The Unhappiest Man or Why You Are Never Going To Be Happy In The Present According To Giacomo Leopardi
An excerpt from the “Dialogue Between An Almanac Seller And A Passer-by”
“The unhappy person is one who has his ideal, the content of his life, the fullness of his consciousness, the essence of his being, in some manner outside of himself. He is always absent, never present to himself. But it is evident that it is possible to be absent from one’s self either in the past or the future” — Soren Kierkegaard
Although he is known primarily for his poems (Canti in Italian), which are considered some of the most beautiful in the history of literature, Giacomo Leopardi produced a body of philosophical work that has long been overshadowed by the former.
The Small Moral Works (Operette Morali) and the Miscellaneous Thoughts on Philosophy and Literature (Zibaldone di Pensieri) contain the author’s main ideas about happiness, pleasure, love, hope, nature, which are also central themes in the Canti.
Leopardi was a romantic poet marked by radical pessimism. For Leopardi “happiness is absurd and impossible, but can seem lovable in its deceptive apparitions; pleasure is only a vain ghost; hope inspires pleasant imaginations even if it has no basis; love is a rare miracle that can give man the only real happiness, though short-lived; nature is indifferent or hostile to men, who anyway feel fascinated by natural beauty” (Mario Furbini).
His existential reflections anticipated themes and ideas that were later found in Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, with the latter referring to him as his “spiritual Italian brother”.
His Small Moral Works consists (in its final form) of a series of twenty-four innovative dialogues and fictional essays treating a variety of themes: the relationship of mankind with history and nature, the comparison with the values of the past and the degenerated situation of the present, illusions, glory and boredom.
What is fascinating about Leopardi’s dialogues is not only his comical, wit, humorous style, but also his ability to condense many different concepts in a short hit and answer between the protagonists.
A good example of this is the Dialogue Between An Almanac Seller And A Passer-by, only a few pages long yet rich with existential thoughts, such as the role of expectations in making human beings unhappy and the idea that pleasure only lies in the future and never in the present.
An almanac seller is shouting “New almanacs! New almanacs! Calendars! Almanacs for the new year?”
A passer-by stops him and asks him whether he thinks this New Year will be a happy one. The almanac seller replies that this coming year will sure be happier than the year before and the one before that.
“Why? Should you not like the New Year to resemble one of the past years?”, asks the passer-by.
Almanac seller: “No, Sir, I should not.”
Passer-by: “Do you not remember any particular year which you thought a happy one?”
Almanac seller: “Indeed I do not, Sir.”
Passer-by: “And yet life is a fine thing, is it not?”
Almanac Seller: “So they say.”
The passer by then asks the almanac seller if, since life is considered a fine thing, he would not like to live all over again the life he had already lived, with all its pleasures and sufferings.
“I should not like that”, responds the almanac seller.
The two then argue that this condition is inherent in all human beings, whether a prince or the passer-by himself, and conclude that no one would wish to repeat the same life over again.
Leopardi explains his view on the matter in a passage contained in the Zibaldone di Pensieri.
“That everyone believes our life consists of more pain than pleasure, more ill than good, is demonstrated by this experiment. I asked many people whether they would be happy to relive their life over again, on condition that they relived it exactly as they had done before. I have often asked myself the same question. As for starting over again, I and everyone else would be very happy, but no one would do so on that condition; rather than agree to that, everyone answered (as I did to myself) that they [..] would want to place themselves blindly in the hands of fortune in the way that their life was to be lived again, and not know how it would be, in the same way as we are unaware what will happen to us for the rest of our life. What does this mean? It means that in the life that we have lived, and which we know, all of us have certainly experienced more ill than good; and that if we are happy, and we still desire to live, this is only because we are ignorant about the future, and have an illusion of hope, without which illusion and ignorance we would no longer wish to live, as we would not wish to relive our life in the same way as we have already lived it.” (Zibaldone [4284])
The source of this disappointment is to be found in the human tendency to build expectations that more often than not do not match reality (more on this here). The only solution for human beings is therefore to hope for the unexpected.
Passer-by: “Then what life would you like?”
Almanac seller: “Such one as God would give me without any conditions.”
Passer-by: “A life at hap-hazard, and of which you would know nothing beforehand, as you know nothing about the New Year?”
Almanac seller: “Exactly.”
“This life, which is such a fine thing, is not the life we are acquainted with, but that of which we know nothing; it is not the past life, but the future”, concludes the passer-by.
Once again, a more direct explanation is found in the Zibaldone.
“The reason the unexpected and casual good is more pleasurable than one that is expected is that the latter suffers comparison with what had been imagined beforehand, and since the imagined good is a hundredfold better than the real thing, it is inevitable that the latter pales and seems like almost nothing. Unlike the unexpected good, which loses nothing of whatever real value it has by reason of an unfavorable comparison.” (Zibaldone [73])
If reality is always inferior to imagination, and if therefore pleasure is to be found in the unexpected, then it follows that pleasure can only be found in the future, as the unexpected is by definition something that can only happen in the future.
“Human pleasure can be said to lie always in the future, to be only in the future, to consist purely in the future. The act of pleasure, strictly speaking, never takes place. I look forward to some pleasure and this hope is called pleasure. I have felt pleasure; I have had a stroke of good luck. This is pleasurable only in that it gives us a positive idea of the future, offers promise of some lesser or greater enjoyment, opens up a new field of hope, convinces us that we are capable of enjoyment, tells us of the possibility of attaining certain desires [..]. I feel some pleasure. How? Each individual moment of the act of pleasure is relative to the moments that follow, and it is pleasurable only in relation to the moments that come after, that is, to the future.” (Zibaldone [532–533])
Conclusion
According to Leopardi, no one would want to live their life all over again exactly as it was. This is because human beings have all felt more pain than joy as a result of the fact that reality is always less pleasurable than expectations.
If someone is to find pleasure, they need to aim for the unexpected, and therefore the belief in Leopardi that pleasure was a thing only attainable in the future.
Leopardi’s breath and depth of thought, as well as his style, make him one of my favorite philosophers.
However, some of his philosophical constructs — just like any philosophical construct — are debatable.
As a pessimist, Leopardi destroys everything, condemns everything, but wishes to save love from the universal miasma and protect it as the last resort that nullifies the awareness of human unhappiness. Love is a rare miracle that can give man happiness, although short lived. The more desolate the solitude which surrounds him, the more tightly he grasps onto love as the faith in his idealized, illusory, eternal woman who placates suffering, disillusion and bitterness.
Leopardi was capable of conceiving love, to describe its beauty and ardor, to dedicate beautiful words to the women that are the subject of some of his poems.
Nevertheless, he never actually experienced love, he was never loved back by the women he dedicated his poems too. He was segregated in his family palace to become an erudite (“mad and most desperate studies”, he would later recall) and developed several physical illnesses that denied him youth’s simplest pleasures, something that inevitably marked his pessimism.
Had he been able to love, to experience love in practice, in that very moment, in the act of loving and being loved back, would he have still been of the opinion that pleasure and happiness only reside in the future? Or would he have thought “In this very moment, no matter how fleeting, I feel pleasure, I am happy”?
In a letter written in 1832, Leopardi would say “[..] It is because of the cowardice of men, who need to be persuaded of the value of existence, that my philosophical opinions have been interpreted as the result of my private sufferings, and that they persist in attributing to my material circumstances what should only be attributed to my intellect.”
I still have my doubts.
