I have praised Italy over France because it did not give up its ancient language, and wanted it made up out of five centuries rather than just one. But I would condemn it outright if, in order to preserve the ancient language, it meant to give up the modern one. For if the ancient is useful, the modern is necessary.引自 Zibaldone
We tend to say that the human mind owes very much, indeed most of all, to the extraordinary geniuses and discoverers who crop up now and again. I believe that it owes them very little, and that the progress of the human spirit is principally the work of average minds.
A rare intellect, having received the lights peculiar to his own age from his contemporaries, presses ahead and takes ten steps forward. The world laughs, persecutes him if need be, and excommunicates him.
Meanwhile, the average minds, in part aided by the discoveries of that great man, but above all by the natural course of things, and by virtue of their own reflections, take half a step. Others repeat the truths taught by them, since they are only slightly at odds with ones that are already received and readily admissible. The world, whether for this reason or by dint of the example set by many, follows them.
He is either already forgotten, or the prevailing opinion regarding him still endures, or finally the world does him no justice, because it finds that it already knows all that he knew, that it has learned it by other means, and does not believe that it owes him anything. And indeed there is not much that it does owe him.
The world is already his equal, will very soon be his superior, and perhaps is so at present, because time has had every opportunity to further develop and confirm his doctrines.引自 Zibaldone
Someone who does not have nor has ever had imagination, feeling, a capacity for enthusiasm, heroism, vivid and great illusions, strong and varied passions, someone who is not acquainted with the vast system of beauty, who does not read or hear, who has never read or heard the poets, absolutely cannot be a great, true, and perfect philosopher. On the contrary, he will never be anything but a half-philosopher, shortsighted, unable to take things in at a glance, short of insight, no matter how diligent, patient, and subtle, and dialectical and mathematical he may be. He will never know the truth, he will be persuaded of, and will prove by means of plausible evidence, things that are utterly false, etc. etc.
Not because the heart and the imagination speak the truth more often than cold reason does, as is asserted, which I don’t intend to go into, but because cold reason itself needs to know all these things if it is to penetrate the system of nature and unravel it.
The science of nature is simply a science of relationships. The progress of our mind consists entirely of discovering such relationships. Now, aside from the fact that the imagination is the most fertile and marvelous discoverer of the most hidden relationships and harmonies, as I have said elsewhere [→Z 1650], it is obvious that someone who is ignorant of a part, or rather a property, an aspect of nature that is bound up with any and every thing that can serve as an object of reasoning, is ignorant of an infinity of relationships, and hence cannot help but reason badly, see falsely, discover imperfectly, fail to see the most important, the most necessary, and even the most obvious things.
Reason needs imagination and the illusions that reason destroys, truth needs falsehood, essence needs appearance, the most perfect insensitivity needs the most intense sensitivity, ice needs fire, patience needs impatience, powerlessness needs supreme power, the very small needs the very large, geometry and algebra need poetry, etc.引自 Zibaldone
Nowadays a poet, novelist, etc., would be jeered at, wouldn’t they, not just in France but in any part of the civilized world, if they chose the subject of pederasty or introduced it in any way? [...] Now, the most refined nation in the world, Greece, introduced it into its mythology (Ganymede), wrote very elegant poems on this subject, between woman and woman (Sappho), between a grown man and a youth (Anacreon), etc. etc., made it the subject of rhetorical or philosophical disputes or treatises (Fronto’s first Greek epistle), spoke of it in the most noble tales with the same ease as when one speaks of love between man and woman, etc. Indeed, it may be said that the whole of Greek erotic poetry, philosophy, and philology revolves chiefly around pederasty, with the love of women being held by the Greeks to be too vulgar, sensual, base, banal, unworthy of poetry, etc., precisely because it was natural.
The much-vaunted Platonic love (so sublimely expressed in the Phaedrus) is none other than pederasty. All the noble feelings that love inspired in the Greeks, all their feeling regarding love, whether in practice or in texts, are simply about pederasty, and, in the writings of women (as in Sappho’s famous ode, or fragment, φαίνεται), love of a woman for a woman.
