Leopardi: philosophy, philosophers and other questions.

By Prof.Ernesto PELLECCHIA

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A research on Leopardi the philosopher. A recent work by Prof. E.Pellecchia, original Promoter and Creator of the Giovenale prize (Aquinate literary event). The original Italian version is available in Open Access at the following link: https://zenodo.org/records/14246558 .

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“Philosophy is the science with which or without which one stands still at the same stitch”.

This is the goliardic aphorism spread among students who do not like philosophy and use this singular formula to denounce its substantial uselessness in the process of knowledge and intellectual and cultural formation that they are facing.

There is no doubt that linguistically and conceptually this definition presents evident characteristics of crudeness; nevertheless in the apparent banality of that formula lies a sort of prejudicial “hostility”, an instinctive refusal, a real repulsion towards a discipline considered, instead, by philosophers, scholars and teachers, among the noblest and most formative disciplines of the intellectual structure of young students..

There would be no mention of this singular and virtual logomachy, fought, moreover, by contenders equipped with visibly unequal weapons, if in support, at least in some aspects, of the thesis of those students there had not been an illustrious and unsuspected defense attorney: Giacomo Leopardi. And it would be wrong to think that the poet from Recanati had limited himself to some incidental expressions, to some brief and occasional parenthetical reflections on the question. On the contrary: in the course of the more than 4000 thoughts of the Zibaldone formulated between 1817 and 1832, Leopardi was the author of many reflections, conceptually organic and articulated on philosophy and philosophers. Reflections of extreme clarity even linguistically.

Already in April 1820 (Zibaldone, thought 111) he observed how “philosophy and the use of pure reason ……. have stiffened and sterilized this poor life, and how all the beauty of this world consists in the imagination which can be compared to words and to construction and to various bold and figurative constructions.”

In truth, the controversy over reason, which is philosophy's elective and exclusive instrument of investigation, began three years earlier (ZIB. 114,115): "Reason is the enemy of all greatness... I mean that a man will be less and more unlikely to be great the more he is dominated by reason... nature is great and reason is small."

A controversy that will run through the entire composition of the Zibaldone, if it is true that Leopardi will renew it several times: for example in thought 17 (reason, which he defines as psychological art, has the responsibility of "making all inspiration, all poetry vanish... and of destroying the illusion, without which there will be no poetry forever, and the greatness of the soul and of actions"); or in thought 1825 ("I condemn reason insofar as it grows and changes in such a way that it becomes the main obstacle to our happiness, the instrument of our unhappiness, the enemy of the other natural qualities of man and of human life."); or in a very long series of other thoughts scattered throughout the collection, not the least of which Leopardi formulates by borrowing words from Rousseau's Thoughts (1,207):

  ”La  seule raison n’est point active; elle retient qulquefois,rarement excite, et jamais elle n’a rien fait de grand”(Zib.4492).

Reason reveals itself as the permanent polemical idol of Leopardi's thought, made the object of a progressive and systematic contestation and demolition, which knows no pauses or breaks or drops in tone. The anti-rationalist polemic of the poet from Recanati legitimately introduces us to the ideological core of these brief notes: the troubled relationship between Leopardi and philosophy.

It was a tormented relationship, lived between criticisms of unusual and unexpected harshness and explicit, repeated admissions of the extraordinary potential of philosophy in the implementation of the process of knowledge of the richness and complexity of human experience. Potential mortified and sterilized, in Leopardi's opinion, by the unfortunate habit of philosophers, especially the German ones but not only them, to close themselves in an ivory tower, in a complacent, arid and sterile self-referentiality, far from what the poet from Recanati calls "the system of nature". But let us hear Leopardi: "Accustomed, those philosophers, to not reading, to not thinking, to not considering, to not studying anything other than philosophy, dialectics, metaphysics, analysis, mathematics,... their minds completely unpoeticized,... and to consider and place their profession a thousand miles away from everything that pertains to imagination and feeling,... identified with pure reasoning, knowing no other existence in nature than the calculated, the reasonable, free from every passion, illusion, feeling, they err at every turn reasoning with the most exquisite accuracy. It is most certain that they have ignored and ignore the greatest part of nature and of the very things they deal with... and the greatest part of the very truth to which they have exclusively dedicated themselves" (Zib.1835|1836 of 4 October 1821).

