The potential to be, or to become, is much greater in man than in any other being, and correspondingly great is his potential to deviate from what nature would have wanted for him. But the corollary to this in man is what Leopardi describes as “more life than there is in other living creatures,” and life itself may be defined as “a greater or lesser degree of adaptability, a number and value of dispositions prevailing in some way (more or less) over the number and value of innate qualities” (Z 3381). From this “supreme conformability” of man (Z 2902) there spring two consequences: his enhanced power to develop in ways not intended by nature even if it had given him the potential, or rather the disposition to the potential, to do so, as we have seen; and a further potential, greater than that in any other creature, to alter and refashion nature itself (Z 1558–62), adapting it, not in accordance with the myriad patterns of adaptation nature allows for in its system, but following other criteria, and doing violence to nature, which, in Leopardi’s view, in 1821 at least, is blameless (Z 1957–59).

It is this rampaging humanity, with all its attendant misery and unhappiness, that has taken the organization of society far beyond its “natural” confines. Existing society travels in the opposite direction from nature, to which it can never return. If there ever was a perfect society, it was for only a brief and irrecoverable moment. Leopardi’s concept of the natural state took the form, not of an imaginary topography, but of an idea of what is left when all that is corrupt about modern society is stripped away, a fiction that starts, not from the remotest past, about which we know nothing, but from the world that we actually see and touch. This world comprises, on the one hand, the “close-knit” integration of human individuals bound one to another “by the clearest and most detailed, specific, numerous, mathematical, etc., laws, agreements, and obligations (moral or material)” (Z 555), while each one of these individuals is motivated by self-love, and is at constant and open war with his fellows; and, on the other, a sign or vestige perhaps of a natural order that still pertains, notably in the social organization of insects and animals such as “bees, ants, beavers, cranes, and other similar creatures, whose society is natural, and at the level intended by nature” (Z 3774–75). “Their individuals,” Leopardi continues, “all work always toward the common good, and they help each other mutually, the only aim, the only reason for uniting in society”; mutual harm is occasional and accidental. The continuation of the essay-long entry from which these quotations are taken (Z 3773–810) comes to focus on the detail of man’s hatred toward man, for which close-knit society is the perfect culture. (Leopardi uses the same term, società stretta, for a rather different concept in his unfinished Discorso sopra lo stato presente dei costumi degl’Italiani, probably drafted in 1824, where it is used to refer to a socioeconomic elite that uses its rentier leisure to form a network of intellectuals that has international as well as national cohesion in contemporary Europe.) But his purpose in these opening pages of the entry is not to idealize the society of animals, rather it is to sketch a blueprint of what humanity in the natural state might have been like.

Agreeing with Rousseau in the Discourse on the Foundations of Inequality, Leopardi imagines our earliest ancestors enjoying the bare minimum of society, coming together only incidentally and as the need arose. While Leopardi mocks the philosophers forever trying, and ever failing, to describe the perfect society, he does not wholly escape the teleological pull of his own fiction. Something must have induced these scattered, and seemingly ruminant, individuals to form a closer social union. It is clear that society could not have become established without the development of language, but even if language were to prove the instrument of man’s “perfection,” it was not of itself disposed by nature (Z 2896–97). The relatively pacific vision of the earliest human society endorsed by Rousseau contradicts the earlier natural-law view of Locke and Hobbes among others that the earliest individuals must have lived in fear of each other, requiring from the start that their unfettered equality be curbed by the establishment of a single, artificial government. Rousseau argues that inequality was established by a trick or a hoax, on the part of the individual or individuals who claimed private rights over common property, and who had the linguistic skills to say “This is mine.” Leopardi overleaps this phase, and is not much concerned with the origin of private property or of inequality. But the space between the very limited (if any) “loose-knit” society of natural man and the fearsomely constricted “tight-knit” society of civilized man is also difficult to negotiate. There are three overlapping terms in play: the primitive, the savage, and the barbarous. Leopardi distinguishes between the first and the third of these: “The primitive and the barbarous are different things. The barbarous is already spoiled, whereas the primitive is not yet mature” (Z 118). In other words, the primitive has not yet reached, or even aspired to, the rank of civilization; the barbarous is already a sign of the latter’s decline (cf. Z 22). The primitive is closer, in Leopardi’s mind, to the origins and implicitly antithetical to the civilized, as in another relatively early passage: “Civilization has introduced refined labors, etc., that consume and exhaust and extinguish human faculties such as memory, sight, strength in general, etc., labors that were not required by nature. And it has taken away those labors which conserve and improve the faculties, such as agriculture, hunting, etc., and primitive life, which were willed by nature and necessary for such a life” (Z 76). This seems fairly clear-cut; elsewhere, Leopardi conflates the barbarous and the savage, as in Z 3882–84, but also distinguishes between them in what is probably the lodestar of his thought on the matter: barbarism is the necessary prelude to civilization, incorporating all that is worst about human society, and also the sign of its decline, as in one of the several passages that document Leopardi’s fascination with the European conquests and interpretations of the Americas, from which he concludes: “Their ills [of the savage tribes of America who destroy one another with their deadly wars] come from a beginning of civilization. There is certainly nothing worse than a civilization either in its early stages or past maturity, degenerate, corrupt. Both are barbarous states, but neither is a savage state in the pure and strict sense of the word” (Z 4185).

But at a certain point, Leopardi extricates himself from these definitional tangles, and works toward a radicalization of his thought that takes place over a number of years. In the first instance, he draws consequences from his writing of the “Dialogue Between Nature and an Icelander” that give rise to an immediate need to nail down and develop the implications of that operetta, most notably in the entry in the Zibaldone dated 2 June 1824, three days after the drafting of the dialogue was complete (a rare example of Leopardi using the Zibaldone to comment on a work in progress), where he poses again a fundamental question: “that the essence of being should include within itself the necessary cause and principle of being in an ill fashion, how can that be the case, if ill by its very nature is contrary to the respective essence of things and for that reason alone is ill? If being unhappily is not being in an ill fashion, unhappiness will therefore not be an ill to anyone who suffers it nor contrary and inimical to its subject, rather it will be a good since everything which is contained in the particular essence and nature of an individual being must be a good for that being. Who can understand these monstrosities?” Can not being be better for living things than being? How do the contradictions of nature and the proposition that “a thing cannot both be and not be” coexist? (Z 4099–100). A few years later, particularly between 1828 and 1829, Leopardi will return insistently to the denunciation of nature as indifferent if not actively evil (for the latter, see Z 4428, 4485–86, and 4511). At Z 4510, he directly challenges the primacy of self-preservation in nature, in light of the immense wastage of seeds not germinated, sentient beings destroyed before they have lived: a wasteland of abortion to set against the wanton and no longer charming childishness of nature itself at Z 4421.