Leopardi’s challenge to Stoicism

Turns out that, properly speaking, nothing is “up to us”

Giacomo Leopardi, posthumous portrait (1897) by Stanislao Ferrazzi. Image from Wikimedia, CC license.

Pessimists have a bad reputation. The Merriam-Webster says that a pessimist is “a person who is inclined to expect poor outcomes” and gives “cynicism” as a synonym. Modern usage derives from the French (of course!) pessimiste, in turn from the Latin pessimus meaning “worst.”

Nevertheless, the pessimists, philosophically speaking, have a point. I’ve always been drawn to their patron saint, Arthur Schopenhauer, though their ranks include figures like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Friedrich Nietzsche, Albert Camus, and Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837).

You may not have heard of the latter one, but I remember having to memorize several of his poems—especially L’Infinito (The Infinite) and La quiete dopo la tempesta (The quiet after the storm)—back when I was in middle school. Leopardi was one of the most influential poets of the entire history of Italian literature, and certainly of the 19th century. I did not realize at the time, though, that Leopardi was also an essayist and philosopher, one of the major exponents of philosophical pessimism, and a student of Stoicism. Indeed, he was fond of my own favorite Stoic philosopher, Epictetus, to the point of producing a beautiful and insightful translation the Enchiridion in Italian (here it is!).

I’ve come across Leopardi in this new (to me) guise as philosopher of pessimism by way of a wonderful book by Joshua Foa Dienstag entitled Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit. You’ll probably hear more about it soon from me because I find it fascinating.

For now, let me get back to Leopardi and his reading of Epictetus. I found a delightful short essay by W.A. Oldfather, one of the modern translators of Epictetus, discussing the surprising kinship that Leopardi had for the sage from Hierapolis. Oldfather describes the contrast between the two in an amusing fashion. Leopardi was a nobleman who could trace his lineage to the time of Charlemagne, while Epictetus was a slave who never mentions his parents; one was a philologist and poet, “a wonder-worker with human speech whose lyrics are sheer miracles of language,” the other never wrote anything and belittled literary skill as getting in the way of living real life; the poet wrote endlessly about his physical ailments, the philosopher wasn’t bothered by the fact that his master made him a cripple for life.

And yet, Giacomo (as we called him at school) was clearly an admirer of the philosophy of Stoicism, as he makes perfectly clear in his introduction to his own translation of the Enchiridion:

“Truly, to obtain that better condition of life and that sole happiness which can be found in the world, men have ultimately no other path than this one: to renounce, so to speak, happiness itself, and to abstain as much as possible from fleeing its opposite. […] This teaching […] is in truth the summit and sum both of Epictetus’s philosophy and of all human wisdom.”

The passage points out the paradoxical wisdom of the Stoics: true “happiness” (meaning, eudaimonia) comes from renouncing the pursuit of happiness (in the common sense of feeling good) and accepting rather than fleeing from the human condition, which is rooted in suffering. This is one way to understand the Stoic message, and certainly it became an important theme in Leopardi’s own philosophical reflections on human existence and contentment (remember, he was a pessimist!).​​​​​​​​​​​

When Epictetus talks about radical human freedom he says that this can be achieved only once we finally realize that the only truly good things in life are those that are “up to us,” as he puts is in Enchiridion 1: that is, our deliberate judgments, our values and disvalues, and our decisions to act or not to act. Nothing else. All other things, so-called “externals” are not up to us, and it is our attachment to such things that is the root cause of our suffering and therefore of our unhappiness.

Leopardi, however, is in a sense even more pessimistic than Epictetus himself, because he raises a challenge that every Stoic ought to take very seriously. In his famous “Operette Morali” (Moral Essays) he writes:

“Would fortune not hold sway over that very frame of mind, which these thinkers claim may enable us to evade her? Is not man’s reason subject all the time to countless accidents, innumerable sicknesses that bring stupidity, delirium, frenzy, violence and one hundred other kinds of madness . . . ? It is great folly to admit that our bodies are subject to things beyond our control, and nonetheless deny that the mind, which depends on the body in almost everything, is inevitably subject to anything whatever outside ourselves.” (144,145)

Leopardi, I’m afraid, is exactly right here. Not convinced? Just look at the (very, very) long list of known neurological disorders. The Stoics were not dualists, in the sense that for them everything, including both mind and body, is made of matter and is therefore perishable. And yet they often talked as if they were dualists. Marcus Aurelius goes and and on (and on) telling himself to despise the body and cultivate the mind, as if the latter were somehow possible without the former. For example:

“Even if its closest associate, the poor body, be cut, be burnt, fester, gangrene, yet let the part which forms a judgment about these things hold its peace, that is, let it assume nothing to be either good or bad, which can befall a good man or a bad indifferently.” (Meditations, 4.39)

But the body isn’t just a “closest associate” of “the part which forms judgments.” The two are one and the same, as the human ability to form judgments depends on certain areas of the brain, specifically the one that modern neuroscientists know to be in charge of the executive functions, the pre-frontal cortex.

