Sebastiano Timpanaro

The Pessimistic Materialism

of Giacomo Leopardi

Giacomo Leopardi was born at Ricanati (a town of the Marches) in 1798, the
off-spring of a reactionary and clerical family of the minor nobility (the Marches
belonged to the Papal States, even though at the time of Leopardi’s birth its
lands were occupied by the French). He was possessed of an exceptionally acute
intelligence and sensibility, and though educated by his father and by an
ecclesiastic tutor in the Jesuit tradition, he very quickly began to study on his
own account, teaching himself Greek and Hebrew. His father would have liked
him to pursue a career in the church. His first scholarly works on Greek and
Latin texts, notably those by Christian authors, which he completed when still
adolescent, seemed to pave the way for such a career. But even in these early
studies he displayed an exceptional gift for philology, the fruits of whose
subsequent development were to elicit the admiration of foreign scholars of such
eminent distinction as B. G. Niebuhr, J.-F. Boissonade and (after Leopardi’s
death) U. von Wilamowitz. Nonetheless, it is only in comparatively recent
times that the value of Leopardi’s writings to Greek and Latin philology has
29
been fully appreciated. Initially, as might be expected, he shared the
reactionary and Catholic ideas of his family; but during the period
1817–1819 he began to dissociate himself from these views, sym-
pathising instead with patriotic and liberal ideas: his first Canzoni
already show signs of this change of heart. This new outlook was
further encouraged by his friendship with Pietro Giordani (1774–1848),
a highly talented if somewhat inconsistent writer, who, though a
defender of the ‘purity’ of the Italian language against French adultera-
tions, was nonetheless full of Enlightenment ideas imported from
France, an anti-clericalist and a materialist by inclination. Around the
year 1819, Leopardi was drawn towards a pessimistic conception of
reality. His pessimism passed through two stages, which have come to
be labelled (though the terms are neither used by Leopardi himself nor
entirely apt, but have now become established usage) ‘historical pessi-
mism’ and ‘cosmic pessimism’. During the first phase, Leopardi was
under the indirect influence of Rousseau, believing that human
unhappiness was attributable to man’s having withdrawn from Nature,
the beneficient Mother and bestower of brave-hearted illusions, in
order to follow ‘reason’, the source of spiritual dessication and of a
false and corrupt civilisation. It is this conception which inspires the
Canzoni, the Idilli (Short poems) and the first of the Operette morali, a
series of prose sketches that were ‘philosophical’ after the manner of
Voltaire and the French philosophes of the 18th century.
Leopardi and Romanticism
At Ricanati Leopardi felt imprisoned within a reactionary and pro-
vincial milieu. In 1822–1823, overcoming his father’s resistance, he
finally managed to settle in Rome for a period. But Rome seemed to
him no less provincial and culturally backward than Ricanati. Never-
theless the desire to escape from the environment of his family re-
mained strong in him throughout his brief life: it would be fair to say
that from the time of his departure to Rome the pattern assumed by
his external life was that of a series of sojourns in one or another city
(always in quest of a job that would render him financially independent
of his family, but which he never succeeded in finding, his political and
religious views being known by then to the Papal government, to the
other governments of the little states that divided Italy, and to the
Austrian government which held sway in Lombardy and the Veneto)
alternated by periods of enforced retreat to Ricanati. He lived in Milan
(in 1825 for a brief period), in Bologna (1825–1826—this was the least
unhappy phase of his life), at Florence and at Pisa (1827–1828), again at
Florence (1830–1833), and finally with his friend Antonio Ranieri at
Naples (from 1833 to his death in 1837, after a life increasingly plagued
by illness of every description).
From around 1825 onwards Leopardi’s thought, as we have mentioned,
underwent a transformation: Nature was no longer regarded as the
beneficient Mother but as the wicked Stepmother, (a conception we
will explore further below). Leopardi’s pessimism does not have
romantic-existentialist origins, and therefore differs profoundly from
that of Schopenhauer, or that of more recent writers. It is often said
that Leopardi was a great ‘romantic’ poet, and this is an acceptable
30
description if by romanticism one understands a ‘state of mind’ deeply
dissatisfied with reality, a nostalgia for a happier past epoch, and a
yearning for a world other than that found actually existing. But with
romanticism defined as that historically specific cultural–political and
literary movement that arose in reaction to the Enlightenment and to
the French revolution, Leopardi was at odds in every way, both during
the Rousseauist phase of his thinking, and more decidedly than ever
in the succeeding phase with which we are here concerned. Leopardi
always remained convinced that the 19th century represented a
regression relative to the 18th. His pessimism had a materialistic and
hedonistic motivation, and its sources (in its second stage) must be
sought in the anti-providentialism of Voltaire’s poem on the Lisbon
Disaster, in Maupertius’ reflections on pleasure and pain and in the work
of Pietro Verri. But while these authors continued to maintain various
bridges to deism (and here one thinks of Voltaire in particular),
Leopardi consistently pursued his chosen course to its ultimate con-
clusion, displaying an intellectual courage that is unique in the Euro-
pean culture of this period. His radical materialism also had 18th
century origins in the thought of La Mettrie, Diderot, Helvétius and
D’Holbach. But the 18th century materialists, in the fervour of their
struggle against obscurantist and religious prejudice, were persuaded
not only of the truth of their doctrine but also of its power to promote
happiness. Leopardi, though he, too, felt that ‘proud contentment’
(to use his own words) in the destruction of the myths and dogmas of
spiritualism, considered materialism to be a true but doleful philo-
sophy. These ideas find their rational and artistic expression in Leo-
pardi’s Canti, in the Operetti morali and in the vast collection of writings
that he addressed to himself over a number of years in a series of note-
books which he entitled Zibaldone and which were not published until
long after his death.
Poetry and philosophy are, according to Leopardi, two strictly con-
joined activities: even in the Canti, the poetic fantasy, the extraordinary
musicality of language, the expressions of affection and regret, and the
evocation of scenes from nature, are not in contrast to his awareness of
the bitter truth, but rather serve to heighten it. This is not the appro-
priate place to speak of Leopardi the poet. Suffice it to say that even as
poet the epithet ‘romantic’ applies to him only in that generic and non-
specific sense of which I have already spoken. In language, in style, in
metre, Leopardi belongs to the classical, not the romantic tradition;
and this is true also of his prose style and language. His contemporaries
(and even a great critic of the latter half of the 19th century such as
Francesco De Sanctis) were well aware of this dislocation between
Leopardi’s thought and the culture of his century. Some of them, such
as the Catholic bigot, Niccolò Tommaseo, and Gino Capponi, a more
moderate religious idealist (though also influenced by Tommaseo),
reacted with the most ferocious hostility. Others, such as Giuseppe
Montani and, in England, Christian Carl Josias Bunsen and the Liberal
statesmen and writer Gladstone,1 sensed Leopardi’s greatness, but
remained sceptical, or, more frequently, hostile towards his materialism
and his pessimism.
1
See his Gleanings of the Past Years, II, London 1879, pp. 65 et seq.