And Virgil, the most circumspect not only of the ancient poets, but of all poets, and perhaps of all writers, certainly the most refined and elegant of any who ever wrote, he, so shrewd, so particular, and a very model of refinement and exquisite good taste, in an era in which, etc. etc., adapted and applied sentiment to the infamous fact of pederasty and made of it the subject of a sentimental tale in his Nisus and Euryalus.引自 Zibaldone
One might suspect that the sudden explosion of this topic [pederasty] in the Zibaldone may betoken a glimpse of self-awareness. What we can say is that, much later, “Leopardi’s letters to Antonio Ranieri, the companion with whom he spent most of the last seven years of his life, are the most personal… dramatic and fascinating documents of the Epistolario. Yet they are either passed over in embarrassed silence, or glossed with apologetic euphemism… Nowhere else is Leopardi so direct, so unguarded, so passionate. He dispenses entirely with his customary reticence, and writes from the heart, obsessively repeating a single message: that he misses Ranieri and cannot live without him.” (Kathleen Baldwin, Ambivalence, Dissimulation and Self-Censorship in the Letters of Giacomo Leopardi, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Birmingham, 2004, pp. 355–67.)引自 Zibaldone
But these Germans—in whom imagination and feeling (speaking in general) is all the more false, forced, unnatural, and weak in itself, the more intense and extreme it appears to be (for this extreme character plainly derives from a cause in them contrary to that involved in the case of the Orientals, whose climate is the exact opposite of theirs); these Germans whose mind, as Staël says (De l’Allemagne, tome 1, first part, ch. 9, 3rd ed., p. 79) “is almost null on the surface, needs to go deeper in order to understand, grasps nothing at first glance” [...] have certainly developed no small number of truths discovered by others, have brought clarity to many obscure matters, and have discovered not a few and not insignificant secondary truths.
[...]But what great discovery, especially in metaphysics, has so far issued from the many German schools, etc. etc.?
[...]The eye cast by Germans into abstract matters is itself never entirely sure, although it is very free (and it can never be free without a great capacity to imagine, to feel, and without a natural mastery of nature, which only great souls have). Minute, refined analysis is not the same as seeing at a glance and never discovers a major point of nature, the center of a great system, the key, the mainspring, the entire workings of a great machine. So it is that the Germans are excellent at shedding the greatest possible light, extending, polishing, perfecting, applying, etc., already discovered truths (and this is a large part of the philosopher’s task), but few of them are capable of finding new and great truths on their own account.
[...]The Germans’ imagination (generally speaking), because it is not very natural, not very much their own, and in a way is artificial and fabricated, and hence false though very lively, does not have that spontaneous correspondence and harmony with nature which is characteristic of imaginations derived and fashioned from nature itself. (The same is true of feeling.) Consequently, it warps their vision and causes them to dream. And when a German sets out to speculate and to pronounce, to build a great system by himself, make a major innovation in philosophy, or in some special part of it, I venture to say he will usually go wild.
The Germans always fawn at the feet of the truth, only rarely do they grasp it with a firm hand. They follow it tirelessly through all the mazes of this labyrinth of nature, while a man on fire with enthusiasm, feeling, fantasy, genius, and even great illusions, placed on a high eminence, discerns at a glance the whole labyrinth, and the truth, which, though fleeting, cannot be hidden from him. After he has communicated his knowledge and new findings to philosophers like the Germans, the latter help him greatly to describe and perfect the design of the labyrinth by considering it carefully inch by inch.
I have said that no genuinely resounding discovery of an abstract kind, and in [1857] any immaterial doctrine, ever issued from the German schools, etc. What do the great discoveries of Leibniz, perhaps Germany’s greatest metaphysician, and certainly a very profound speculative thinker respecting nature, a great mathematician, etc., amount to in this regard? Monads, optimism, preestablished harmony, innate ideas. Fables and daydreams. What do those of Kant, the leader of a school, etc. etc.? I believe that no one knows, not even his disciples.引自 Zibaldone
Z1850-1857
以及德国浪漫主义
Through their profound speculations regarding the general theory of the arts, the Germans have recently given us the romance of Romanticism, a system utterly false in theory, in practice, in nature, in reason, in metaphysics, in dialectics, as shown in several of these thoughts.引自 Zibaldone
Z1857
但是（Note on Z1857）：
Leopardi’s hostility toward German philosophy was commented on a few years after his death by G. H. Lewes, “Life and Works of Leopardi,” p. 663 (B9). Leopardi’s knowledge, however, was superficial and almost entirely secondhand, being derived for the most part from Madame de Staël, and from articles in the Biblioteca Italiana and the Spettatore, which often contained dismissive judgments on Leibniz and Kant. There is thus no reason to suppose that Leopardi had (or ever would) read Kant, although he was certainly familiar with Staël’s account in De l’Allemagne (part 3, ch. 6ff.) where she depicted Kant as a “spiritualist” philosopher, at odds with the materialists (see, e.g., the review of Destutt de Tracy cited in the note to Z 1235, where Plato’s and Kant’s abstruse “delirium” is opposed to Aristotle, seen as a precursor of sensationalism). Later on, in 1825, he cited from the Italian translation (Storia della filosofia moderna, 12 vols., Milan 1821–1825) of J. G. Buhle’s Geschichte der neueren Philosophie. See Cellerino (B12). There is the same lack of sources with regard to the German Romantics. On a similar reception of German culture in England in the 1820s see Z 106, note 1, and the section on Staël in David Simpson, Romanticism, Nationalism and the Revolt Against Theory, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993.
