering self-destruction. In his first sustained reflection on the theme (Z 56), Leopardi notes that the primary instinct of all beings is “concern for preserving their own existence.” Looking upon this instinctual need from the perspective of civilization, it would appear that there is no contradiction between a being’s self-preservation and the same being’s unhappiness with its existence. But “such a thing cannot be in nature unless nature has become totally corrupt,” least of all can it be so in the creature that “is manifestly the highest rung” of the animal order, man (and cf. Z 2900–901). A number of reflections follow from this important entry, which sets a template for the more detailed and sophisticated thoughts that will follow on and around the same theme. First, corruption, the degradation of man, is not in nature but in man. Apparently in agreement with the Christian narrative of the fall (Z 393–420, 1004), Leopardi will execute a delicate maneuver in November 1821 with his claim that “all these authorities” (such as the Church Fathers) “favor my system, with the difference that whereas they believed nature to be corrupt and corrupting I believe that reason is. […] And whereas they came to place man outside nature, where everything is perfect of its kind, I put him back inside, and say that he is outside only because he has abandoned his primitive being etc. etc.” (Z 2115–16). Second, Leopardi—in this early entry at Z 56—imagines a space in which man could live satisfactorily in the way that the animals do, with a “more or less constant and moderate” contentedness, save for the accidental misfortunes—accidental, but not substantial—to which all beings in nature are liable (cf. Z 1957–59). But that space is now denied us because “we have experienced the emptiness of things and the illusoriness and nothingness of […] natural pleasures, which we ought not even to suspect.” This is the proclamation on the one hand of the curse of noia, boredom, “the passion most contrary to and farthest from nature,” “the feeling of nothingness, and of the nullity of what exists, and of the very one who conceives and feels it, and in whom it subsists” (L’s emphases), the acme of human corruption, perhaps the one ill that cannot find its analogue among the animals, who know no boredom (Z 2220; in the same vein: Z 1554–55, 2599–602), an ill that is perhaps less marked in country people and the uneducated, and especially in children, still capable of naturalness, spontaneity, simplicity, and natural pleasures, including those of physical vigor (Z 358) and vivacity (Z 2017–18, 3813–15) and natural reactions to pain or grief (Z 4243–45). On the other, it alerts us to the destruction, the “massacre” of the illusions given by nature—virtue, glory, love of country, and so on—a theme more fully developed in the anti-Genesis “History of the Human Race,” which opens the Operette morali. The illusions invoked in Z 56 form part of the composition and order of things. Since nature is the supplier of illusions, they are not an exception to the natural order. The corollary is that, if they are destroyed (by man himself, or by a more anonymous “reason”), man is de-natured (Z 22, 51).

The third area opened up by the thought on Z 56 concerns man’s social organization compared with that of other animals. But before confronting that central question, we must touch on an argument upon which Leopardi expends some care. This concerns different kinds of natural disposition and the particular phenomenon of man’s conformability and adaptability. Nature creates almost nothing but dispositions in man. But it is important to distinguish, Leopardi notes (Z 3374), between dispositions “providing the potential to be” and dispositions “to be.” If, in the latter case, man follows his natural inclinations he will become what he ought to be. Insofar as dispositions that supply only potential are concerned, “man acquires many qualities not intended for him by nature, many qualities which may even be counter to nature’s intention, and becomes what he ought not to be, that is, what nature did not intend him to become in creating that disposition in him” (Z 3375).