31
The Judgement of Posterity
Leopardi was extremely sensitive, especially during the last years of
his life, to this dissension between himself and ‘his age’, a dissension
which extended to his politics also, because despite his extreme demo-
cratic views, his commitment to egalitarianism, and his hostility not
only to absolutism but also to constitutional monarchy (positions
adhered to especially during the years 1818–1823, and again in his
last years), he did not maintain, as did the Tuscan and Neapolitan
liberals, that socio-political regeneration could be accomplished on
the basis of a religious ideology. (In this respect, even the thought of
Giuseppe Mazzini, with which he was unacquainted, would certainly
have been rejected by him on account of its religious orientation). This
is an issue to which we return below.
Leopardi became increasingly convinced that anyone who proved
distasteful to his age was bound to be forgotten by subsequent gener-
ations; he ceased even to hope for posthumous glory, for the judgement
of ‘posterity’. The only hope he retained was that the 20th century
would return to the bold truths of the 18th century, and maybe even
enlarge upon them; his idea at one point was to address a Letter to a
Youth of the Twentieth Century, but this was never written, and he died
convinced that the new century, even if it were to resort to some of his
conceptions, would not acknowledge a ‘precursor’ in him.
To judge from the huge number of studies on Leopardi that have been
written since his death, and from the posthumous admiration of his
writings, one might say (and surely to some extent correctly) that in
this prediction he erred. In Italy it was glory that awaited him, not the
oblivion he had anticipated. And even outside Italy, where Nineteenth
century Italian literature and philosophy are generally (and, with rare
exception, deservedly) scarcely known, there are those who have
recognised Leopardi’s stature: in Russia, for example, there has been
Herzen, in France, Sainte-Beuve and, more contemporaneously, Gide,
to mention but the names that first spring to mind. But it is above all in
English that Leopardi has been appreciated and studied: ample testi-
mony to this can be found in the work of the Belfast scholar, G.
Singh, Leopardi e l’Inghilterra,2 where reference is given to several trans-
lations of the Canti and, in lesser number, of the Operette morali; it is
only the Zibaldone, it would seem, that remains untranslated in English,
save for isolated passages.
It could be (and on this point my English readers are obviously in a
better position than I to judge) that Singh’s book has given me a
somewhat exaggerated picture of the diffusion of Leopardi’s work in
English culture: it is one thing to have attracted, and to continue to
attract, the attention of specialist scholars of the highest merit, of
excellent translators, even of poets who (like A. E. Housman, a
philologist and poet comparable with Leopardi) have drawn inspiration
from the reading of Leopardi’s work; but for his poetry, and especially
his thought, to be widely appreciated in intellectual circles, and to be

2 Florence 1968; unfortunately no English edition exists.

32
known, above all, to intellectuals on the Left—a point of particular con-
cern to me—is quite another matter. All the same, it seems certain that
English culture has been more receptive towards Leopardi than that
of other European countries.3
In what follows, therefore, I have no pretensions that I am introducing
to English readers, not even to English readers of the Left, an Italian
author with whom they are unacquainted. My one wish is to bring to
light the potential importance for a Marxist of an understanding of a
poet and thinker so utterly divergent in intellectual formation from
Marx and Engels as is Leopardi.4 Before proceeding to this, my main
objective, a brief comment is in order on recent Italian interpretations
of Leopardi’s thought and work.
After the second world war, there was a renewal of Leopardian studies
inspired by scholars on the left. Its impetus was provided by Cesare
Luporini’s essay ‘Leopardi progressivo’ in his book Filosofi vecchi e
nuovi5 and by Walter Binni’s book, La nuova poetica leopardiana,6 which
was mainly devoted to the later Leopardi. Luporini was to become ab-
sorbed in other interests; moreover, the type of Marxism, which underlay
the treatment of his essay (and also of one he wrote in 1960: ‘Verità e
libertà’, now included in his work Dialettica e materialismo7) has under-
gone considerable alteration (in my opinion not for the better) under the
influence of Althusser, of structuralism, of psychoanalysis, of too many
modish currents of thought, which though certainly not passively
absorbed by Luporini, have diluted his materialism and have made the
search for novelty, rather than the search for truth, the prior goal of his
intellectual itinerary. Binni has continued and deepened his Leopardian
studies: their most substantial product to date is his book La protesta di
Leopardi.8 Many other scholars have been stimulated by Luporini and
Binni to engage in Leopardian study, each of them bringing to it the
mark of their particular personality.9 I, too, have always recognised
my debt to Luporini and to Binni. But my disagreements with Luporini
are far from marginal, as will shortly become clear. I differ from Binni
in my estimation of Leopardi as an anti-romantic thinker and poet, in a
3
Indeed two years ago, that is to say after the publication of Singh’s book, a small
volume appeared by Giovanni Carsaniga, written in English and from a Leftwing
standpoint (Leopardi, Edinburgh 1977). I am not in agreement with my friend Car-
saniga on every point: I consider his thesis according to which Leopardi should not
be seen as a pessimist but as an ‘anti-optimist’ (chapter 8) a trifle artificial; and I
remain convinced that an essential antecedent to Leopardi’s ‘Titanism’ (his rebellion,
despairing though it was, against reality, against the ‘brute fact’ of Nature) was the
Titanism of Vittorio Alfieri (1749–1803), which itself belongs to the classical rather
then the romantic tradition, and is certainly not, as Carsaniga claims ‘the forerunner
of the decadent love for the “superman” ’ (p. 125). But taken as a whole Carsaniga’s
book is excellent, and I would recommend it warmly to English readers on the
Left.
4
I have already given some indication of this in the introduction to my book, On
Materialism, NLB, London 1975, pp. 18–22.
5
Florence 1947, pp. 183 et seq.
6
Florence 1947, 4th edition Florence 1971.
7
Rome 1974.
8
Florence 1973.
9
For reasons of space I cannot cite them all; let me mention only Emilio Bigi, Luigi
Blasucci, Bruno Biral, and a student of a rather different cast, but to whom we are
indebted for an important work, Umberto Bosco.

33
greater insistence upon the cognitive (rather than merely ethical or
‘heroic’) value of Leopardian pessimistic materialism, and in my con-
viction that there is more variety of tone and style, more moments of
‘relaxation’ and irony, than he would appear to grant to Leopardi in his
latest work.
But these disagreements are secondary compared to what I feel in
regard to a new tendency, which has come to light in recent years, to
devalue Leopardi precisely because he was isolated from moderate
bourgeois public opinion, because he had no desire to become, or was
not able to become, an ‘organic intellectual’ of Italian capitalism—
which with a good deal of trepidation and at no little cost in hardship
even from the bourgeois pont of view, was then moving into its first
stages. This tendency is Marxist only in appearance: in reality it is
vulgarly economistic and sociologistic, and implies a negative his-
torical judgement on all those who, in their time, refused to accept the
ideas and interests of the dominant class. Moreover, the Gramscian
concept of the ‘organic intellectual’ (a non-Marxist concept which is
loaded with ambiguity even in Gramsci’s work) becomes, in the use to
which it is put by these self-styled Gramscians, an impoverished and
philistine concept: it leads to the devaluation, not only of Leopardi,
but of all great artists, thinkers and political figures who were in con-
flict with their times. I have discussed this aberrant interpretation of
Leopardian thought (which is favoured by the current politics of the
PCI, which demands disciplined, satisfied intellectuals deprived of
critical spirit) and other equally mistaken Freudian or ‘Adornian’ con-
structions of it, in another essay.10 The battle for Leopardi has not yet
been decisively won: he has not vanished into the oblivion which, as we
have seen, he himself predicted, but he has been the subject of many,
too many, misinterpretations. Let us then turn to the task of establish-
ing the true significance of Leopardi’s thought.11
Pessimism and Hedonism
It was not primarily in response to a logical line of argument that
Leopardi arrived at a conception of Nature as a force of evil, but
under the impact of concrete experiences that were themselves new in

10 ‘Antileopardiani e neomoderati nella sinistra italiana’. Belfagor, XXX-XXXI,

1975–1976.
11 What follows is based on the crucial section of an essay on Leopardi written in

1963 and republished in my book, Classicismo e illuminismo nell’Ottocento Italiano (Pisa,

Nistri-Lischi, 2nd edition 1969). For the present English version I have removed
many of the bibliographical notes which would be of interest only to the Italian
reader, and I have added some comments of elucidation on lesser Italian writers
of the 19th century. When Luporini or Binni are mentioned by name only, the
reference is to their respective works already mentioned: Luporini’s ‘Leopardi
progressivo’ and Binni’s La nuova poetica leopardiana. The initials TO refer to the
Italian edition of the collected works of Leopardi (Tutte le Opere, edited by Binni in
collaboration with Enrico Ghidetti, Sansoni, Florence 1969). The Zibaldone references
are to pages in the handwritten text, whose numbering is reproduced in all printed
editions. References to English translations of the Canti are to: Leopardi’s Canti,
translated by John H. Whitfield, Naples 1962, published by G. Scalabrini and
designated hereafter by the initial: C. References to prose translations are to:
Giacomo Leopardi: Selected Prose and Poetry, edited by Iris Origo and John Heath-
Stubbs, OUP, London 1966, designated by the initials: SPP.

