Voetnoot bij de Nederlandse Tweede Kamer Verkiezing

Naar aanleiding van het verschijnen van de eerste volledige vertaling van Giacomo Leopardi’s filosofische teksten wees de prominente Britse politiek filosoof John Gray in het Britse politiek en cultureel tijdschrift de New Statesman van 26 september 2013:

The frail and sickly poet was also a thinker of intrepid bravery who produced one of the most unsparing critiques of modern ideals. Crucially, this was the work of a quintessentially modern mind — one that looked to the bottom of modern civilization and found there nothing but conceit and illusion. An anthropologist of modernity, Leopardi stood outside the beliefs of the modern age. He could never take seriously the faith in progress: the notion that civilization gradually improves over time. He knew that civilizations come and go and that some are better than others — but they are not stations on a long march to a better world. ‘Modern civilization must not be considered simply as a continuation of ancient civilization, as its progression… These two civilizations, which are essentially different, are and must be considered as two separate civilizations.’

https://www.newstatesman.com/books/2013/09/barbarism-reason 

Op 21 maart 1826 schreef de Italiaanse dichter Leopardi: 

Modern civilization must not be considered simply as a continuation of ancient civilization, as its progression… logically speaking, these two civilizations, which are essentially different, are and must be considered as two separate civilizations, or rather two different and distinct species of civilization, each actually complete in itself… it is almost impossible, as it is to find two faces perfectly the same, although all are born in the same way, to find in any two peoples (or in any two periods of time) without a highly intimate relation between them, the same civilization, and not two distinct species. 

John Gray:

His sympathies lay with the ancients, whose way of life he believed was more conducive to human happiness. A product of the increase of knowledge, the modern world is driven by the pursuit of truth; yet this passion for truth, Leopardi suggests, is a by-product of Christianity. Before Christianity disrupted and destroyed the ancient pagan cults with its universal claims, human beings were able to rest content with their local practices and illusions. ‘Mankind was happier before Christianity than after it,’ he writes.

Christianity was a reaction against corrosive doubt, a condition that took hold partly as a result of the habit of skeptical inquiry inculcated by philosophy: ‘What was destroying the world was the lack of illusions. Christianity saved it, not because it was the truth but because it was a new source of illusion.’ This new illusion came in the form of a claim to truth that all the world had to accept: an inordinate demand that with the rise of the Enlightenment shifted to science, which has become a project aiming to dissolve the dreams in which humanity has hitherto lived. The result is modern nihilism — the perception that human beings are an insignificant accident in a scheme of things that cares nothing for them or their values — and a host of rackety (luidruchtige. svh) creeds promising some kind of secular salvation.

https://www.newstatesman.com/books/2013/09/barbarism-reason 

Het is dit wanhopig verlangen naar ‘een of andere wereldse verlossing’ die deze week ertoe heeft geleid dat de liberalen in de neoliberale regering, die twee maanden geleden vanwege het toeslagen-schandaal moesten aftreden en zowel betrokken waren bij het steunen van terroristen in Syrië als het doden of verminken van burgers in het Midden-Oosten, de Tweede Kamerverkiezing wonnen. Dit resultaat toonde andermaal aan dat ondanks de werkelijkheid de elite dankzij de propaganda van haar ‘corporate press’ en de staatsomroep haar macht kan vergroten. Centraal in deze farce staat het feit dat de mens niet zonder illusies kan. Speciaal voor degenen die geloven in de Vooruitgangsideologie citeer ik nogmaals John Gray:

Leopardi’s account of the paradoxical process whereby a Christian will to truth gave birth to nihilism has much in common with Nietzsche’s — an affinity that the fiery German thinker recognized. Here as elsewhere, Nietzsche was following a path opened up by Schopenhauer, who wrote that it was a tragedy that the world’s three great pessimists — ‘Byron, Leopardi and myself’ — were in Italy at the same time but never met. (I’m not sure that a meeting between Leopardi and Schopenhauer would have been a success. Unlike Schopenhauer, who lamented the human lot, Leopardi believed that the best response to life is laughter.)

What fascinated Schopenhauer, along with many later writers, was Leopardi’s insistence that illusion is necessary to human happiness. Matthew Arnold, A E Housman, Herman Melville, Thomas Hardy, Fernando Pessoa (who wrote a poem about the Italian poet) and Samuel Beckett were all stirred by his suggestion that human fulfillment requires a tolerance of illusion that is at odds with both Christianity and modern science. A version of the same thought informs the work of Wallace Stevens, perhaps the greatest 20th-century English-language poet, who saw the task of poetry as being the creation of fictions by which human beings can live.

