Encountering Leopardi *

STEFANO GENSINI

In Augusto Ponzio’s long and productive scientific career, his encounter with
Giacomo Leopardi’s linguistic ideas has played an important role, from both
the semiotic and the political viewpoint. Ponzio is significantly among the
very first scholars to have become aware of the theoretical relevance of
Leopardi’s reflections on language as formulated in his Zibaldone (his intel-
lectual diary, which counts more than 4,526 pages and on which the poet
worked from 1817 to 1832). In his essay Plurilinguismo e pluridiscorsività in
Leopardi,1 Ponzio focuses on Leopardi’s doctrine according to which lan-
guages are governed by an inner principle of differentiation: hence,
plurilingualism does not simply depend on certain social and political circum-
stances, but even more on the close relationship between language and human
knowledge, which is of course made of intellect, but also of sensitivity, mem-
ory, imagination, ever changing experience. According to Leopardi, «the
history of languages» is thus «the history of the human mind» (Zib. 2591), in
all its complicated and unexpected expressions.
Drawing attention to some passages in which Leopardi articulates his
“general linguistics”, Ponzio rightly observes that his idea that «the diversity
of languages is natural and inevitable among men» (Zib. 936, our translation)
is one of the few “praises of Babel” which can be found in Western tradition.
Indeed, some sort of phobia for variety and changeability of language accom-
panies a large part of the history of thought and of literary culture. The
theoretical background which can be briefly referred to as “Cartesian”, and
which deeply influenced cognitivism from its very beginnings (good cases in
point are Chomsky and Fodor), has systematically searched for the universal
devices underpinning knowledge and language, and has neglected the reasons
of their variety in space and time. And if one reconsiders the theoretical paths
of logic empiricism in the 1990s until the more recent developments of the
analytical tradition, one can easily see that the historical dimension of lan-
guage, its being anchored (as Malinowski argued) to a “situational context”

*
Laura Centonze has prepared the first draft of the English version of this paper. Susan
Petrilli has read the final version and suggested useful stylistic corrections. I am very
grateful to both of them.
1 Zibaldone was critically edited in 1991 by Giuseppe Pacella in three volumes,

Garzanti, Milano. Ponzio’s essay to which I refer is to be found in Carlo Ferrucci

(ed.), Leopardi e il pensiero moderno, Feltrinelli, Milano 1989, pp.37-49. My ideas
about Leopardi as a philosopher of language have been expressed in Linguistica
leopardiana, Il Mulino, Bologna 1984.

187
188 STEFANO GENSINI

and thus resistant to any formalist account, has represented a disturbing ele-
ment and not a philosophical problem to deal with.
In his essay, Ponzio often refers to Bakhtin, a strategic thinker thanks to
his special philosophical perspective: as a matter of fact, not a few analogies
can be seen between the linguistic theory of the latter (to whom very little
attention has been paid sofar by the “mainstream” philosophy of language)
and Leopardi’s view of language and signs. I would like to suggest that the
subjectivity of the linguistic experience is the common thread between these
two thinkers who remain, under other respects, very distant from each other,
and not just chronologically. The concept of subjectivity as an inner element
(and not only an external one, in terms of performance) of the linguistic prax-
is was new and original in Leopardi’s times, when the overwhelming
rhetorical-grammatical tradition entailed an underestimation of the role played
by language in the process of knowledge. In overt opposition to the rhetorical
view of language, Leopardi suggests that «an idea with no word accompany-
ing it» is destined to wander like a ghost in our mind, without taking a definite
shape (Zib. 1054 and elsewhere); moreover, on one side, without words we
would not even be able to conceptualize quantities (Zib. 360-62), and on the
other, words act on the mind as a “resonator” of experience, affection, delicate
and personal memories. On these premises, Leopardi is able to bridge the gap
between the individual and the social dimensions of language, in a very simi-
lar way to a much more famous philosopher of language such as Wilhelm von
Humboldt; but Leopardi did so quite independently from him, having had no
access to Humboldt’s writings on language of the 1820s. I also suppose
Leopardi had no information about Humboldt’s posthumous masterpiece
Einleitung zum Kawi-Werk (1836), in which the principle of subjectivity
becomes manifest thanks to a kind of linguisticization of Kantian gnoseology
as well as to an incomparable competence in languages and grammars from all
over the world.
In another passage of his essay, Ponzio maintains that Leopardi’s
approach to the language-nation relationship is very different from the
Romantic perspective (of which Herder is a typical exemple) in the sense that
he refrains from identifying the two elements; indeed, Leopardi escapes the
dangers of linguistic nationalism characterizing the German and French
milieu, by suggesting that languages grow and develop in time according to
mechanisms that are different from those conditioning (as we would say
today) ethnicity. I should like to focus on this issue. Generally speaking, I do
agree with what Ponzio states: there are both linguistic and conceptual argu-
ments that can be used to back up such an interpretation of Leopardi’s view.
To begin with, Leopardi does not ascribe to substratum a decisive role with-
in the process of language diversification (cfr. Zib. 933 and following): this is
a crucial point in that the very idea of “ethnic reaction” of indigenous lan-
guages on languages with which they overlap for demographic, military
reasons had ended up, since the 18th century, establishing a strict correspon-
dence between linguistic and national element. The second aspect is the
 ENCOUNTERING LEOPARDI 189