34
kind, and resisted systematisation within the framework of ‘historical
pessimism’. These consisted in a deterioration of his state of health
(in the Spring of 1819) and in an accentuated sense of unhappiness he
had felt even before that date on account of his physical deformity.
Since this is an issue on which misunderstandings of the crassest kind are
all too likely to arise, it must for that very reason be confronted, rather
than evaded or denied. Leopardi was quite correct to object, as he did
consistently, to those opponents who believed they could excuse them-
selves the task of a rational refutation of his pessimism on the grounds
that it merely reflected a pathological condition (as a hunchback he was
bound to be a pessimist!) and was thus without any general relevance.12
There is no doubt that this thesis, accountable in the first instance to the
malicious clericalism of Niccolò Tommaseo, subsequently promulgated
by the positivist disciples of Sergi, and finally reinvoked by Benedetto
Croce,13 must be rejected. The correct way to refute it, however, is not
to deny, as some have done, that illness and physical deformity had any
role to play whatsoever in generating the Leopardian Weltanschauung—
a view that regards its pessimism either as purely ‘spiritual’, or else,
according to an alternative line of thought, as purely socio-political.
On the contrary we must, recognise that as a result of his illness
Leopardi’s sense of the heavy weight of the determination exercised by
nature over man, of the unhappiness of man as a physical being, was
particularly acute and to the fore. Just as certain personal experiences
of work relations develop an exceptionally intense consciousness in
the proletariat of the class character of capitalist society (that ‘class
sense’ so difficult for someone on the Left of non-proletarian origin to
acquire), so illness played a powerful role in drawing Leopardi’s
attention to the relationship between man and nature. This mistake of
12 See in particular the Dialogo di Tristano e di un amico [Dialogue between Tristan and a
Friend ], spp., pp. 179 et seq, and the letter to Louis Sinner of 24 March 1832 (the
passage in French).
13 A striking feature of Croce’s study on Leopardi (in Poesia e non poesia, Bari, 1923)

is his prejudicial use, precisely to combat Leopardian pessimism, of positivistic

arguments made available to him by the school of Lombroso. In similarly prejudicial
fashion, Croce helps himself to the arguments of empirio-criticism and pragmatism
in order to deny the cognitive value of the physical sciences, manipulates Marxism in
order to deliver a (right-wing!) challenge to democratic-humanitarian ideologies,
and so on. In his work, the exigencies of cultural politics (and of a cultural politics
that is less than progressive at times) always count for far more than the demands of
scientific accuracy. Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909) was a psychiatrist and anthropolo-
gist of vulgar-materialist inclination. He rightly maintained that the delinquent was
not ‘to blame’ in the sense that a metaphysics of free-will would claim, and was more
appropriately to be regarded as someone ill, to whom curative rather than punitive
measures should be applied. But he took delinquency to be a matter of biological
degeneracy, rather than to be social in origin, and did not hesitate to ascribe a
greater constitutional disposition towards delinquency to some races rather than
others. Lombroso had no interest in Leopardi; but some of his followers and pupils,
including Giuseppe Sergi (1841–1936), explained Leopardi’s pessimism as merely the
effect of his illness, denying that it had any theoretical value. This was a thesis
already previously maintained from a non-materialist, Catholic point of view by
Niccolò Tommaseo (1802–1874), a patriot and man of letters, not wholly devoid of
merit, but an intolerant obscurantist, and by Gino Capponi (1792–1876), a moderate
liberal, who in general was rather less factious than Tommaseo. But he, too, was
also extremely hostile to Leopardi’s materialism. Both of them combined a hypo-
critical ‘compassion’ for the illnesses and physical deformity of the ‘unfortunate
Leopardi’ with moralistic and religious reproach for the fact that he had refused
to accept his physical ailments with proper Christian resignation.
35
Catholics such as Tommaseo, of positivists like Sergi, and of the Cro-
cean idealists, does not lie in their insistence upon a relationship
between a ‘stifled life’ and pessimism, but in their failure to recognize
that the experience of deformity and disease is always registered in
Leopardi’s work at a level that transcends individual lament for a
purely private and biographical fact; that it is not even to be explained
in terms of a purely poetic introspection, but becomes a formidable
instrument of cognition. On the basis of his subjective experience,
Leopardi arrived at a representation of the relationship between man
and nature that precluded any form of religious escape (whether the
recourse was to traditional faith or to a humanist mythology) and
whose ‘scientificity’ was never for a moment compromised by his
personal suffering and artistic transfiguration.
Naturally, even in regard to ‘physical evil’, Leopardi never failed to
recognise the particular blame attaching to his contemporary society,
and to the unwholesome and exclusively ‘spiritual’ form of education
of his day, which had proved so detrimental in its effects upon himself
and upon the whole of his generation. He always regarded the impor-
tance attributed by the Greeks and Romans to physical education as one
of the marks of the superiority of the ancients over the moderns. Even
in Tristano [Dialogue between Tristan and a Friend] to be found in the last
of the Operette morali—that is to say, at the height of his ‘cosmic
pessimism’—he stressed that point with great insistence: ‘But among
us, it is a long time since education has deigned to consider the body,
a thing too low and abject, and has cared only for the spirit; and
precisely in order to cultivate the spirit, it has ruined the body, without
realizing that by its destruction, the spirit too, is destroyed’14; and he
made it clear, that despite the fond beliefs of the Catholic-Liberal
pedagogues, no simple reform of academic institutions could eradicate
this defect from the educational system of his day, since that could only
take place on the basis of an entirely new anti-Christian and anti-ascetic
ethics, and therefore would entail radical social reforms: ‘And even if
it were possible to correct this doctrine, it would never be possible to
change the whole state of modern society, and to find a remedy for
every other aspect of private and public life, which, in their respective
ways, always used to unite in perfecting and strengthening the body,
and now are conspiring to deprave it’.15
It was clear, nonetheless, that even the best society in the world, while
it would have eliminated injustices of a socio-political origin (though
even on that score, Leopardi reveals a good measure of reserve), could
have no more than a palliative effect upon the oppression exercized by
nature over man. As he elaborated and developed this theme, Leopardi
was therefore drawn increasingly towards the ‘cosmic’ sense of pessi-
mism, which, as we have seen, emerges spasmodically in his work after
1819, and is later adhered to more systematically (from 1823–1824
onwards).
14 SPP, p. 181.
15 Ibid. Even the Tuscan moderates had insisted upon the usefulness of gymnastics
but within the framework of Christian education, which never failed to assert the
primacy of the mind over the body. It was quite a different matter to claim that ‘the
body is man’!