The year before, on June 7, 1820, broadening, historicizing and, so to speak, politicizing the analysis of the limits and inadequacies of philosophy in its presumption of laying the foundations of the freedom of peoples, he had affirmed: "The safeguard of the freedom of nations is not philosophy nor reason... but virtues, illusions, enthusiasm... And a people of philosophers would be the smallest and most cowardly in the world. Therefore our regeneration depends on a, so to speak, ultra-philosophy, which, knowing the intimate and the entirety of things, brings us closer to nature" (Zib.115).

And nature is for Leopardi life itself, in the richness and complexity of its manifestations.

Leopardi reiterates these limits and this inadequacy by underlining the responsibilities of philosophers: "The analysis of ideas, of man, of the universal system of beings, must necessarily fall in great and principal part on the imagination, on natural illusions, on passions, on everything that is poetic in the entire system of nature.

This part of nature is not only useful, but necessary to know the other, indeed one cannot be separated from the other in philosophical meditations. The said analysis in order to philosophy must be done not by the imagination or the heart, but by cold reason, which enters into the most secret recesses of both. But how can he do the said analysis who does not know all the said things from his own experience or knows them almost nothing?.......he who does not know nature knows nothing and cannot reason, however reasonable he may be" (Zib.1835).

So who appears to be the real defendant in this very harsh indictment by Leopardi? Perhaps philosophy in its autonomous disciplinary structure, with its rules, its binding constraints that imprison philosophers within a predetermined conceptual organization, a rigid and impermeable enclosure of pre-established investigation and research and, above all, of an exclusively intellectualistic nature, from which the analysis of that extraordinary interior world of man in which imagination, feeling, illusions, passions and enthusiasm pulsate at every moment is absolutely and completely excluded?

Or are the real defendants the philosophers, especially the Germans, who from the seventeenth century onwards have in fact transformed philosophy into a sort of mathematics that uses words instead of numbers in a dialectical exercise, purely academic, narcissistic and self-referential, whose echo does not go beyond the walls of the ivory towers within which they have deliberately and aristocratically locked themselves?

Leopardi's answer does not lend itself to any kind of misunderstanding: "He who does not have or has never had imagination, feeling, capacity for enthusiasm, for heroism, for vivid and great illusions, for strong and varied passions... absolutely cannot be a great, true and perfect philosopher, indeed he will never be anything other than a halved philosopher, with short sight, with a very weak eye, with poor penetration, however diligent, patient, subtle, dialectical and mathematical he may be; he will never know the truth, he will persuade himself and prove with possible evidence very false things." (Zib. 1833).

But he will say even more clearly and explicitly the next day, October 4, 1821: "The philosopher is not perfect, if he is only a philosopher, and if he employs his life and himself only to the perfection of his philosophy, of his reason, to the pure discovery of the truth which is also the only and pure aim of the perfect philosopher. Reason needs imagination and the illusions that it destroys" (Zib.1839).

In other words: if philosophy reveals itself to be a purely intellectualistic discipline and incapable of projecting its gaze and developing its analyses on the richness, variety and complexity of the movements of the human soul as they unfold and manifest themselves in the extraordinary mystery of life, it is due exclusively to those philosophers who have made philosophy a sort of exclusive cultural area reserved for sterile yet refined dialectical exercises, incapable of arousing interest and emotions in readers.

But Leopardi is perfectly aware of the difficulty of identifying this figure of the perfect philosopher who is at the same time the supreme philosopher and the supreme poet: "So you see how difficult it is to find a perfect philosopher. It can be said that this quality is the rarest and strangest that can be conceived and that only one arises every ten centuries, if one has ever arisen." He, retracing the very long history of philosophy, identifies very few: among the moderns Rousseau and Pascal "almost mad because of the strength of his imagination at the end of his life"; among the ancients above all Plato "the most profound, vastest, most sublime philosopher of all the ancients, who dared to conceive a system which embraced all existence, and gave reason for all nature, and was in his style and in his inventions as much a poet as everyone knows" (Zib. 3245 of 23 August 1823).

This red thread of Leopardi's analysis of philosophy and philosophers will re-emerge in general lines several times, albeit intermittently but with some subtle adjustments, some of which are unexpected and surprising, in the more than one thousand thoughts that constitute the final part of the Zibaldone closed by thought 4526 of 4 December 1932.

