13 Leopardi between Supernaturalism and Materialism

Another view is that of Antonio Negri,[5] who postulates the notion that “the guiding light of materialism is the eternity of matter.” But he also takes the position that “the totality of time is fulfilled in the actuality of the common,” meaning that, on the one hand, materialism has no predetermined end of any sort, but on the other hand “it does follow a teleological progression in its definition of the common.” The crucial point of his argument is that this telos is not built into any preconceived plan or goal but rather works itself out in the course of history, which is produced by “the whole of man’s actions.” History is an entirely open-ended affair that in the final analysis depends on what Negri calls “love,” which is the force that draws diverse human actions together, producing an ever-evolving destiny. Through the various modalities of material being, “we are able to see the horizon of life progressively construct itself as a common horizon.” The key word here is “common,” in that Negri wants to reconcile the concept of total historical indeterminacy with that of a shared human destiny. In another formulation, he explains his point of view by defining the common as the succession of moments “where eternity and innovation meet.”

There is something in Negri’s theory of the common which I think is implicit in Leopardi’s understanding of history.

A twentieth-century thinker whose ideas and perspectives on what he called “the phenomenon of Man” shed light on Leopardi’s scheme of things is the Jesuit priest and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955). As formulated by Sir Julian Huxley, Teilhard de Chardin’s writings were an effort to effect a synthesis of the material and physical world with the world of mind and spirit.[6] He did this by fully integrating one of the keystones of modern biological science, the theory of evolution, into the general framework of his analysis of what makes man an indispensable element in this biological process, and, in this sense, links human existence to a comprehensive conception of history and destiny. Like Huxley, Teilhard de Chardin tried to relate the development of moral codes and religions to the general trends of evolution. Where Leopardi would probably have been uncomfortable with the thinking of Teilhard de Chardin is the latter’s conviction that evolutionary phenomena, considered processes, could “never be evaluated or even adequately described solely or mainly in terms of their origins: they must be defined by their direction, their inherent possibilities (including of course also their limitations), and their deducible future trends.” He quotes with approval Nietzsche’s view that man is unfinished and must be surpassed or completed, then proceeds to deduce the steps needed for his completion.[7]

Leopardi rejected all teleological interpretations of human history, and was profoundly skeptical if not dismissive about the notion that man was a work in progress, that the human adventure on earth was an ongoing process, that it was in some sense a work of art, a conscious creative act. His negative attitude toward the idea of human perfectibility would no doubt have prevented him from entering fully into Teilhard de Chardin’s theory of man, as he articulated it in the epilogue of his The Phenomenon of Man. Yet there are elements in this theory that are clearly in harmony with two facets of Leopardi’s worldview, which are, first, individuality or individuation as a necessary premise and aspiration of human life, and second, the French thinker’s vision of an ever-expanding number of individual centers of human consciousness entering “into association with all the other centres surrounding it.”[8]

We should remind ourselves, however, that Leopardi died more than twenty years before Darwin’s theory of evolution became part of the world’s consciousness. Had he known of this theory, his outlook on the human condition might have become more open to a fundamental postulate of Teilhard de Chardin’s thought, that “evolution is an ascent towards consciousness. . . . Therefore it should culminate forwards in some sort of supreme consciousness.” In this regard, we would do well to remember that Leopardi was much more inclined to see in modernity a downward than an upward movement of historical man. For Leopardi, modern civilization, as I explained in chapter nine, almost took on the coloration of a conspiracy against everything he regarded as characteristic of the good life. When all else failed, he said in a letter to his sister, we must hold fast to the idea that “virtue, sensitivity, and greatness of soul are the only things that matter, the only consolations for our ills, the only good things possible in this life.”[9] His attitude toward modern bourgeois society was irrevocably condemnatory, as we can see in number xliv of his Pensieri, his thoughts on trends of his day. Commenting on the high hopes that were being expressed for the future prosperity of mankind as a result of the burgeoning industrial age, he observed:

In the meanwhile, along with industry, meanness of the soul, coldness, egotism, greed, the falseness and perfidy of the merchant class, all of the most depraved qualities and passions and the most unworthy of civilized man are in force, and multiply endlessly; but virtues are awaited.[10]

