I wish /lit/ would discuss more about him and other pessimistic philosophers like him. He was an exceptional truecel philosopher and poet.>Everything is evil. I mean, everything that is, is wicked; every existing thing is an evil; everything exists for a wicked end. Existence is a wickedness and is ordained for wickedness. Evil is the end, the final purpose, of the universe…The only good is nonbeing; the only really good thing is the thing that is not, things that are not things; all things are bad.
>muh pessimistic philosophersYou’re a mentally weak bitch. Intellectual cattle.
>>25535935I read him in the 2010s and was moved by his pessimism, when I tried to find the passages I half-remembered it was like I was reading a different author. I couldn't have mistaken him for another Italian could I?
>>25535962idk honestly there are a few more italian pessimists but leopardi is the most well known. and every litfag should read this.
>>25535970Yeah I have to sit down and study his verse to trigger my memory. I don't think it was his journal. It's a vague recall of plaintive, fragile appeals that don't match up with him writing patriotic odes to his motherland.
>>25535935Italian literature is underappreciated by the angloid golems.>>25535970>and every litfag should read thisWhy?
>>25536023it's a huge 2600ish page collection of his personal notes. published after his death.
>>25536038And is that enough to make it mandatory reading?
>>25535935I loved him. I wish to read Italian to get him better.It's astonishing how much of his poetic outpout was written so early in his life. And how learned he became in many different languages despite never travelling outside of Italy. He was the original gloomy /lit/ basement-dweller, weak in body but strong in spirit
>>25537164well said anon.
Some excerpts of the preface to the Zibaldone I had saved a while back.Leopardi is a proto-Nietzschean>For the ancients (and so too for children and “native peoples”), everything turns on the naive belief in the identity between corporeality and the external world, in the efficacy of action, in the genuineness of expression, because they believed in the objective reality of things: sensations, images, institutions, rituals, and words are real for them, because these apprehensions and practices have not been submitted to the rule of Reason, “the true mother and cause of nothingness” (Z 2942), which destroys the basis of experience. There is no doubt that when Leopardi speaks of the ancients, he is thinking primarily of Greece, or better still, of an archaic Greece, still uncorrupted by Platonic intellectualism. For according to Leopardi, Rome in the first century BCE is already the victim of that excess of civilization and of philosophy that produces the internal barbarism of every people (Z 22, 161, 274), as Brutus and Cicero demonstrate.>For Leopardi, experiencing one’s own body is a privileged point of access to knowledge. His enfeebled constitution, by intensifying his constant self-observation, and his tendency to hypochondria are key to an interpretation of the world that negates an idealistic or spiritual perspective of any kind. Man for Leopardi is first and foremost an animal, and his history is merely the last section of the much more ancient history of all living species, which in their turn are an integral part of the entire ecological system.>He begins with the supposition that ideas and feelings, modifications of thought and changes of state of mind, all depend on the body and are body (Z 1719, 2455, 3202–206). Leopardi shares the sensistic principle of the correspondence between the physical and the moral (Cabanis), and adopts the critique of innate ideas that is present in Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, the translation of which Leopardi had read in 1821 (...) In 1827 he will claim, in opposition to the spiritualism then prevalent, that “matter thinks”.
>>25537620Do you have a link/reference to the Italian version.Btw, that statue of his in the main square of Recanati is just about the ugliest thing they could have dedicated to him.
How much popular is he in Italy?
>>25535935I always assumed he was a more literary and less philosophical figure but who knows.
>>25536023who are you calling a golem, greaseball?
>>25538432he is "studied in school" kind of popularprobably the third most known author after Dante and Manzonibtw you should absolutely read his "Small moral works" and "Canti" before the Zibaldone, they are much more approachable (and better imo)
Can we discuss Julio Cabrera? He's the best pessimistic philosopher (after schophenaur).