poly-centric perspective adopted by Leopardi as regards the future of the

Italian language: quite unlike his contemporary Manzoni (who since 1820s
suggested to “set up war against dialects”), Leopardi maintains that a country
rich in cultural and political varieties like Italy needs an open (non-centralist)
linguistic policy; and the example which he has in mind, far away in time but
authoritative, is the Greek koiné, which is more likely to adapt to history and
the perspective of Italy than Roman linguistic policy.
As far as ideological-linguistic issues are concerned, Leopardi’s writings
are not related to “ethnicism” characterizing the anthropological debate at the
end of the 18th century, which was to influence the theory of Indo-European as
a “privileged” linguistic family (a thesis supported by Friedrich Schlegel), to
the point of assuming racist connotations towards the 1850s.. Here I will give
just an example. It is noteworthy Barthold Georg Niebuhr, the famous German
philologist and historian who knew and appreciated the young scholar from
Recanati, was the author of a Römische Geschichte in which the ethnic ele-
ment played a pivotal role: in Niebuhr’s masterpiece, an important
historiographic lesson went hand in hand with an identification between hero-
ic romanity and éthnos which has fed the 18th-century nationalist and racist
ideologies. Nothing of the above-said is to be found in Leopardi. The alleged
superiority of Old Romans does not depend, as Leopardi states, on ethnical
reasons, but on the special anthropological condition in which they lived:
ancient nations represent the culmination of the development of human imag-
ination, a creative force which is able to condition memory and reason,
stimulating the human mind to function in a unitary way. Ancient time is thus
a time of big fantasies, but also of individual virtue, public morality, of love
for the homeland and so forth. Conversely, modern nations undergo a process
of breakthrough with respect to such a balance: here, reason has dethroned
imagination and the principles of individual and social egoism have come to
substitute ancient values. Modernity represents a phase of painful disenchant-
ment for all languages, which witness the loss of their creative potential and
their transformation into merely terminological systems; this linguistic crisis
is a relevant feature of a transnational tendency to uniformity that renders the
intellectual and moral future of all nations really problematic.
However, in his letter to Giordani of July 1821, Leopardi suggests that
“man, languages and nations are almost the same thing”, and from such a prin-
ciple he derives the idea that studying languages is not only a grammatical and
literary, but also, and mostly, a philosophical matter. As a matter of fact, we
know that Giacomo, at least until 1829, long planned to write a book dealing
with linguistic issues – a book which he never succeeded in finishing and
whose preparatory material is to be found in the Zibaldone. Hence, we need to
blur or contextualize what we have just said above on the asymmetry of the
concepts of language and nation in Leopardi. We should note that Leopardi
chooses the term nation as the most appropriate counterpart of language,
instead of people (a term which frequently occurs in the Italian debates around
his figure: think about Giovanni Berchet’s Lettera semiseria di Grisostomo).
190 STEFANO GENSINI