In postwar discussions of Leopardi’s religious beliefs, we find the same variety of opinion as in the political sphere. In his early years, Leopardi was a devout believer; he saw in Christianity a great purifying movement that had brought humanity forward in the never-ending struggle for peace and justice. In his mid-adolescent years, he began to re-examine this premise, which led him to views that were not only anti-clerical but anti-Christian, inasmuch as he became convinced that Christianity, in its doctrinal essence, tended to reinforce in its adherents an attitude of passivity in the face of oppression, and to encourage a mentality unsuited for the challenges facing humanity in a new era of scientific experimentation and reliance on reason as the best guides in the search for truth. He became, at age twenty or twenty-one, an eager disciple of the Enlightenment philosophes, whose materialist conception of life, as expounded in the writings of doubters such as Voltaire and atheists such as Diderot, Destutt de Tracy, and d’Holbach, he found to be solidly rooted in reality. His meditations on the writings of these and other French thinkers are interspersed throughout his Zibaldone and appear in different guises in his poems and in the Operette morali.

Leopardi’s materialism was not, however, grounded in an absolute atheism and in an unqualified denial of the spiritual dimension of human experience and desire. It was more subtle than that. On this point Alphonse Aulard exaggerated a bit when he claimed that “The Broom Plant” showed Leopardi’s atheism “in all its purity, in its full majesty.”[11] What Leopardi believed, essentially, after his conversion from traditional Christian faith to materialist philosophy, was that the human mind “cannot not only know, but even conceive anything beyond the limits of matter. Beyond matter we cannot through any effort whatever imagine something other than a void, a nothingness.”[12] Leopardi based his materialist understanding of reality primarily on the unavailability of a so-called spiritual, immaterial world to human consciousness, except as a verbal construct. Matter and spirit were separated by an unbridgeable gulf, so that all attempts to posit the primacy of spirit were mere words that did not and could not correspond to anything the human mind was able to grasp. Human beings were part of a material reality, and as such obeyed all of the laws and forces that govern the natural world. The mind may reflect on and wonder about the ultimate spiritual essence of things, but it does so fruitlessly, because matter, of which the human mind is a part, remains forever cut off from the essence it seeks to comprehend.

Matter, Leopardi thought, was not merely a philosophical concept. It was “a way of being that was not only possible, but real, so much so that it is the only real way that we can effectively know, and distinctly imagine. . . . Nor in order that God exist materially would he be material, but would embrace matter also in his essence; which is certain and agreed upon by theologians as well, who recognize in God the type, and the idea, or the form and the antecedent reason of all possible things and ways of being.”[13]

Here we get as close as possible to what Leopardi thought, philosophically speaking, about matter and spirit. The idea of God is precisely that, an idea having no necessary internal connection with anything human beings can understand. Thus it is possible, as Leopardi acknowledges, to think of a realm beyond and different from matter, in a purely speculative sense, without yielding ground to those who claim dogmatically that the world of spirit governs the world of matter. In other words, we can imagine a totality embracing both matter and spirit, and call that totality God; but to make of such a notion the basis for determining what is real and relevant to human beings is tantamount to a gross confusion between speculation, which knows no limit to what it can say about the world, and reason, which demands that thought be based on knowable phenomena, and on the laws that underlie these phenomena. This is as far as Leopardi went, in strictly philosophical terms, in relation to the question of matter and spirit and the existence of God. Only in his letters, especially in the last years of his life, did he have recourse to the word God, when he wanted to establish a close connection between himself and his loved ones. In any case, while Leopardi was an avowed philosophical materialist, and looked upon conventional religion in decidedly critical terms, it would not be correct, in my opinion, to call him an atheist without the qualifications I have just tried to clarify. There remained alive in him the notion of totality, even if he denied that totality was anything but a verbal construct lacking a basis in reality.

Cesare Luporini has discussed Leopardi’s materialism to good effect. In his view, it was in the “Apocryphal Fragment of Strato,” written in 1825 but not published until 1845, that Leopardi made a definitive statement of his materialism. It was included in the Operette morali, and argues that matter itself is eternal, without beginning or end, but that the forms of matter do change and evolve through eons of time. The fragment is not, however, in any way an alternative to the notes on materialism in the Zibaldone, which are more philosophically sophisticated and nuanced than the relatively crude version of materialism presented in the 1825 essay.