>>25537164"weak in body but strong in spirit" is the reading that gets him wrong, and it's the exact move the Zibaldone was written to kill. he wasn't a gloomy guy with a good line. he was the one person in the canon who refused to let a mood stand in for a thought.
>>25537620>Do you have a link/reference to the Italian version.This is the preface to the English edition, so no. If you refer to the notation which reference passages. it should be the same across all editions.>Btw, that statue of his in the main square of Recanati is just about the ugliest thing they could have dedicated to him.I think he looks alright. Leopardi was ugly himself, he has a poem about being rejected for his appearance iirc. But here's another Leopardi.
>>25539291>>25537695
I went hiking for the firsr time this year. An Italian girl stopped me to ask for directions, then asked me what I knew about Italy. I couldn't think of anything so I said Geocamo Leopaldi. She couldn't believe it, and it turned out she was from his region of Italy and had visited his home numerous times. About a minute later her "friend" turned up, a guy, and she said something in Italian and mentioned Leopaldi. He just said "okay" as in "so what" and I just walked away. Fucking normies.
>>25539291>This is the preface to the English editionMy bad, I read the first line without glasses and I thought it was a translation of one of the Zibaldone's entries.>I think he looks alright. Leopardi was ugly himself, he has a poem about being rejected for his appearance iirc. Uhm, maybe I'm just really salty about how "Recanatesi" portray him in general. As someone who grew up in Recanati, you'd think we'd kiss the ground he walked on, since he's the only reason anyone knows that city. Instead everyone just parrots the same malignant banalities about him -- "he was a pessimist because he was ugly"-tier. I mean, the guy was clearly not an Adonis, but to *only* focus on his physical aspect just proves that his complaints about us being a bunch of simpletons were, in fact, right.As for that statue specifically, they could have at least had him look up. There's so many evenings where there's a full moon and the sky is full of stars, yet he keeps staring down at the cobblestones -- completely out of character if you ask me :P
>>25535935Leopardi is in some respects the Schopenhauer Schopenhauer might have become had he taken Kant’s prohibition on speculative knowledge of the thing-in-itself more seriously. Schopenhauer thinks he has found a passage behind representation and can identify the inner nature of the world as Will. He is wrong and so will everyone be until they swallow the Kantpill. Leopardi does not need the manoeuvre. The phenomenal world really is already bad enough. The case against existence can be made entirely from what appears. There is no aesthetic cope cosmic Will endlessly devouring itself. There is simply nature, producing organisms whose continued existence requires the destruction of other organisms, furnishing them with desires it cannot finally satisfy, and remaining perfectly indifferent to the happiness of any of them. In the Dialogue between Nature and an Icelander, Nature describes the circuit in which destruction sustains production, and the Icelander asks the annihilating question: if everything suffers and dies so that something else may live, whom does the system benefit? The dialogue answers by having starving lions eat him and thereby survive another day. It is de Maistre’s universe after the death of God. It is sacrifice without expiation, victims without guilt, an altar with nobody behind it, and it is fucking hilarious. De Maistre too is a copium addict. He looks at blood, predation, sacrifice, and suffering and sees the dark economy of Providence. The victim suffers within an intelligible order. Blood has metaphysical purchasing power. Leopardi leaves the blood where it is and removes the Providence, which is a spook invention. All of the other hacks need to and can still tell you what suffering ultimately means. Leopardi increasingly suspects that asking what the universe means is itself the cope. His “garden of suffering” makes the point beautifully. Look casually and you see fertility, colour, abundance, and life. Look closely enough and every organism is being scorched, eaten, wounded, crowded, cut, or consumed. Nature does not conceal horror beneath beauty. Nature’s horror is one of the processes by which the beauty is produced. And yet Leopardi does not end with the adolescent conclusion that, therefore, nothing matters. La ginestra has a peculiar moral grandeur to it. Once Providence has gone, other human beings matter more, not less. We are the creatures in the machine who can recognise what is happening to one another. His answer to cosmic indifference is human solidarity, and I think is what in the end makes this gloomball so fucking loveable.
