The match between Leopardi,the White Knight and Severino over the destiny of mankind

In recent years, the work of Giacomo Leopardi has finally begun to receive the international attention it has always deserved. The entire Zibaldone was translated into English by a group of scholars and professionals under the auspices of the University of Birmingham in 2013, Zibaldone: The Notebooks of Leopardi (Penguin). An American edition came out in July of the same year, Zibaldone: Giacomo Leopardi (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux). In 2015 Mario Martone’s Il giovane favoloso was being shown in cinemas not only in Italy, but in Paris. It is the first film that attempts to transfer the work of Leopardi onto the screen. Although it achieved mixed results, there is no doubt that Martone’s dramatizations of the Operette morali, in particular, are quite powerful. In May 2015 Emanuele Severino’s no less noteworthy book appeared: In viaggio con Leopardi: La partita sul destino dell’uomo (Milan: Rizzoli).

Severino, a well-known Italian philosopher who has written countless major books on contemporary, ancient, and modern philosophy, now returns to themes already established in his previous two meditations on Leopardi’s opus (Il nulla e la poesia. Alla fine dell'età della tecnica: Leopardi, 1990, and Cosa arcana e stupenda. L’Occidente e Leopardi, 1997), but further develops them and directs them to a wider audience.

Before we retrace the main points of the philosophical dialogue with Leopardi’s work, we will describe the overall structure and merits of this volume. It consists of 21 chapters of around 10 pages each. It introduces a premise: the book is staged as a chess game between two major players (I will return to the premise after this summary). It then goes on to retrace the main points of Western philosophy and Leopardi’s entire production. Severino has a thorough command of the Zibaldone, which he refers to, however, as Pensieri, the Canti, the Operette morali, and various major Leopardian essays such as Discorso sopra lo stato dei costumi degl’Italiani. He offers penetrating readings of L’infinito in Chapter 2 and in-depth interpretations of La ginestra in Chapters 3 through 8. He also includes the Operette morali, especially Dialogo di Federico Ruysch e le sue mummie, Dialogo di Plotino e di Porfirio, Dialogo della Natura e di un Islandese, Il Cantico del gallo silvestre, Frammento apocrifo di Stratone di Lampasco, Dialogo di Timandro e di Eleandro, as well as other poems from the Canti, in his rigorous pondering of Leopardi’s thoughts. Although he does en passant consider the potenza espressiva del linguaggio di Leopardi (Severino, 2015: 24), his methodical approach to Leopardi’s production is essentially philosophical. If there are any limits to Severino’s book as a means of appreciating Leopardi’s stylistic grandeur they would be for this reason. After all, he was, in the end, a writer, a poet, not a philosopher. But let us go on to the book’s main thrust.

In the introductory chapter titled Istruzioni per la lettura, Severino points out that Leopardi’s work is a grande critica della civiltà. He anticipated Nietzsche’s theme of the ‘Death of God.’ As the author writes, at this point the reader may or may not wish to continue reading about the opinions of philosophers and literati. The world goes on. Yet, he reminds us that we cannot act if we do not know the world in which our actions unfold. Leopardi attained the culmination of the history of Western philosophical thought. Therefore understanding how he got there helps us grasp the predicament (sfacelo, Severino, 2015: 12) of our present world. Paradoxically, Leopardi, as poet-philosopher, was the singer of death, il cantore della morte, because he was the cantore del nulla, the singer of nothingness. Severino sets up a partita, a match, a game or contest, between Leopardi as Giocatore Nero, cantore del nulla and a Giocatore Bianco, who represents the tradition of Western thought, born with the Greeks and developing into Christianity, the conviction that the world exists within a set of unchanging laws founded on a divine and eternal principle of all things.

We are immediately told that the Giocatore Nero wins this match at least on the conceptual, philosophical level. Nevertheless, the Giocatore Bianco, even today, does not feel defeated, neither philosophically nor practically. This is the case even if we live our present with an ever greater sense of unease and alienation. The world, Severino reminds us, is not what it once was. Leopardi is capable, along with a very few others, of understanding the causes behind the unravelling of more than 2000 years of civilization. Today that tradition is like dried-up vegetation, and this is an inevitable occurrence. The sottosuolo, ‘subsoil’ of our time is a philosophical place inhabited by the few who understand why. The match is played on the scacchiera, the chess board built by the Giocatore Bianco. On this chessboard, for the first time il divenire delle cose—la morte—è pensato e vissuto come il loro uscire dal nulla e ritornarvi (the becoming of things, death, is conceived and lived as though they were coming from and returning to nothingness). When the Giocatore Nero wins the match he also commits a sort of ‘parricide’ since he is ‘defeating’ his own tradition, what formed him. There is also a Terzo Giocatore, who describes the match and offers a slightly different interpretation of the issue that divides the two players, that is, the law of non contradiction, in the ontological Aristotelian sense, introduced in Chapter 14, as the basis of all of Leopardi’s philosophical explorations: Il rapporto della filosofia con il principio di non contraddizione si costituisce nella dimensione più profonda del pensare. Leopardi lo esplora sin dall’inizio delle sue riflessioni. Si può dire anzi che tale esplorazione costituisca il loro percorso essenziale (Severino, 2015: 138). Simply put, this law affirms that ‘it is impossible for the same thing to belong and not belong at the same time to the same thing and the same respect,’ as stated by Aristotle in Metaphysics, IV (Severino, 2015: 137–138). Both players agree on the law as a premise and irrefutable point of departure, but differ on its interpretation, as we shall see.