After World War II, Leopardi’s legacy in the domain of religious thought and feeling was vigorously debated. Raffaele Belvederi cited a passage in the Zibaldone to make his point that in Leopardi we are dealing with “a Christian sensibility and an atheist reason,” a poet in whose work one finds “the existence of a Christian soul.”[14] Sensibility and soul are words that appear frequently in Leopardi criticism, for various reasons, one of which has to do with his way of sharing intimate feelings with friends and family members.[15] These personal communications were bound to be interpreted by some readers as being of Christian origin, and perhaps they were. Exactly what these words meant for Leopardi is not easily resolved. Belvederi elected to acknowledge Leopardi’s atheism but affirm that behind his so-called indifference to the Catholic religion there remained an indestructible emotional residue of the childhood beliefs that he had, intellectually, repudiated. If this is the case, it becomes easier to understand why he expressed himself as he did in his letters to his sister Paolina, and why, in a letter of May 28, 1830, to his mother, he said that “I hope death, which I constantly invoke, among the infinite good that I expect from it, is that it will convince others of the truth of my pain. Recommend me to the Madonna, and I kiss your hand with my entire soul.”[16] It’s difficult to believe, however, that this was anything but a gesture of filial respect on Leopardi’s part, not an access of mariolatry.

The human qualities that lay behind these and similar expressions of concern for the feelings of his family and close friends are part of what made Leopardi the poet and thinker that he was. Although increasingly skeptical about collective political causes, his responsiveness to the needs of individual human beings, especially those with whom he had significant interaction, never waned. There was more than intellectual acuity in his best poems. There was also heart, passion, and empathy.

Vittoriano Esposito recognized this dimension of Leopardi’s forma mentis in recalling the work of another critic, Enzo Chiórboli, who in 1944 spoke of the poet’s frequent evocations of religious holidays as deeply engraved in his psyche and were associated with “the religious sentiments of the poet that influenced the entire philosophical expression and lyrical expression of the Canti as well as of the Operette morali.”[17] In the opening section of his study, Esposito provided a list of Leopardi’s youthful religious writings, to which Maria Corti returned in her discussion of the “religious way of life” that marked the Leopardi household so indelibly. His argument rests on the supposition that this sort of religiously saturated atmosphere remained alive in the poet long after he had nominally rejected the Christian religion and any other religion based on supernaturalism.

Esposito cites an early entry in the Zibaldone as indicative of the poet’s strong leaning to religious transcendentalism. The entry was made in December 1818, when Leopardi was developing a strong interest in philosophy; Esposito cites it as proof of his lingering fidelity to his religious upbringing. The entry reads: “Everything is or can be content with itself, except man, who shows that his existence is not limited to this world, as are other things.”[18] Esposito interprets this as meaning that, through an infinite number of needs, one arrives necessarily at the beyond and God.[19] In another entry, Leopardi devoted an entire page to the thesis that “the animosity between nature and reason [is] brought back to concord by Religion.” This theme is an important ingredient of Leopardi’s early concept of illusion as a powerful stimulus to great and noble actions; but as I see it, rather than offering us a reason to conclude that, at the age of twenty-one, the poet was still a believer in supernatural religion, it reveals that he was already intrigued by the idea that the human propensity for illusory beliefs is precisely the trait that has always inspired the noblest and even the most heroic actions, as evidenced, for example, in the lives of the Christian martyrs. The sacrifice of all the pleasures that life can give to a person is subordinated to the love of God and the principle of duty to a higher cause than what mere worldly experience can represent. To perform the kind of heroic deeds recorded in Church history, it was clear, Leopardi thought, that “if we remove the hope for a future life, the immortality of the soul, the existence of the virtue of knowing the truth concerning the personified beauty of God . . . there will never be, we can say, heroic and generous and sublime action, and lofty sentiments that are not real and distinct illusions.” On the basis of this statement, Esposito concludes that, for Leopardi, religion confers the light of truth on everything that reason, in an opposite way, finds to be small, ugly and arid in this world.

Esposito goes on then to attribute Leopardi’s pessimism and his sense of nullity that was to preoccupy him in future years to his Christian formation; this was not the religion of love, to be sure, but it was an attitude of mind that tapped into deeply rooted Christian assumptions about human nature and conduct.

