From the Impossible to the Imperative: Pleasure in the Thought of Leopardi and Nietzsche

In “Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben,” Nietzsche quotes Leopardi’s “A se stesso” as the creation of a dejected mind, ‘hypersaturated’ by knowledge. Leopardi’s philosophical conclusions are, according to Nietzsche, the dangerous consequence of the excessive pursuit of scientific and scholarly truth. This thesis discusses Leopardi’s theory of pleasure as the motivating force behind human action, and its implications for the idea of truth. It first attempts to show how this theory underlies his poetry as well as his prose works, and ultimately leads to the extreme pessimism of “A se stesso”. The thesis then argues that Nietzsche’s negative attitude towards factual truth is, at least in part, inherited from Leopardi himself, and explains how an analogous understanding of the role of pleasure and a radical skepticism towards a stoic system of morals is at the core of both of their works. On the basis of their nearly identical premises, this thesis aims to show how Nietzsche’s renowned theory of the superior individual may be understood as an attempt to resolve the philosophical impasse that underlies Leopardi’s late works.