Unlike philosophers today, Leopardi aims to do more than provide a comforting justification for the intuitions of well-meaning liberals. Just as much as Nietzsche, though much more soberly, he is a critic of modern ethics. Leopardi found the unthinking moral certainty of secular thinkers highly questionable, not least because of their hidden debts to Christianity. In an irony of which he was undoubtedly aware, this opponent of the Enlightenment ideal of reason was in many ways a child of the Enlightenment, not least because he shared the Enlightenment suspicion of Christianity.

Yet Leopardi’s resistance to Christianity was not simply, or even mainly, an intellectual objection to its theological claims. It was a moral objection, which applied equally to the secular successors of Christianity. He criticised Christianity not because he believed it to be untrue (he accepted that human beings cannot live without illusions) but because he saw the militant assertion of its truth as being harmful to civilization. The universalism of which Christianity and its humanist offshoots are so proud was, for Leopardi, an open-ended license for savagery and oppression.

Leopardi was emphatic in affirming the constancy of human nature and the existence of goods and evils that are universally human. He was far from being a moral relativist. What he rejected was the modern conceit that aims to turn these often conflicting values into a system of universal principles — a project that fails to comprehend the irresolvable contradictions of human needs. ‘No one understands the human heart at all,’ he wrote, ‘who does not understand how vast is its capacity for illusions, even when these are contrary to its interests, or how often it loves the very thing that is obviously harmful to it.’ Modern rationalists imagine they do not succumb to this quintessentially human need for illusion, but in reality they display it to the full.

Assessing the impact of Christianity on the ancient world, Leopardi notes that the more that universal principles are accepted as the basis of action, ‘the worse peoples and centuries prove to be.’ The crimes that Christians in the Middle Ages committed were ‘quite different, more horrible and more barbarous than those of antiquity.’ Long before the atrocities of the modern era, he perceived that such crimes, like those of the medieval Christians, emanated from belief, not passion. From late-19th-century imperialism to communism and the incessant wars launched in our time under the gaudy banner of democracy and human rights, the most barbarous kinds of violence have been promoted as rational means to achieving a higher civilization. Even the Nazis believed their crimes were based in reason: genocide and ‘scientific breeding’ would lead to a type of human being superior to any that had existed before. The barbarism of reason is the attempt to order the world on a more rational model. However, evangelists for reason are more driven by faith than they know and the result of attempting to impose their simpleminded designs on the world has been to add greatly to the evils to which human life is naturally prone.

Some will find Leopardi unsatisfying because he proposes no remedy for modern ills, but for me a part of his charm comes from how he has no gospel to sell. The Romantic movement turned to visions of natural harmony as an escape from the flaws of civilization. With his more penetrating intelligence, Leopardi understood that because human beings are spawned by natural processes, their civilisations share the ramshackle disorder of the natural world. Brought up by his father to be a good Catholic, he became a resolute atheist who admired ancient pagan religion; but because it was not possible to return to the more benign faiths of ancient times, he was friendly to Christianity in his own day, seeing it as the lesser of many evils: ‘Religion (far more favored and approved by nature than bye) is all we have to shore up the wretched and tottering edifice of present-day human life.’

Realizing that the human mind can decay even as human knowledge advances, Leopardi would not have been surprised by the stupefying banality and shallowness of current debates on belief and unbelief. He accepted that there is no remedy for the ignorance of those who imagine themselves to be embodiments of reason. Today’s evangelical rationalists lag far behind the understanding of the human world that he achieved in the early decades of the 19th century.

Yet it is hard to think of Leopardi being disconsolate because of this. Quietly dictating the closing lines of one of his most exquisite poems, ‘The Setting of the Moon,’ as he lay dying in Naples, he seems to have seen his short life as being complete in itself. On the evidence of this magnificent volume, he was not mistaken.

Ik citeer dit alles voor alle mensen die diep teleurgesteld zijn en zelfs geschokt over het gedrag van het Nederlandse volk deze week. Zoals Leopardi en Gray duidelijk maken: er bestaat ‘geen remedie tegen de onwetendheid van degenen die zichzelf verbeelden de belichaming te zijn van de rede.’ En daar zullen u en ik het mee moeten doen.