36
It was a decision crucial to the later development of Leopardi’s thought,
as Luporini so rightly maintains, that at this point in his career he
refused to have recourse to God, or to take refuge in mysticism or
religious transcendence, but chose instead the antithetical path of
atheism and of an ever more unswerving materialism.16 It is from this
perspective, in fact, that Leopardi’s greatness as a man and as a thinker
must be gauged, and set in contrast to those numerous ‘unquiet souls’
of his and of our own century, for whom pessimism has been only the
ante-chamber to religious conversion. When he fixes upon the frailty
of man in confrontation with nature, Leopardi is not led to fabricate a
mythical ‘spiritual realm’, another world (however comprehended) in
which man would have his revenge. On the contrary, it is a wholly de-
mystified analysis of the man-nature relationship that he promotes.
From Dialogo di un folletto e di uno gnomo [Dialogue between a Sprite and a
Gnome]17 until the time of Copernico [Copernicus],18 and thereafter, every
anthropological and teleological element is subjected to radical and
damning criticism. Man is ‘a vanishingly small part of the universe’, and
nature follows a rhythm of production-destruction wholly indepen-
dent of every end and interest of the individual or of humanity as a
whole. The idea of spirit as something totally different and counter-
posed to matter, is revealed as illusory. What feels and what thinks is, in
man, matter itself: the brain and not the soul. All these thoughts are
fully treated in the Zibaldone.
At the same time, Leopardi continues to unfold the ‘theory of pleasure’
that had emerged somewhat earlier in his thought as the nihilistic
consequence of his initial vitalism,19 now relating it to the context of
the full materialism at which he had arrived. More than one scholar
has found a contradiction at this point between ‘cosmic pessimism’ and
materialism. It is said that through his materialism Leopardi ought to
16
Luporini, p. 246f. Not only did his materialism save Leopardi from the pseudo-
solution of religion, but also from that tendency to ‘misanthropism’ to which he had
given expression around 1820 in the sketches for the two pieces in the Operette morali
entitled Galantuomo e Mondo and Senofonte e Machiavelli (in TO, I, pp. 199 et seq, 189
et seq), and which was an inherent risk of Leopardi’s very isolation. The memorable
thought of 2 January 1824 (Zibaldone, p. 4428): ‘To the superficial glance my philo-
sophy might seem conducive to misanthropy, and many have charged it with so
being; but it not only discourages misanthropy, but of its nature excludes it . . . My
philosophy finds nature guilty of every crime, and, discharging man of any culpa-
bility, addresses its hatred, or if not that, its lament, to a higher authority, to the true
author of the evils suffered by living beings’—a statement whose importance has
been well brought out by Luporini, and which represents not only an attack upon
his detractors, but the clarification of his own thoughts on the issue, the exorcism of
a possible deviant trend from his pessimism. Significant in similar fashion, and one
might even say symbolic, is the change of name of the autobiographical figure in one
of Leopardi’s works from ‘Misenore’ to ‘Eleandro’. (The work concerned is the
Dialogo di Timandro e di Eleandro (Greek names meaning ‘one who honours man’ and
‘one who pities man’) which was first published under the title Dialogo di Filenore e
Misenore (‘lover of man’ and ‘hater of man’.)
17
TO, I, p. 92 f. (SPP., pp. 119 et seq).
18
TO, I, p. 166 f. (SPP., pp. 164 et seq).
19
Luporini (pp. 245 f., 251 f.) has been right to insist that the theory of pleasure
pre-dates Leopardi’s materialism, even if certain passages of his analysis of the Leo-
pardian ‘crisis of vitalism’ risk becoming over-subtle and devised. (An improved
development of the point is now to be found in Luigi Blasucci, ‘La posizione ideo-
logica delle Operette morali’, in a work of various authors, Critica a storia letteraria,
studies dedicated to M. Fubini, Liviana, Padua, 1970, pp. 621 et seq.)
37
have attained to the impeturbability of a Spinoza or Holbach, and that
his pessimism thus constitutes an anthropocentric residue, or else that it
quite straightforwardly betrays a yielding to the forces of religion
(a claim made at the time by some of Leopardi’s contemporaries,
and one which even today certain Catholic scholars persist in maintain-
ing), or alternatively that it reveals a failure in Leopardi, the poet, to
attain to the consistency of the philosopher. In reality, it is precisely the
theory of pleasure—the hedonism which is an essential element in
Leopardian thought—that provides the link between materialism and
pessimism. His uncompromising materialism is not in conflict with his
assertion that man’s physico-psychical constitution is such that far more
suffering than pleasure accrues to him: Leopardi himself defined his
own materialism as ‘an unhappy but true philosophy’. The human
unhappiness of which Leopardi speaks is not a romantic mal du siècle,
nor a vague existentialist angst: it is (and the more materialist he became,
the more acute was his recognition of this fact) above all a physical
unhappiness, based on highly concrete givens: illness, old age, the
ephemerality of pleasure. Leopardi is, of course, fully aware that it is
hedonism which provides the bases for the development in man of a
higher order of demands (emotional, moral, cultural, etc.). But even at
this more elevated level, pessimism has its rightful place, since the
sophisticated values of human civilisation are fragile in the extreme,
and nature is no less destructive of them than she is of biological
organisms. Leopardi is a merciless critic of all the myths of the immor-
tality of human works.20 Even an individual’s death, which merely at
the level of personal hedonism, can be considered, and is so considered
by Leopardi, as not in itself an evil, but rather an object of unfounded
fear (though of a fear, all the same, that it is difficult to eliminate, and
which thus contributes to the unhappiness of the majority of men)
reasserts itself as an evil from the standpoint of the personal ties of
affection between individuals, since it severs the bonds of ‘loving
friendship’.21

Materialism and Politics

Luporini, in his essay on Leopardi, does not make sufficiently clear, it

seems to me, that the adoption of a consistently materialist position is
not accompanied by a move in a democratic direction, but for an
entire period (from the beginning of 1823 until 1829) coincides with a
significantly diminished interest in political issues, and with a loss of
commitment to that mission of civil poet, which Leopardi had not
altogether renounced in 1821. These are the years in which Leopardi
felt particularly close, first to Lucian (and for a brief period also to
Plato, though the attraction was not his metaphysics but his lyrical
irony), and then, above all, to Hellenistic philosophy, in the first instance

20
The theme of the futility and fragility of glory recurs constantly throughout
Leopardi’s work. In any case, his absolute conviction of impending cosmic disaster
whose effect would be the annihilation of our world, constituted, in his eyes, a
refutation of every myth of the immortality of human works.
21
See, notably, the poem Sopra un basso rilievo antico sepolcrale [On an Ancient Sepulchral
Bas-Relief ] in TO, I, pp. 36 et seq (C., pp. 212 et seq).

38
to the Manual of Epictetus.* The significance of his conversion to prose
lies precisely in the fact that it expresses his rejection of heroic despair
or highminded illusion, in favour of an attitude of ironic resignation in
the face of reality.

Luporini has every reason to quarrel with those, of whom De Sanctis

is the first, who consider the Epictetean ethics as alone consistent with
Leopardian pessimism, and take the heroic morality to be an aspect that
‘flies in the face of it, that is in contradiction with its premises rather
than a genuine deduction from them’. He is also right to note the
degree of ironic discretion that Leopardi introduces into his Epicte-
teanism, and the unalloyed nostalgia for the heroic ethics with which
he tempers it. Leopardi certainly never succumbed to the ethics of
ataraxia, of tranquility and reconciliation, favoured by late antiquity,
which he would have regarded as an evasion of a clearsighted and
rational pessimism, analogous, in some sense, to the refuge that
Schopenhauer takes in Buddhism. Besides, Epictetus was always, so to
speak, off-set by Theophrastus, by an empirical and wordly moralist,
that is, who taught, in accordance with Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics,
that virtue and wisdom were not sufficient to the attainment of happi-
ness, to which it was equally indispensable that external circumstances
should be propitious. But what does stand in need of correction, in my
opinion, is the idea that Leopardi succumbed to the temptations of
Epicteteanism—and more generally of Stoical ethics—periodically,
throughout his life, in moments of weariness or as a temporary respite
from the strains of heroism; for it is rather, in fact, the definitive mark
of a particular stage in Leopardi’s life and thought (that of his years in
Bologna and of his first stay in Florence, 1825–1827), and it represents
the culmination of an essentially a-political phase.