Waiting for a more detailed analysis, I’ll venture to suggest that Leopardi
makes use of nation as a more comprehensive term: nation does not mean
some kind of political entity, but it is rather a set of classes which make up
society (of which people is the most numerous part), seen together with their
traditions, their widespread culture, their government, and language(s). This
use of the term nation dates back to the 18th-century intellectual terminology,
where syntagms like Roman (or Neapolitan, Genoese etc.) nation, which
clearly express the peculiarities and diversification of Italian history, are nor-
mal. In such a context, Leopardy usually also talks of ancient nations, each of
which is distinct and is classified according to the identifying element repre-
sented by imagination. Hence, learning more about the history of their
languages, investigating the etymologies of Hebrew, Greek and Latin means
shedding light on ancient times, especially when no documentation can be
found: in so doing, Leopardi takes sides with the methodological principles
sketched by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in his Brevis designatio de originibus
gentium ductis potissimum ex indicio linguarum (1710), a milestone for com-
parative linguistics. There is no evidence that Leopardi might have had access
to it, but he found similar principles in Turgot’s entry Étymologie, available
in the Éncyclopédie méthodique (which instead Leopardi consulted continual-
ly).
On the other hand, Leopardi discusses the tendential uniformity of the
international well-educated society of his times, which appears to be “one
nation” and consequently adopts a “universal” simplified language, easy and
quick to use: Modern French. To the anthropological de-nationalization of
modernity corresponds linguistic homologation, the loss of expression, the
neglect of registers and styles inherited by literary tradition. The terms based
upon rigid conventions go too far beyond their physiological space (the one
typical of arts and crafts, as well as sciences) and try to expropriate the space
of words (poetic, personal and subjective uses). It is important not to misun-
derstand what Leopardi thinks of such an issue. He firmly believes in the need
to enrich the Italian language by introducing the keywords of modern thought,
and of course he is not against the introduction of scientific terminology, since
he has no purist prejudice (the case of chemistry is something he holds very
dear). But whilst many philosophers of the Enlightenment (e.g. Condillac)
tended to generalise the principle of the semantic exactness of terms, Leopardi
maintains that a language follows a continuum of uses: it moves from seman-
tic vagueness, which feeds both poetry and common language, to precision
and formalisation tout court. (In his 1965 article, L’italiano, una lingua tra le
altre lingue, Italo Calvino must have reminisced Leopardi’s perspective).
A language is healthy (and healthy are also the cultures and the society
upon which it is based) if such a dynamic equilibrium obtains; if uniformity
and unidimensionality prevail, to the repressive damage corresponds a patho-
logical condition of social mentality. Perhaps we can explain the point made
by Leopardi by referring to very recent communication experience. Many
readers will remember Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1964-65 contributions to the “new
 ENCOUNTERING LEOPARDI 191

linguistic question” in Italy, including, among other things, an unforgettable

portrait of the new TV hero, the Italo-American presenter Mike Bongiorno,
absolute speaker “with no qualities”: for Pasolini, who had previously
described the popular, dialectal suburbs of Rome, the neo-Italian TV star with
no regional traits, was an omen. Will Italy become the country where “the
Exact!” (as opposed to Dante’s “Sì”) echoes? This is the question that Pasolini
raised in 1960s: but Leopardi had raised a similar question as early as 1821.
To sum up, Leopardi’s concept of “nation” and its relation with the issue
of language is rich and articulated and is subject to historical, linguistic, philo-
sophical, and even theoretical-political investigations which, I hope, will be
explored in the near future.
To conclude these considerations dedicated to my friend and colleague
Ponzio, here follows my wish – which I am sure he will share: as some peo-
ple already know, the English translation of Leopardi’s Zibaldone is almost
finished (edited by Franco D’Intino, Professor at University of Rome “La
Sapienza” and by Michael Caesar, Professor at Birmingham University, which
has boasted a Leopardi Centre since 1998). It is an exceptional occasion for
the most critical scholar of (ancient and modern) globalisation to be, read,
accepted and digested by North-American culture which we all love and from
which we learn every day. However, this culture also bears deep-rooted ele-
ments of rigidity (starting from the anglocentrism of bibliographies and
cultural references) which should be recognised as well as carefully mitigated.
Leopardi’s plea for plurilingualism and pluriculturalism may be still topical in
the homeland of cognitive sciences.

References

Gensini, Stefano (1984). Linguistica leopardiana. Bologna: Il Mulino.

Leopardi, Giacomo (1991 [1820-1827]). Zibaldone di pensieri, Giuseppe Pacella (ed.).
Milano: Garzanti.
Ponzio, Augusto (1989). Plurilinguismo e pluridiscorsività in Leopardi. In Leopardi e
il pensiero moderno, Carlo Ferrucci (ed.), 37–49. Milano: Feltrinelli.