My sense of all this is somewhat different from that of Esposito, in that where he sees a Christian residue in Leopardi’s outlook on the world, I would favor the idea that by 1820 he had already gone beyond faith to his theory of illusion as a necessity for human beings that, in many instances, inspires them to reach the heights of courage and conviction.

Giorgio Luti, unlike Belvederi and Esposito, and in a manner similar to that of Mario Sansone, places Leopardi squarely in the camp of Enlightenment thought. For Luti, Leopardi’s embrace of materialism reached its apex during the poet’s years in Naples, from 1833 to 1837, when he gave a “definitive order to his moral world, demystifying every ‘metaphysical’ understanding of social life in the light of his solid secular-materialist principles.”[20] Luti includes in his study a consideration of the writers of classical philosophy and literature who also, in his view, played an instrumental role in the development of Leopardi’s mature conception of life, primarily Theophrastus, Epicurus, and Epictetus, among the Greeks, and Lucretius, among the Romans.

Luti took from Sebastiano Timpanaro the view that Leopardi was shaped in large measure by his sense that human beings are situated in and conditioned by their rootedness in nature; that humans are creatures of nature, and experience all of the travails and difficulties of vegetal and animal existence. It was Leopardi’s strong awareness of mankind’s vulnerability to the dangers and misfortunes of natural life, exacerbated by his own illnesses, that, Luti concluded, can be detected in the poems of the years 1829 and 1830, “Remembrances,” “The Calm after the Storm,” “Saturday in the Village,” and “Night Song of a Wandering Shepherd in Asia.” None of these poems give one cause to think that Leopardi had adopted any other than a realistic and this-worldly attitude toward the losses he had sustained and the pleasures of youth that he had enjoyed, if only fleetingly. The young girl he calls Nerina in “Remembrances,” who had been the object of his affection as a young man, is remembered chiefly for her beauty and vitality, and the poet laments her death as a final, not a transfiguring, event. Basically, Luti aligns himself with a group of like-minded scholars—Luporini, Binni, Timpanaro—who find in Leopardi a courageous writer of thoroughly modern sensibilities.

In his poetry, and in his prose essays and dialogues, Leopardi made much of the concept of truth as an overriding concern of his once he relinquished the religious beliefs of his early years. This is part of what has attracted some critics and scholars to Leopardi. It is the quality that allowed him to blend poetry and philosophy in a holistic way. Both poetry and philosophy were means with which to seek the truth. There was no contradiction in his scheme of things between what his imagination perceived as true and what his intellect also told him was true, but in a different key, according to a different method. Both were necessary and legitimate; indeed, each needed the other. Of not a single poem he wrote can it be said that it is exclusively one or the other. Readers coming from both worlds, that of science and that of the arts, have found his ideas and his feelings to be compatible with their own. On the side of science, Leopardi was engaged in philological studies that required painstaking attention to detail, and patient labors over texts that presented notable difficulties of comprehension and interpretation. His early writings on the beliefs of the ancients, and other of his disquisitions on astronomy and physics, while not of any theoretical importance, demonstrate his keen interest in science as a method of investigating what was, at one and the same time, true and real. There was a quality of mind at work in his writings that appealed, for example, to Bertrand Russell, something that G. Singh called his “reasoned and pondered pessimism.” In a letter to Singh, who solicited his opinion of the Italian poet, Russell replied that he had encouraged his friend R. C. Trevelyan to translate Leopardi into English, adding that “I consider Leopardi’s poetry and pessimism the most beautiful expression of what would be the faith of a scientist. La ginestra [The Broom Plant] expresses more effectively than any other poem known to me my opinion about the universe and the human passions.”[21]

NOTES

1. Zibaldone (Solmi), 72–73.

2. Leopardi (Galassi), 297–301.

3. Hawking and Mlodinow, 143–44.

4. Ibid.,180.

5. Antonio Negri, “Alma Venus—Prolegomena to the Common,” http://www.korotonomedya.net/otonomi/almavenus.html, 1–7. For a fuller discussion of Negri’s ideas, see his Lenta ginestra. Saggio sull’ontologia di Giacomo Leopardi. Milan: SugarCo., 1987.

6. Sir Julian Huxley, introduction to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, 11.