It is easy to point to the reasons for this lack of interest in political

affairs. Here let us call attention to the fact that in the wake of the
movement of political and cultural revolt against the Restoration—
that had come to its head in the abortive uprisings of 1820–1821—the
whole of Italy entered into a period of recidivism and stagnation. An
entire generation of intellectuals after that date abandoned the revo-
lutionary vision in favour of a reformist perspective. From Milan to
Florence, from the Conciliatore (grave charges were brought against
almost all those involved in this journal, and they languished thereafter
in the Austrian jail of Spielburg, in Moravia) to the Antologia, a
journal of moderate tendency, edited by Vieusseux, the displacement
of the epicentre of progressive culture coincided precisely with this

* Epictetus (55–135 AD), a Stoic philosopher, lame as a result of a punishment

received as a slave: ‘I must die. But must I die groaning? I must be imprisoned. But
must I whine as well? I must suffer exile. Can anyone then hinder me from going
with a smile, and good courage, and at peace? ‘Tell the secret.’ I refuse to tell
because this is in my power. ‘But I will chain you.’ What say you fellow? Chain me?
My leg you will chain—yes, but my will—no, not even Zeus can conquer that. ‘I
will imprison you.’ My bit of a body you mean. ‘I will behead you.’ Why? When did
I ever tell you that I was the only man in the world
.. that could not be be-headed?
These are the thoughts that those who pursue philosophy should ponder. These are
the lessons they should write down day by day, in these they should exercise them-
selves.’ Epictetus, quoted Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, London
1950, p. 286.
39
change of heart. The new revolutionary wave of 1831 was to find almost
all these intellectuals either diffident or hostile in regard to the revo-
lutionary groups: even Pietro Giordani, who had exulted over the
uprisings of 1820 and who neither ideologically nor personally ever
felt at home in the milieu of the ‘moderates’ Giampietro Vieusseux and
Gino Capponi, remained cold and distrustful towards the Emilian and
Romagnolan movements of 1831—while he was later, once more, to
share in the enthusiasm of 1843.22 If Leopardi’s abandonment of a
Risorgimento vision is already implicit in the new alignment of his
thought impressed upon him by his personal crisis of 1819, it was
certainly strongly reinforced by the political crises of 1821. While
recognising the much more profound historical disillusionment
resulting from the failure of the French Revolution, which is the
constant reference point for Luporini (and whose various contributory
circumstances and motives could perhaps themselves be brought out
more distinctly), we must not neglect the additional disillusionment
resulting from the suppression of the risings in Naples and Turin. It is a
feeling still to be heard quite clearly in the Paralipomeni of the Batra-
comiomachia (the short satirical poem which Leopardi composed in the
last years of his life), at which date it has been reinforced by the later
failure of 1831. The sombre ethico-political pessimism of Bruto minore
[Brutus] (written in December, 1821)23 also reflects that disillusionment.
It is only natural, that in an atmosphere that was by then devoid of
revolutionary tension, the uncompromising Titanic protest should
yield to a period of greater resignation during which the voice of
heroism was far less strident.

The Operette Morali, which Leopardi had already conceived of in July

1821 as a means of promoting, at a different level, his task of political
and civil education (using the ‘weapon of satire’ to ‘enliven my poor
country, my century’: Zibaldone, p. 1393 f.), were in fact to become the
mark, three years later, of his temporary abandonment of that project.
To Leopardi, ‘this most ludicrous and coldest of times’ now appeared
refractory not only to an impassioned political lyricism, but even to
political satire.

In addition to this, however, we must bear in mind that Leopardi’s

transition to a consistently materialist position, which took place
precisely from 1823 onwards, acted as a disincentive, at least initially,
to any political engagement. While the Rousseauist-democratic,
‘historical’ pessimism of the previous years was, so to speak, spontan-
eously progressive at the politico-social level, the task of coordinating
the new materialistic pessimism with a forward-looking socio-political
attitude came much less easily and directly. To one who, like Leopardi,
had become persuaded of the radical unhappiness of all living beings,
it might well seem that one could afford to neglect efforts to ameliorate
social institutions. This is the conclusion to which Leopardi in effect
arrives, for example, in that letter to Vieusseux of March 4th 1826, to
which both Emilio Bigi and Bruno Biral have correctly drawn attention:
22 On Pietro Giordani see the comment near the beginning of the introductory
section to this article.
23 TO, I, pp. 11 et seq (C., pp. 66 et seq).

40
‘In my eyes, men are what they are by nature, that is, a vanishingly
small part of the universe, and my relations with them and their
relations with each other hold no interest for me, and given their
failure to interest me, I am content to observe them in the most
superficial manner. Therefore, you may be certain that in matters of
social philosophy I am a complete ignoramus. Yet it is my habit
constantly to observe myself, that is man in himself, and likewise his
relations with the rest of nature . . .’

The Religion of Progress

Luporini’s ‘Leopardi progressivo’ is somewhat marred by an inade-

quately defined concept of progress—not an isolated failing in Marxist
historiography. The struggle for the emancipation of man from religious
and metaphysical prejudice and for the conquest of an integral, secular
vision of the world is logically connected—and, indeed, historically so,
both in the past and still currently—with the struggle against every
form of politico-social oppression. All the same, connexion does not
signify immediate identity, and it is easy to cite many cases where there
is a ‘lag’, or even direct temporary conflict, between that which is
progressive in the socio-political sphere, and that which is progressive
from a ‘scientific’ standpoint; between the commitment to democracy
and a day to day rationality. It is a point that Antonio La Penna sub-
mits to the melting pot in an article on Lucretius in Unità, 3rd.
November, 1963: ‘The problem (regarding the progressive character
of Lucretian thought) is none other than that of the attitude one
adopts towards the rationalism and materialism of the past, even when
these were politically agnostic, if not straightforwardly reactionary.
Or rather, a reactionary rationalism and materialism, when they have
brought about an improved understanding of nature and of history—
when they have been the index of scientific progress—have always
despite themselves enlarged the conditions for the complete emanci-
pation of man, for an emancipation, that is, both from ignorance and
from social and political oppression. And they have done so, precisely
because this total emancipation, towards which Marxism aspires, is
founded on a scientific knowledge of natural and historical reality. I
do not think I am wrong to assert that Machiavelli was less demo-
cratic than Savonarola; nevertheless, Machiavelli is far more important
than Savonarola to Marxism in the basis he provides for the construc-
tion of its social and political vision. Enlightenment thought and
Marxism are, at their differing levels, both syntheses of a clear-sighted
rationality with that will to freedom which previously found expres-
sion only in utopianism and religious mythology’.

Within the Enlightenment movement itself, the two moments of the

synthesis to which La Penna refers are present in very differing degrees
in different thinkers. It is a movement, indeed, which from the stand-
point of our distinction between scientific progress and progress of a
social and political character, provides examples even more pertinent
than those of Machiavelli and Savonarola. One has only to think of
Rousseau, that most advanced of democratic thinkers, who was
nonetheless a good deal less secular and rationalistic than La Metrie,

41
Holbach, Helvetius; while they, though unwavering in their material-
ism, were extremely moderate in their political views.
The confusion between these two levels of progress can result in
forced interpretations of an antithetical character: either every atheist
and materialist is presented as a democratic thinker, or else anti-
democratic materialism is dismissed without more ado as out-and-out
reactionary. The treatment accorded Epicurus and Lucretius provides
an instance of the first interpretation, while an exemplification of the
second is the standard approach to the positivist thinkers of the late 19th
century—who very rarely receive a fair evaluation at the hands of
democratic and Marxist historians.
In Leopardi’s case, there is no question at all of confining what is
progressive in his thought to the secular-rationalist level. In social and
political matters he was also a progressive thinker. The point has been
incontrovertibly established through Luporini’s work. But the dis-
tinction between the two levels allows us, in Leopardi’s case, to arrive
at a more coherent picture of his thought. It allows us to recognise that
at different periods of his life, it was now the one and now the other
form of progress that predominated. Finally, it allows us to see that the
two were at times in open conflict, and that the character of Leopardi’s
thought towards the end of his life derived precisely from the urge he
felt to bring these two aspects into harmony. In Luporini’s work, by
contrast, Leopardi’s materialism is subjected to examination and given
a positive evaluation almost exclusively from the standpoint of its
bearing upon socio-political progress (pp. 251–254): the materialist
element in his thought is seen as important not in itself, but as a
reconciling link between the early and the late Leopardi, as the anchor-
age that saves him from being swept away on the waves of irrationalism
before he has developed the offensive of his new secular morality.
Hence the underestimation of the Operette morali; hence, too, the fact
that while the ‘political philosophers’ such as Hobbes, Rousseau and
Voltaire,24 figure constantly in Luporini’s catalogue of those inspiring
Leopardi’s thought, there is not even a single mention of the ‘vulgar
materialist’ Holbach, who, as we have already noted, influenced Leo-
pardi in a number of important ways.
The fresh vigour with which the theme of the brotherhood of man is
treated from the time of the Dialogo di Plotino e di Porfirio [Dialogue
between Plotinus and Porphyrius] (1827),25 the grand, new lyrical flowering
of the poems written during his stay at Pisa and Ricanati (1828–1829),
are the mark of his definitive abandonment of any morality of ataraxia,
but do not as yet represent any decisive return to political commitment.
It was a hostile encounter with Liberal-Catholicism, especially during
his second stay in Florence, and later in Naples, that drove Leopardi to
pose the problem of how to establish, necessarily on bases other than
those on which he had relied in 1818 –1821, a link between his own
pessimism and a progressive political attitude.