The Giocatore Bianco believes he can show that the basis of the law of non contradiction necessarily affirms the existence of the eternal Beginning/Principle: Il Giocatore Bianco ritiene di poter mostrare che sul fondamento del «principio di non contraddizione» è necessario affermare l’esistenza del Principio eterno. The Giocatore Nero, on the other hand, is able to prove that the existence of any eternal Beginning/Principle implies the negation of that very principle, or that it is impossible, that thus the Principle, the beginning of all things is nothingness: Il Giocatore Nero riesce a mostrare che l’esistenza di un qualsiasi Principio eterno implica la negazione di tale “principio,” ossia è impossibile, e che quindi il Principio di tutte le cose è il nulla (Severino, 2015: 139).

The reason that the Giocatore Nero wins the match is because he shows that if the eternal Principle defended by the Giocatore Bianco exists, then nothingness must necessarily be subject to it: Se esiste l’Eterno, il nulla dovrebbe esserne il suddito (Severino, 2015: 176). But it is not possible that nothingness can be a subject obeying the law of all present, past, and future things that comprise the Prototype. Nothingness cannot be subject, or sub-exist because it does not exist. At this point, the Giocatore Bianco gives up because both players are absolutely convinced that the law of non contradiction is an irrefutable premise.

When the Giocatore Nero wins the match he is not yet convinced of the contradictory nature of all things. But at a certain point he comes to believe that the reality of the world, which can be experienced and which is evident, negates the law of non contradiction. He thinks he can show that reality itself proves that being is non being, that the same is and is not. At this point, Severino concludes, the Giocatore Nero destroys his own victory over the Giocatore Bianco. By denying the law of non contradiction he annuls his victory. This is where the Terzo Giocatore enters the scene, in Chapter 18 (Severino, 2015: 177).

The Terzo Giocatore again points out that the chessboard was built by the Giocatore Bianco on an erroneous basis. In fact, in Chapter 19 Severino writes: il Terzo Giocatore … vede che la schacchiera non si appoggia ad alcunché ed è l’Errare estremo; e nondimeno è il sostegno su cui si appoggia e di cui si alimenta tutto l’errare e la violenza della civiltà occidentale e ormai di tutta la Terra (Severino, 2015: 183) (The Third Player sees that the chessboard stands on nothing and that it is a sort of extreme wandering off course, and nevertheless it is the base upon which all the errancy and violence of Western Civilization, and by now of the entire Earth, nourishes itself). The Third Player can see this because he sees the truth. He doesn’t see the truth proclaimed by the Giocatore Bianco, which is negated by the Giocatore Nero. He sees an unheard-of dimension of the truth. His language then attempts to express it.

The Terzo Giocatore points out that both players agree that going to nothingness and coming from it are supremely evident, that this can be concretely observed and experienced. On this foundation, he says, grows the entire history of Western thought. However, he counters that this, in effect, is a theory, not a truth. The chessboard is built upon a false foundation. We say, he points out, that things never before seen come from nothingness, precisely because we have never seen them. The Third Player is saying that all Western thought has always rested upon the conviction that becoming other, that is, the passages to and from life, the changing of conditions, are phenomena that enter the realm of experience. But he is able to articulate how becoming other, coming from so-called nothingness, is not something that can be experienced or perceived. This means that coming from nothingness and returning to nothingness is a theory built on the basis of a disappointment provoked by the failed return of what no longer appears. A theory cannot affirm something which is suggested by experience but it interprets experience itself.

In the final chapter, Severino explains how Leopardi in his Zibaldone was on the point of understanding this, that the contradiction he perceived in reality was in fact a cosa che non è cosa, a thing that is not a thing, or rather something very close to what he called ‘il vero’:

Per questo si può dire che se il Giocatore Nero è infinitamente lontano dal Terzo Giocatore, del Terzo Giocatore egli è anche un interlocutore privilegiato. Gli è in qualche modo vicino. Chi è sceso nelle estreme profondità della Terra si è allontanato dal Cielo. Ma, se avesse proseguito ancora, e avesse quindi rovesciato il capo, le stelle avrebbe infine potuto giungere a rivederle, lasciando cadere a terra le sue vesti nere e lasciando apparire il destino della verità, che eternamente appare. (Severino, 2015: 221)

(Thus we can say that if the Giocatore Nero is infinitely far away from the Terzo Giocatore, he is also a privileged interlocutor. He is somehow close to him. When we descend to the depths of the Earth, we go far from the Sky. But had he gone on, had he turned his head, he would have been able to see the stars, shedding his black garbs and allowing the destiny of truth to appear, eternally appear). (Translation my own)

Hopefully the reader has been able to follow at least some of the main currents of a complex philosophical exploration of Leopardi’s oeuvre. In the last three chapters the Third Player enters the match and takes over the dialogue, much like a character from the Operette morali. At times, it may seem as though the philosopher is ‘correcting’ the poet. Nevertheless, In viaggio con Leopardi is a seminal contribution to the field, one that could probably be the substance of a graduate course and that will certainly shape our understanding of Leopardi’s achievements.