Adam Kirsch reviews the newly translated, mammoth diary of Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldone, and finds the poet presaged Nietzsche with his dark meditations on modernity:
Leopardi envies the ancients, who were history’s children. The young Leopardi, who
had seen little of life and did not at all like what he saw, took the Greek epics and the Latin orations as evidence that there was once a time when men lived heroically and single-mindedly. The cruelty of the ancients, as we see it in the Iliad, was not for Leopardi a reason to prefer the moderns. On the contrary, the belligerence of antiquity was a sign of its greater authenticity and capacity for faith. At moments Leopardi suggests that the xenophobic patriotism of the ancient Greeks, their capacity for utterly dehumanizing and exterminating their foes, was a technique of thought that the moderns would do well to cultivate: “Society cannot subsist without love of the homeland, and hatred of foreigners.”
Here Leopardi strikes a note that would become familiar from Nietzsche, and later from fascism:
the belief that the modern world must re-barbarize itself. Yet this is Leopardi’s view only at rare moments, when he seems carried away by his own speculations. Temperamentally he is anything but violent, and far from being contemptuous of the mind, he is in his own way absolutely pious toward it—in just the way that Nietzsche would observe that the nihilist remains pious toward one thing, which is the truth. And the truth, for Leopardi as for Nietzsche, is that there is no truth. This is the revolutionary insight that enlightened thought has brought us, overturning in the process two thousand years of Christian and Platonic thought about the nature of the good. “The truth about good and evil, that one thing is good and the other is bad, is believed to be naturally absolute, when in fact it is only relative…. There is almost no other absolute truth, except that All is relative. This must be the basis for all metaphysics.”
Previous Dish on Zibaldone here and here.
(Image of Leopardi c. 1820 via Wikimedia Commons)
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