In the margin of this necessarily synthetic and schematic reconstruction of Leopardi's analysis, some observations can be made:

1) It is evident that in Leopardi's reflections the mind and soul of someone who feels himself first and foremost a poet and the experience (in the semantic sense of the term) of a restless and tormented human story, lived permanently between illusions and disappointments in a swing of hope and despair, have significantly influenced the severe judgment of the poet from Recanati on the purely intellectualistic, academic and self-referential nature of philosophical research, especially that conducted by German philosophers between the end of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries;

2) We do not know whether the criticisms that Leopardi addressed to German philosophers during the fifteen years of composition of the Zibaldone aroused the attention and interest of German intellectuals; it seems extremely unlikely, also because only in the first months of 1832 a dear friend of Leopardi, the Swiss philologist Luigi De Sinner, who had taken on the task of disseminating the poet's works in Europe, was able to announce to Leopardi that the German poet and philologist F.H. Bothe would publish in the magazine "Altes und neues" the translation of the Ultimo canto di Saffo, of A Silvia and of the moral operetta the Dialogo di Federico Ruysch e le sue mummie. Of that publication, however, no trace remains and therefore we cannot know what reception that initiative had among German intellectuals. But, on the other hand, within the initiatives launched to spread the figure and the work of Leopardi in Germany, another event is documented (completely unexpected and unforeseeable if one considers the initial interest aroused, in truth, more by the thinker than by the poet among German intellectuals) which caused great bitterness in the Recanati native: in issue 55 of April 1832 in the magazine Hesperus published in Stuttgart, the translations of the song Il Sogno edited by the chief editor Notter and of the moral operetta Il Cantico del gallo silvestre edited by F. Henschel appeared. The latter, within a broad bio-bibliographical profile dedicated to Leopardi, referring explicitly to his philosophical conception, simplistically and banally affirmed that the painfully pessimistic vision of the Recanati native arose solely from his infirmity, debasing the depth and complexity of his philosophical meditation.

To the bitterness was added in the soul of the poet a sort of annoyance generated by the intellectual crudeness and the uncritical and prejudicial nature of that judgment, which deliberately avoided addressing the merits of philosophical questions, even falling into the offense to the human and personal dignity of the poet. This wounded and mortified state of mind induced Leopardi to a linguistically and conceptually particularly and unusually harsh response. In fact, on May 24, 1832 he wrote to his friend de Sinner a letter in French (of which we report here an excerpt in my Italian translation) in which among other things he said: "Whatever my misfortunes, I have had enough courage not to try to alleviate their weight either with frivolous hopes ... nor with the resignation typical of the weak ... Precisely by virtue of this courage, since my research directed me to a desperate philosophy, I did not hesitate to embrace it entirely; ... It is only because of the weakness of men that my philosophical opinions have been considered the consequence of my sufferings and that they persist in attributing the origin of my thought to physical causes. Before I die I want to protest against this invention of intellectual weakness and vulgarity and ask my readers to try to refute my observations and my reasoning without calling into question my infirmities.”

Henschel's remained the only, albeit unpleasant, polemical note in the initial stages of the process of dissemination of Leopardi's works in Germany; indeed, it can be said that interest in our author grew progressively to the point that in 1836 in Leipzig the translation of the entire collection of Canti was printed for the first time, edited by Karl Kanniggiesser on the basis of the Italian edition of 1831.

3) In conclusion of this interesting, albeit brief, journey into the surprising, stimulating and evocative reflections that Leopardi spread over the 15 years of composition of the Zibaldone on the theme of the relationship between philosophy and poetry, and between philosophers and poets, the author of these notes may be forgiven for daring to formulate the following malicious question: when Leopardi affirmed, and he did so countless times, that the perfect philosopher must be at the same time the supreme philosopher and the supreme poet, was he perhaps thinking of himself?

A question that is not entirely unfounded if one takes into account the opinion of Emanuele Severino, one of the most illustrious contemporary Italian philosophers, on Leopardi the philosopher: after having stated that our man is the perfect incarnation of the “thinking and poetic poet-genius”, he affirmed that “in this historical circumstance, Leopardi must be recognized for his merit, as a philosopher, in having laid the foundations for the destruction of Western tradition, and, as a poet, in having offered, through poetry, not a way to achieve a happy life, which was the unattainable goal of his existence, but certainly a way, if not the only one at least the most suggestive, to make life less barbaric and miserable”.