24
And the appeal is made in this last instance, not to the pessimistic and anti-
providentialist themes to be found in Voltaire’s poem on the Lisbon Disaster and
other of his writings.
25
TO I, p. 171 f.

42
Liberal-Catholicism represented something particularly repugnant to
the whole tenor of Leopardi’s thought. It was the myth of progress,
stripped of the ballast of lucid rationalism that the French had brought
to it in the 18th century, and reconciled now with the traditional myths
of Catholicism. It was an exaltation of the achievements of science and
technology (the steam-engine, the rapid diffusion of news: one thinks of
the satire in the Palinodia26) side by side with a rejection of any
genuinely scientific, that is secular, vision of reality. It was Catholic
optimism—whereas Leopardi, so long as he had retained any faith in
his ability to achieve some kind of reconciliation between his own brand
of pessimism and Christianity, had premised it precisely on the pessi-
mistic outlook upon the world that can be found in Christianity.
Leopardi’s writings, and particularly the Operette morali, were received
within this milieu as expressions of an atheism that denied both
religion and progress; that was opposed, therefore, in every respect to
the ‘spirit of the age’. Nor were these new detractors pure and simple
reactionaries whom Leopardi could afford to neglect. It was the voice
of a public opinion not without its measure of enlightenment and sense
of progress that was expressed in their criticisms. And the charge of
irreligiousness was (in distinct contrast to the criticisms which Leopardi
had received on the occasion of his first patriotic poems) closely linked
to imputations of disloyalty to his country and lack of faith in human-
ity. That, moreover, some of these accusations had their reverberation
outside the circle of Catholic-liberals and were felt by a public whose
consciousness could be said to be, in the broadest sense, that of the
Risorgimento, is shown by Pietro Giordani’s work on the Operette morali
—a study that was to have been included in Vieusseux’s Antologia but
in the end remained unpublished. Giordani declared that he shared
Leopardi’s pessimism and defended it from the criticisms of the Tuscan
moderates, but even he expressed the wish that Leopardi27 should
assume a greater political commitment.
The need to respond to this accusation of political apathy and ego-
centricity (‘What does it profit you/to search in your own breast ?/
Look not within/ For matter for your song’28 are the words which
Leopardi puts into the mouth of one of his adversaries in the Palinodia)
was certainly the definitive motive for his reassumption of a polemical
and combative stance; it was that which lay behind the Titanism of
his last years. The measure of ‘extroversion’ that characterises the later
orientation of Leopardi’s thought in no sense detracts (as some critics
have wrongly thought) from his profound integrity and coherence. On
the contrary, it demonstrates Leopardi’s capacity to react to the new
cultural and political climate, through an enlargement of the human
26
To, I, p. 38 f. (C., pp. 224 et seq).
27
There are two episodes which should be placed in the context of this separation
and lack of understanding between Leopardi and the liberals of his day, both of
which were to have a major impact on his frame of mind and to arouse bitter
resentment on his part: the rumour, credited temporarily even by Giordani, that he
had gone to Rome in the autumn of 1831 in order to enter the Church (cf. Epistolario
ed. Moroncini VI, pp. 102 and note 2, 107, 109), and the attribution to him of the
reactionary Dialoghetti written in fact by his father, Monaldo (cf. the letter to Vieuss-
eux of 12 May 1832 and subsequent letters).
28
C., p. 236.

43
and social dimension of his own pessimism that allows him to establish
a wholly secular and de-mythologised morality.
In opposition to the ideological compromise effected by the Catholic
liberals, Leopardi, in his last phase, reinvoked the grand themes of
Enlightenment and materialist thought. There can be no political
freedom, he asserts, in the absence of freedom from dogma and
mythology (‘You dream of liberty, and yet you wish/Thought at the
same time slave once more/ By which alone we rose again’29). It was
precisely this need to expose the ‘barbaric errors’ of Catholicism that
allowed Leopardi to overcome any lingering doubts as to whether or
not the time had come for him to reveal to man the evil of his condition
in all its harshness. Leopardi came to be convinced of what Gian Luigi
Berardi has aptly termed the ‘social value of truth’30 because experience
had taught him that he lived in an age in which it was no longer the
stalwart and highminded illusions of primitive man which filled the
void of ignorance, but a hybrid compound of gloomy Mediaeval
superstition and a false and superficial conception of progress, from
which no happiness could ensue to man. In such a climate, then, the
better policy was that ‘proud contentment’ which springs from
enlightened despair and which constitutes, in a world which now
precluded heroic action, the ultimate and paradoxical form of an origin-
al classical ‘virtue’. The Paralipomeni, in that they deny any inelimina-
ble difference between men and animals, and in that they uphold the
anti-metaphysical and empiricist values of the 18th century in opposition
to the Christian ethic of the 19th represent the furthermost point to
which Leopardi extends his ideology of progress.
At the political level (and accompanying the increased aversion to every
reactionary and absolutist position that is revealed in the Paralipomeni
and in his letters of the period) we find Leopardi pursuing an attack
upon the moderate Catholics in two successive stages. In the first
instance, in the early poems of the Paralipomeni, there is a return to
patriotic themes that are classical in their inspiration and are marked by a
sectarian xenophobia and rhetorical exaltation of the Roman age
(which reaches its height in his objection to the Italian practice of
naming children after such barbarian heroes as Hannibal and Arminius,
rather than after the Romans of old!). Nearest in character to a mere
retaliation, and exposing more than elsewhere the parochial limitations
of a classical patriotism when placed against the expansive European
character of Catholic-liberal reformism, this is, without a doubt, the
weakest strand in Leopardi’s polemic. Its limits are those which later
detracted from the force of Carducci’s republicanism and encouraged his
ultimate capitulation to a reactionary politics.31 All the same, we should

29 La Ginestra, vv. 72–73, in TO, I, p. 42 (C, p. 249).

30 ‘Ragione e stile in Leopardi’ in Belfagor, XVIII, 1963, pp. 437.
31 Giosue Carducci (1835–1907) was a poet, a teacher of the history of Italian litera-

ture, and the author of critical and polemical essays. Today he is admired for a
handful of poems of a violently melancholic inspiration, expressive of the transient
quality of life. In politics, after a period of ardent republicanism and commitment to
democratic ideas, he transferred his allegiance to the monarchy and to the anti-
socialist, nationalist and reactionary politics of the government in power at the end
of the 19th century.

44
remember that, albeit in inadequate form, this Leopardian position
nonetheless expressed the need to return within the revolutionary
framework of thinking that Italian intellectuals had adopted as a
solution to the national problem in 1820–1821, and later abandoned
after the debacle of those years.