>>25539410>Once Providence has gone, other human beings matter more, not less. We are the creatures in the machine who can recognise what is happening to one another. His answer to cosmic indifference is human solidarity, and I think is what in the end makes this gloomball so fucking loveableWas Leopardi a socialist?
>>25540722It is not always easy to discern his ideal politics, because he was not really a political thinker (kind of like Nietzsche). He gives us an ethics. He couldn't be a socialist because he did not believe in the progress of Mankind. Nature itself was the true oppressor of Mankind. On the one hand he was a democratic, anti-clerical, republican who wanted an independent italy, but on the other hand his "social catena", which, if anything, is an ethical imperative, went beyond national boundaries. Ultimately, as he himself confessed in a letter to Giovan Pietro Vieusseux dated 4 March 1826>"In my eyes, men are what they are by nature...Therefore, you may be certain that in matters of social philosophy I am a complete ignoramus..."
>>25539410I've always considered his pessimism, from what little I've read, to be a more honest pessimism. I like the observation of "yeah, what the thing is, idgaf, I think we've seen enough. idk if good is a thing but what we're party to is definitely not it."Connects nicely to Zapffe, who doesn't need to perceive the sublime object to intuit shits fucked.
>>25538560He's more popular than Calvino, Eco, Pirandello? I doubt it.
>>25545448By what metric? Time spent studying in school, he beats all of them combined 10 times. I think most people would also be able to at least quote the first line of the Infinito.
>>25535935Where do you start with him?Is there a recommended translation of his work? And, how complicated is the language in there? Could another Romance speaker brave it with the help of a dictionary or would it be too hard?
why didnt anyone tell him to cheer up?
>>25536023>wawawa life is meaninglessgolem behavior
>>25539410I like your style, anon. Where would you recommend starting with Leopardi? Do you have other favorites? Anyway, here's a painting by Henri Rousseau. Every time I see it I think of Schopenhauer's work and the orgiastic violence of Nature you discussed in your post
>>25545709I'd personally skip his classicising stuff, it's impressive that he wrote them so young but they are hardly what he got famous for. Everything he wrote after his Sappho poem is imo worth reading and much easier to read, so if you get a bilingual side-by-side version you might be able to follow along, if you are a Romance speaker as you say.
>>25535935Sounds based. Thank you for sharing!
>>25545684If you ask random Italians in the street and ask them to cite three writers/poets they know, wouldn’t people say mostly Dante, Eco, Pirandello, Petrarca, Boccaccio?
>>25545448>>25546866>EcoI think foreigners overestimate his popularity in Italy, at least compared to other authors. He's barely studied in schools.Meanwhile everyone here knows Leopardi and L'infinito, because they're cornerstones of education.
>>25546866>If you ask random Italians in the street and ask them to cite three writers/poets they knowI bet most people would answer Dante, Manzoni, and Leopardi (in order of decreasing popularity). As >>25547712 pointed out, we don't really study Eco in schools. The most recent author we study in high school is usually Calvino, and even then plenty of teachers just stop at the early 20th century.
>>25535970Any books similar to zibaldone? I just love books that are compilations of miscellaneous information. I've also read the arcades project, and that's a good one.
>>25546169Do you suggest any order in particular?
>>25548173His most famous work is by far the Canti, which includes all of the poetry published in his lifetime (as I said above, feel free to skip anything before L'ultimo canto di Saffo, and read everything else in order, as they should be arranged chronologically).His other masterpiece is the Operette morali (which are philosophical dialogues in prose). I personally like them better than the Canti, but the latter is what everyone thinks of when they think of Leopardi.Those are the major works he actually wrote for publication. People who are really hardcore into him end up reading the Zibaldone, his letters, etc, but you wouldn't want to *start* there.
>>25535959Fpbp
