The Leopardian notion of desire is taken up by Schopenhauer pointing forward to Freud’s reflections on the unconscious. Schopenhauer specifically praises Leopardi:
no one has treated this subject [human desolation] so thoroughly and exhaustively as Leopardi in our own day. He is entirely imbued and penetrated with it;
everywhere his theme is the mockery and wretchedness of this existence. He presents it on every page of his works, yet in such a multiplicity of forms and applications, with such a wealth of imagery, that he never wearies us, but, on the
33 In many passages in the Zibaldone, Leopardi stated that the infinity for which our soul strives is not an
intellectual or spiritual entity but a physical one. Leopardi could sense that the contradiction lay in the dialectical essence of our nature. The desire for pleasure is a sign of our being part of nature (our physicality), whereas the need for infinity derives from the rational part of our being.
34 Edmund Burke’s essay “A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful” was in Leopardi’s library in the Italian translation, published in 1804 (see Bini; 155). An excellent study of the influence of the English thinkers in Leopardi’s concept of the Sublime is to be found in Perella’s Night and the Sublime in Giacomo Leopardi.
35 It is important to point out that the desire for the other in Leopardi does not imply transferring one’s
desire onto another subject because that would bring about moral death and in Leopardi the acceptance of the impossibility of happiness finds its scope in Beneficenza (Zibaldone 614, 2). The other is a limited human being and it is that same limit that channels the moral sensation of desire of the infinite. Concomitantly, however, the desire of the infinite, the desire of the absolute, typical of magnanimous subjects, requires illusions and dreams. This Romantic message annuls the Stoic teachings about control and limit. (It has to be stated, however, that in spite of what could be termed as his Romantic spirit, Leopardi repeatedly attacked Romantic writers. See Zibaldone 191,3 and also his essay “Discorso di un italiano sopra la poesia romantica”).
contrary, has a diverting and stimulating effect. (The World as Will and Representation 2: XLVI).36
In the period that spans from Schopenhauer to Freud the great project of Enlightenment runs aground on an obdurate core of desire (struggling against Will, as Schopenhauer would term it), which throws it alarmingly out of kilter. What appears as an already suspicious desire in Leopardi, becomes in Schopenhauer’s hands the blind, insatiably hankering Will which, like desire for Leopardi, is witnessed in the self and the world as embodied striving driven by lack: “desire lasts a long time and demands go on forever; fulfilment is brief and sparsely meted out. But even final satisfaction itself is only illusory.” (World as Will and Representation 1:219)
The world manifests itself to experience as a multiplicity of individual
objects−Schopenhauer calls this the objectivation of the will. The form of all cognition is the principle of sufficient reason, or the “principium individuationis” (1: 137).37
Schopenhauer associates the “levels of the will’s objectivation” to Plato’s Ideas which are “always being and never becoming” (1: 154-55). The will finds in the human being, as (Platonic) Idea, “its clearest and most perfect objectivation,” (1: 178). In a passage that Beckett clearly echoes in Proust, and that Leopardi equally clearly foreshadows, Schopenhauer describes human endeavour and desire as follows: 38
36In a note to his translation of “History in the Service and Disservice of Life,” the second of Friedrich
Nietzsche’s Unmodern Observations (otherwise translated as Untimely Meditations), Gary Brown writes: “Nietzsche, like Schopenhauer, felt intense admiration [for Leopardi’s poetry and prose]. Schopenhauer had seen in Leopardi the supreme contemporary poet of human unhappiness, and it was to Nietzsche . . . that Hans von Bulow . . . dedicated his translation of Leopardi into German . . . Of Leopardi Nietzsche remarked [in “We Classicists,” the last of the Unmodern Observations] that he was ‘the modern ideal of a classicist’ and one of ‘the last great followers of the Italian poet-scholars’ [“Richard Wagner in Bayreuth,” the fourth of the Unmodern Observations] . . . who, along with Merimée, Emerson, and Landor, could rightly be called ‘a master of prose’ [The Gay Science 92].” (93n-94n). See 2.4.
37 The will as thing in itself lies outside the province of the principle of sufficient reason, although each of
its appearances is entirely subject to this principle since it conditions the general form of all appearance; and human activities, like all other appearances, must be subject to it.
38
As to the invisible chord of sympathy between Beckett and Schopenhauer, the latter has long been recognized by criticism: “Beckett had a ‘sensed affinity’ with Schopenhauer; consequently emphasized the latter’s pessimism, artistic views and the role of the will” (Feldman, “Samuel Beckett’s Early
Always delud[ing] us into believing that their fulfilment is the final goal of willing; but as soon as they are attained they no longer look the same and thus are soon forgotten, grow antiquated and are really, if not admittedly, always laid to the side as vanished delusions; we are lucky enough when there is still something left to desire and strive after, to carry on the game of constantly passing from desire to satisfaction and from this to a new desire, a game whose rapid course is called happiness and slow course is called suffering, so that the game might not come to an end, showing itself to be fearful, life-destroying boredom, a wearied longing without a definite object, a deadening languor. (1: 188-89)
The world as ‘will’ can either be considered with respect to its affirmation or negation. The negation of the will and the role of art in this negation (see 2.3.2), 39 which is clearly prefigured by Leopardi’s atarassia tinged by souffrance and pre-announces Beckett’s suffering of being (see 2.1), still proves elusive to complete will-lessness and
desirelessness (see 2.3.2).40
In a clear foreshadowing of Freud, and an echo of the Eros-Thanatos dilemma at the heart of Leopardian poetics, Schopenhauer explains that the drive to reproduce is the most fundamental expression of the affirmation of the will to life: “ [the] ultimate purpose; the highest goal of life in the natural human being, as it is in the animal” (1:
39
The goal of art is “to arouse cognition of these Ideas through the presentation of particular things . . .– something that is possible only given a corresponding alteration in the subject of cognition” (1: 285). Schopenhauer insists: “the objective side of aesthetic spectatorship, the intuitive apprehension of the Platonic Idea always occurs simultaneously with and as a necessary correlate to this subjective side” (1: 223).
40 Negation of the will is, according to Schopenhauer, directly related to the feeling of the Burkean
Sublime, as is also one of the definitions Leopardi gives of noia (also see 1.2.1; 2.1; 3.2).Schopenhauer explains the difference between the beautiful and the sublime as follows: “what distinguishes the feeling of the sublime from the feeling of the beautiful is this: with the beautiful, pure cognition has won the upper hand without a struggle . . . With the sublime, on the other hand, that state of pure cognition is gained only by means of a conscious and violent tearing free from relationships between the same object and the will (relationships that are recognized as unfavourable) by means of a free and conscious elevation over the will and the cognition relating to it. This elevation must not only be achieved consciously, it must also be sustained and is therefore accompanied by a constant recollection of the will, although not of a particular, individual willing, such as fear or desire, but rather of human willing in general, to the extent that it is universally expressed through its objecthood, the human body” (1: 226).If the world as representation is the visibility of the will, then art is the clarification of this visibility. The thought of Schopenhauer on Will and desire and its relation to art is inherited by Friedrich Nietzsche, particularly in the early work The Birth
356). On the other hand, however, “from the same source . . . ultimately emerges also what I call the negation of the will to life” (1: 405). The latter is central to Asceticism, by which Schopenhauer understands the “deliberate breaking of the will by forgoing what is pleasant and seeking what is unpleasant” (1: 419). This disquieting dichotomy between the will to life and the negation of this will becomes crucial in Freudian drives discussed in Beyond the Pleasure Principle.