The Losing Battle against Nature

The second strand of Leopardi’s polemic is represented by the famous

passage from the Ginestra [The Broom] in which Leopardi appeals for
the solidarity of all men in the struggle against nature. There is no
doubt as to the enormous democratic potential of that appeal. But it is
precisely in terms of its potentiality in that respect that we must speak
of it, in order to stress the indeterminacy that is to be found alongside
the extreme openness and lack of bias of Leopardi’s thought. He never
betrays the slightest hint of a prejudicial class attitude, nor any trace of
liberal ‘caution’; on the contrary, he quite explicitly states the necessity
for the entire populace to participate in the new secular morality.32
But nor, on the other hand, does he ever mention the struggle against
political and social oppression that might be thought to be a prelimin-
ary condition to the attainment of a ‘confederation’ embracing the
whole of humanity. Leopardi regarded the conflicts between human
groups as but a secondary factor, and therefore to be silenced in the
face of the demand to present a consolidated front to the first and
foremost enemy, pitiless Nature.33

Returning once more to our earlier distinction between progress at the

socio-political level, and ‘scientific’ progress, we can say that Leopardi
absorbs the former into the latter. Only in this latest phase of his
thought does he strip his pessimism of a certain solitary and shadowy
character that it had acquired during his years in Bologna. Likewise,
when he resumes the Titanism of Bruto minore, it has been expunged of
its earlier aristocratic taint. There is no longer any opposition of
principle between the hero and the common man, and even agnostic
pessimism is destined to become an attitude shared by all human
32 La Ginestra, v. 145 (in C, p. 253): ‘Such thoughts as these when they/Are known,
as they once were, to common folk/ . . .’
33 La Ginestra, v. 119 (in C., p. 251): ‘ . . . Hatreds and strife of brothers, worse/

Than all other ills, to our miseries,/ Giving man the blame for grief, but gives/ The
blame to her who has indeed the guilt,/ Mother by birth of mortals, and stepmother’;
v. 135 ‘To arm one’s right hand/ To the offence of man, to set a snare/ And obstacle
to neighbours/ He thinks as foolish as on battlefield/ Hemmed in by hostile armies
at the height/ Of the assault to start,/ Forgetting enemies,/ Sharp feuds against one’s
friends, /To turn to flight, to strike down with one’s sword/ Those who make war
upon one’s side’. In Leopardi’s rejection of misanthropy (upon which we have
already commented in note 16) there is an implicit refusal to countenance, not only
private enmities and hostilities between nations, but internal political conflicts also.
See the thought of the Zibaldone, pp. 4070–72 (17 April 1824) in which he declares
that men unfairly attribute the blame for their own unhappiness to their governors,
rather than to the natural causes from which it in fact derives, and by virtue of which
it is destined to remain the same under every government. Such an uncompromising
statement must, of course, be associated with that transitory period of political
apathy which, as we have seen, Leopardi passed through from 1824–1827. Neverthe-
less, there is an undeniable continuity of thought between this statement, that cited
in note 16, and the Ginestra.

45
beings, a philosophy of the people. In this sense, one can say that
political progress does not simply dissolve in scientific progress, but
infuses the latter with its democratic urgency.
Furthermore, we must not forget that the struggle against nature to
which Leopardi calls the attention of humanity, is, and always will
remain, a losing battle insofar as its fundamental objectives are con-
cerned. Certainly, Leopardi does not deny that it is possible to achieve
partial successes of major importance in this battle (hence his claim
that ‘We can grow civilised, and thus alone/better guide our public
fate’: Ginestra, v. 7634). But that it is nature which remains the ultimate
victor is the theme affirmed throughout the Ginestra, and likewise in
Il tramonto della luna [The Setting of the Moon], which dates from the same
final stage of Leopardi’s life and thought. It is here that we find the
difference between Leopardian pessimism and the scientistic credo of
the later positivism of the 19th century (even though one should add
that the scientistic optimism of that period alternated with a cosmic
sense of desolation which, when it did not culminate in an agnosticism
of vaguely religious hue, found its confirmation directly in Lucretius
and in Leopardi).
The Enlightenment which Leopardi opposes, in the Ginestra and in the
Fourth Canto of the Paralipomeni, to the Catholic spiritualism of the 19th
century, is always, in fact, interpreted in the sense of a doleful philo-
sophy, which precludes the possibility that mankind can attain both
to happiness and to truth. Leopardi does not see the spiritualistic reflux
of Restoration thought as primarily explicable in terms of political
motives (anti-Jacobinism), but as a retreat in the face of the pessimistic
implications of the analysis of the man-nature relationship undertaken
by 18th century materialism: ‘In that age of bitter war, in dishonour,/
Another philosophy yet held its sway,/ From whose brave and timely
thought/ Our own epoch turns away, recoiling/From a message so
distasteful to it, from the lesson that it teaches,/ Of its harsh and sad
condition’ (Paralip. IV, st. 16).
It is on pain of altering the face of Leopardian Enlightenment that one
detaches the two very beautiful verses at the beginning of this octet
from those which follow. And again, in the Ginestra, Leopardi was to
address the following words to his own century: ‘Thus you disliked
the truth/ Of the harsh lot and of the lowly place/ Which Nature gave
us. Therefore you turned/ A coward’s back towards the light/ Which
made it obvious’35. This Leopardian interpretation of the 18th century
Enlightenment is not as arbitrary as is frequently maintained. (As we
have already noted above, pessimistic themes are to be found in Vol-
taire, in Maupertius and in Pietro Verri). On the contrary, there can
be no doubt that it should be considered a forcible accentuation of a
motif which remained subordinate in the thought of the great French
Enlightenment thinkers.
As far as the prospects for the struggle between man and nature are

34
La Ginestra, C, p. 249.
35
Ibid (vv. 78–82).

46
concerned, the Ginestra does not deny but rather affirms, while pro-
jecting them onto a vaster cosmic scale, these verses of the Palinodia
(154–197):
Just as a child with constant care erects,
With little cards and twigs, an edifice
Into the shape of tower, temple, palace;
And once he sees it finished, then he turns
To knock it down because he needs these same
Papers and twigs to make some other shape;
So too Nature no sooner sees each work
Of hers perfected than she starts, although
To look on, it may be of noble form,
On its destruction, making use of parts
Dissolved in other ways. And then in vain
The race of men, to save themselves, and things,
From this bad game, reason for which is hid
Eternally, attempts with cunning hand,
Using a thousand virtues in a thousand ways:
Because, in spite of all the efforts which
They make, cruel Nature, a child untamed,
Follows her whims, and ceaselessly enjoys
Her pastime as she makes and then destroys.
And hence a varied family life of ills,
Infinite and immedicable, and pains,
Weighs on frail mortals, made so that they may
Perish irreparably: and hence a force
Hostile, destroying, strikes them within, outside,
From every part, continuously, intent
From the first day of birth; it wearies them,
Itself unwearying; until at last
The mortal lies, killed by the wicked mother.
And these, O gentle spirit, are the last
Miseries of mortal state; old age and death,
Which have beginning when the infant lip
Presses the tended breast that gives it life;
The happy nineteenth age cannot, I think,
Emend this any more than could the tenth,
Or ninth, nor future ages more than this.
And therefore, if it is allowed some time
To name the truth with its own name, in short
Nothing but unhappy at any time,
And not alone in civil modes and ways,
But in all the other parts of life,
All who are born will be, by an essence
That is incurable, and by a law
Embracing heaven and earth, and universal.36
In these verses, unhappiness is asserted, with merciless clarity, to be an
essential feature, not only of determinate, historical man, but of ‘man
in general’. Those who would bring a ‘progressive’ interpretation to

36 Palinodia, C, pp. 233–234.

47
Leopardi’s later work must come to terms with both this and many
other passages in which the same theme is stressed. What, in effect,
is at issue here, is whether the cosmic pessimism of Leopardi is to be
considered merely an extrapolation from his historico-social pessimism.
According to Lukács, Schopenhauer’s reactionary pessimism is an
‘indirect apologetics’ for bourgeois society.37 Should one regard
Leopardi’s cosmic pessimism as an ‘indirect indictment’ of that same
society? Neither Luporini, nor Biral, nor Berardi draw this explicit
conclusion; yet all three of them tend to present the theme of man’s
permanent and incurable unhappiness as in some sense an inessential
aspect of Leopardian thought: ‘the wider horizons’ within which,
according to Luporini, Leopardi is discovered relative to the liberals and
democrats of the Risorgimento, the regnum hominis which, in Biral’s
opinion, is foretold in the Ginestra, the enlightenment of the final phase
of Leopardian thought, upon which Berardi insists, would each then
represent in their respective way, a transcendence, or at least the
beginnings of a transcendence, of its pessimism; and that pessimism
itself is thus revealed as entirely relative to the particular historical
context in which Leopardi found himself situated.38 In its essentials,
this is the ‘Risorgimental’ interpretation of Leopardi (associated with
Poerio and De Sanctis), and though it now encompasses a social or
Enlightenment interpretation, it nonetheless clings to the conviction
that the Leopardian mode is not definitively that of pessimism. Upon
this view, such statements as that of the Palinodia which we have just
quoted, would represent something more in the nature of an injection
of metaphysical themes than the living and positive substance of Leo-
pardi’s thought.
The False Promise of ‘Dialectical’ Optimism