The system known by the name of Copernicus could be regarded as a great discovery and innovation, even as regards metaphysics. Yet it is well known that this German, with his profound and lengthy meditations, simply cultivated and placed on a sound footing, etc., a truth already known or imagined by the Pythagoreans, Aristarchus of Samos, by the Cardinal of Cusa, etc. That’s what the Germans know how to do.引自 Zibaldone
Why is Ovid’s style weak, and so not very pleasing, although he is a very faithful painter of objects, and a determined and keen hunter of images? Because his images come from an abundance of words and lines, which give rise to the image only after a long circuitous path; and so there is little or nothing simultaneous about him, for the spirit is led, instead, to see objects little by little, through their parts. Why is Dante’s style the strongest that could ever be conceived, and therefore the most pleasurable and beautiful possible? Because every word is an image, etc. etc. 引自 Zibaldone
Z2042-2043
参见Z21
That’s why Ovid, who depicts nature without naturalness, that is, who pursues those objects to such an extent that in the end he presents them to us, and even enables us to see and touch and feel them, but only after infinite labor on his part (so that he needs a page to show us what Dante shows us in a terzina), and with more tenacity than efficacy, soon becomes tiresome and, what’s more, unpleasing, because he is unable to conceal his art, and with so much circling around the objects (not only because of rash intemperance and restlessness but also because he is unable to describe the figure without a lot of details, and if he were not lengthy he would not be clear) he displays diligence, and diligence in poets is the opposite of naturalness.引自 Zibaldone
Swiftness and rapidity also in speech, in pronunciation, etc., is pleasurable. It is very pleasing to hear Venetian women speak, because of the material rapidity of their speech, because they have an inexhaustible supply of words, because their speed doesn’t lead them to stumble, etc., that is, in spite of the velocity of their pronunciation and their speech, they do not stumble.引自 Zibaldone
[...] often someone who as a youth was by habit or nature conspicuously poetic becomes (even in youth itself) more quickly and strongly prosaic with experience. One excess attracts another, because, contrary to what at first glance appears to be the case, excesses are more alike, familiar, and closely related to one another than to what is in the middle. Someone who has a lively poetic spirit and feels intensely must quickly and intensely feel the vanity and the evil of men and things. He becomes intensely disillusioned, because he was capable of intense illusions, and, in fact, had such illusions. Before the recognition he has strong illusions, after the recognition strong, and prompt, and firm, and complete disillusionment. The very strength of his nature, or of his acquired faculties, which gave prominence and energy to his illusions, gives the same qualities to his disillusionment.
And so the old age of the poet is perhaps (or at least very often) much more prosaic in all senses than that of the man whose original nature is cold, and the more so the more keenly and truly poetic in any sense his youth was [...]引自 Zibaldone
We know that the chorus had a large part to play in ancient drama, and that much has been said for and against its use. [...] Modern drama has banished it, and everything modern was well served by its banishment.
I regard this use as part of that vagueness, that indefiniteness which is the principal cause of the charme of ancient poetry and fine literature. The individual is always a paltry thing, and often an ugly, often a contemptible one. The beautiful and the great need indefiniteness, and this indefiniteness can only be brought on to the stage by bringing on the multitude. Everything that stems from the multitude is respectable, though it is composed of wholly contemptible individuals. The public, the people, antiquity, ancestors, posterity—great and beautiful terms, because they represent an indefinite idea.
In the ancient dramas the maxims of justice, virtue, heroism, compassion, patriotism were spoken by the chorus, that is to say, an indefinite and often unnamed multitude, since the poet did not in any way declare which persons his chorus was supposed to consist of.
[...] The sound of its voice was not that of human individuals, it was a music, a harmony. In the intervals of the performance this unknown, unnamed actor, this multitude of mortals, began to make profound or sublime reflections on the events that had taken or would take place before the spectator’s eyes, bewailed the sufferings of humanity, sighed, cursed vice, avenged innocence and virtue, the sole revenge permitted them in this world, that is, the public and posterity’s execration of the oppressors of the innocent and the virtuous; exalted heroism, paid tribute to the benefactors of men, to the blood shed for the homeland.
This was tantamount to establishing a connection on the stage between the real world and the ideal and moral world [...]
Events were represented by individuals; feelings, reflections, passions, and the effects they produced or were expected to produce in persons placed outside such events were represented by the multitude, by a kind of ideal being. This latter undertook to gather together and express the benefit to be derived from the example of such events. And there was a sense in which the audience came in order to hear the selfsame feelings which the performance inspired in them, represented in the same way on the stage, and they saw themselves transported as it were on to the stage in order to play their part; or imitated by the chorus, just as much as the heroes were imitated or represented by the individual actors.引自 Zibaldone