The reasons why such theses appear to us to be unacceptable have

emerged quite clearly, it would seem, in the course of our observations
on Leopardi’s materialism-pessimism. A polemic conducted from the
historical standpoint against ‘man in general’ is correct and necessary
as a check against arbitrary generalisations about economic-social,
cultural and psychological features that are in reality specific to a given
epoch. Neither the division between exploited and exploiters, nor
private property, nor the belief in God, not to mention institutions and
mental habits and attitudes that are even more circumscribed tem-
porally and geographically, are in any sense defining of humanity in
general. But the matter stands quite otherwise in regard to man qua
natural, biological creature.39 Now Leopardi’s pessimism, in its second
and more mature phase, is founded precisely upon the recognition of

37 G. Lukàcs, Die Zerstörung der Vernunft, Aufbin-Verlag, Berlin, 1955, pp. 200 et seq.
38 Luporini, p. 274 (cf. also p. 269); ‘So perfect is the combination of pessimism and
rationalism to be found in this forceful construction that Leopardi puts upon the
future that it demonstrates to the full the relative nature of these axiological stand-
points that are precisely known as optimism and pessimism; it shows, that is, the
extent to which they are indeed axiological antitheses which can never be assessed as
such, but only relatively to the concrete historical situations in which they are
produced’.
39 On this issue I refer the reader to my book On Materialism, trans. L. Garner, NLB.

London, 1975, pp. 16 et seq, 43–52.

48
certain fundamental givens of man’s physical existence (‘senility and
death’) which are in contrast to his desire—itself also a ‘natural’
disposition—for happiness. Leopardi never, in fact, denies that nature,
too, has its historicity (the author of two such intrepid Cantos as we
find at the end of the Paralipomeni would certainly not have been dis-
concerted by Darwin’s findings); but he knows that it has a history that
unfolds at an incomparably slower pace, and that it has an automatic
and unconscious character to which it would be mistaken to attribute
any purpose or providential design.40 He does not even deny the possi-
bility that nature itself can be manipulated (one has only to think of
that notion, so justly admired by Luporini: ‘a future civilisation of the
beasts wherein, eventually, the highest of some species, such as the apes,
come to comport themselves as human beings’ in such a fashion that
even those animals might become members of the ‘great alliance of
intelligent beings opposed to nature and to non-intelligent things’);41
but he maintains that even were man to intervene in such a way to alter
the course of nature, it would never be possible to change those funda-
mental givens upon which we commented above, and from which
unhappiness inevitably flows.
To speak of the permanent value of Leopardian pessimism in this
strictly materialist sense, is not, in my opinion, in any way to succumb
to metaphysical and existentialist interpretations of his thought; nor is
it to abandon inquiries into the concrete experiences, both individual
and socio-historical, from which that pessimism springs.
On many occasions,42 throughout his study, Luporini notes that it is an
absence of dialectics—that new ‘instrument of cognition’ that German
philosophy during these years was engaged in developing—that
(together with his lack of contact with a popular revolutionary move-
ment) prevents Leopardi from developing to the full the progressive
core of his thought. Indeed, he argues that Leopardi reached the very
threshold of a dialectical thought when he noted in the Zibaldone that
‘the manifest contradictions that exist in nature’ (the natural aspiration
of living beings to happiness and the natural impossibility of attaining
it; the perpetuation of the life of the species only through the des-
truction of its individuals), would seem to undermine the very prin-
ciple upon which our reason is founded,43 that ‘nothing can both be
and not be’. Now, there is no doubt that Leopardi presents us with a
problem which, quite rightly, appears to him insoluble with the
traditional tools of Aristotelian logic. But to suppose that Leopardi
would have seen the acquisition of a new theoretical instrument
(dialectical logic) as a means to overcome pessimism, or that it could be
so regarded by a Leopardian of the Twentieth century, involves a failure
to recognise the wholly practical, sensist-hedonist character of Leo-
pardian pessimism. For a thinker so anti-theoretical and anti-meta-
physical as Leopardi, unhappiness is not to be ‘dialecticized’ away at

40
See La Ginestra, vv. 289–294, in C, p. 259.
41
Zibaldone, 4279 et seq (13 April 1827), cf. Luporini. pp. 273 et seq.
42
Luporini, pp. 235, 241, 247–251, 253.
43
Zibaldone, 4099 (3 June 1824), 4127–32 (5–6 April 1825), and already on p. 4087
(11 May 1824).

49
the level of logic. It can only (circumstances permitting) be eliminated
in fact. After having stressed the incomprehensibility—from the
standpoint of formal logic—of the contradiction between the life
force and unhappiness, Leopardi adds, as if to forestall any attempts to
minimise the second term: ‘In the meantime, the inevitable unhappi-
ness of living beings is a certain fact’ (Zibaldone, p. 4100).

On closer inspection, we shall see that there is no need to engage in

these hypothetical speculations (if Leopardi had been acquainted with
dialectical logic . . . ). The providentialist theme, according to which
God or nature pursues, although only via the unhappiness of particular
individuals, the general happiness of humanity, or the variant of this
theme, according to which modern civilisation can assure, if not the
happiness of individuals, at least the happiness of the mass of men,
have both, in their ways, been attempts to overcome pessimism
‘dialectically’. That is certainly not to suggest that at the theoretical
level these themes are assimilable within the framework of Hegelian
logic: it is only to point out that they exercize an analogous function in
regard to the problem of human unhappiness. For they take pessimism
to be the effect of a fragmentary and static view of reality and to reflect
an incapacity to see the isolated phenomenon in its relations with the
whole. Leopardi, in fact, following Voltaire, but also going far beyond
him, was tireless in his rejection and derision of such a ‘dialectical’
solution, arguing precisely that it was ‘illusory’, an ‘ideal negation’,
that serves to disguise the impossibility in fact that man can be freed of
the oppression that nature exercises over him.44

Seen in this light, there is a genuine analogy to be drawn between the

Leopardian polemic against the apologists of divinity or nature and the
Marxist attack on the presumption of the Hegelians (and of an entire
millenial philosophic tradition) that human alienation is to be suppres-
sed ‘in thought’, and not, first and foremost, in reality; on their attempt
to justify, rather than to change the world. The only difference is that
while for Marxism the reality that is the cause of human unhappiness is
essentially economico-social, for Leopardi it is essentially physico-
biological. Most Marxists regard nature’s determination over man as
exercised primarily at the dawn of human history; it is conceived as a
kind of prologue or pre-historic antechamber, and from the moment
that man begins to labour and produce, nature reduces (and is ever more
reduced) to a mere object of human activity: ‘natural man’ is increas-
ingly overshadowed by ‘historic man’, in whom eventually he is
absorbed and wholly transcended. For Leopardi, on the other hand,
even in confrontation with civilized man, nature preserves its entire
formidable force of attrition and destruction: for that reason, the
struggle of man against nature appears in his thought as a desperate
conflict, and even when all mythology has been exploded, it is not to an
optimistic vision of reality that it yields, but to an aggressive and lucid
pessimism.

44
Zibaldone, 4175 (and the appeal to Voltaire’s poem on the Lisbon Disaster, in the
Palinodia, v. 197 f. (C p. 235).

50