Seneca uses similar language throughout his writings:

“Behold this clogging burden of a body, to which nature has fettered me!” (Letters, 24.17)

But there is, of course, no distinction between my body and me. Nature hasn’t shackled me to my body, because without my body I simply would not exist.

And of course Epictetus does the same:

“Let it not escape you—this body is not your own, but only clay cunningly compounded.” (Discourses, 1.1)

The body is indeed “cunningly compounded,” the result of eons of natural selection. But it is most certainly “my own.” In fact, nothing else at all is properly mine other than my body.

Then again, the Stoics themselves recognized what Leopardi was getting at. In one of the most profound and touching passages in his Letters, Seneca writes:

“If old age begins to shatter my mind, and to pull its various faculties to pieces, if it leaves me, not life, but only the breath of life, I shall rush out of a house that is crumbling and tottering. I shall not avoid illness by seeking death, as long as the illness is curable and does not impede my soul. I shall not lay violent hands upon myself just because I am in pain; for death under such circumstances is defeat. But if I find out that the pain must always be endured, I shall depart, not because of the pain but because it will be a hindrance to me as regards all my reasons for living. He who dies just because he is in pain is a weakling, a coward; but he who lives merely to brave out this pain, is a fool.” (Letters, 58.35-36)

Seneca here declares that he will not passively endure mental deterioration, choosing instead to “rush out of a house that is crumbling and tottering” when his mind begins to fail. He penned these words during his retirement years (62-65 CE) when he was approximately 66-69 years old, aware both of his declining health and his precarious political position under Nero. The “crumbling house” metaphor powerfully illustrates the Stoic view that the body serves as the dwelling place of the rational soul—when this dwelling can no longer support virtuous living, the wise person should depart.

The passage encapsulates the Stoic doctrine on rational suicide, establishing clear conditions under which death becomes preferable to continued existence. Seneca distinguishes between acceptable suicide when mental faculties are destroyed and virtue becomes impossible, versus unacceptable suicide that merely seeks escape from pain, which he calls “defeat.”

Letter 58 is entitled “De Esse” (On Being), and primarily discusses Platonic philosophy, but concludes with this deeply personal reflection on aging. Seneca was the first Stoic we know of to explicitly connect suicide with libertas (freedom), arguing that the possibility of choosing death provides ultimate freedom from external circumstances and prevents the mind from becoming enslaved to deteriorating conditions. Epictetus will pick up this particular ball and run with it, articulating his famous metaphor of the “open door” (e.g., Discourses 1.9), the notion that our freedom depends fundamentally on our possibility to leave life because we decided that it is no longer worth living. One important implication of which is that, so long as we decide to stay, we have no grounds for complaining and we need to do our best for ourselves and for others.

Notice that in the passage Seneca identifies three specific conditions that justify departure: when the mind is “shattered,” when mental faculties are “pulled to pieces,” and when life becomes mere “breath of life” rather than true existence. This nuanced position has influenced philosophical discussions of rational end-of-life decisions for nearly two millennia, distinguishing between cowardly escape and reasoned departure when the conditions necessary for meaningful human existence no longer exist. Indeed, the passage stands as one of the most articulate discussions of rational suicide in ancient literature, demonstrating Seneca’s mature thinking during his final years. The metaphor of rushing from a collapsing house remains among the most powerful images in philosophical literature for understanding when life’s fundamental conditions have irrevocably changed, making this text as relevant to contemporary bioethical discussions as it was to ancient Stoic practice.

So, is Epictetus then completely wrong? Should we throw away the famous beginning of the Enchiridion, the bit that distinguishes what is and is not up to us, as nothing but foolishness? Leopardi himself certainly doesn’t think do so. There is a sense in which the most important part of me is my prohairesis, my faculty of judgment. That is how we assess people, on the basis of what they think and, especially, do in consequence of their thinking.

Empirically speaking, the most disturbing of mental disorders are the degenerative ones that affect a person’s character (e.g., fronto-temporal dementia), not those that damage memory (e.g., early Alzheimer). If you lose your memories you are still fundamentally you. But if you start talking and behaving in a completely different way, your own spouse and children will say that they no longer recognize you. That’s because your executive functions have now been affected by disease, and you are, in a crucial sense, no longer you.

So what Epictetus should be understood as saying is that for the majority of human beings, throughout the majority of their lives, their agency and true self reside in their brain’s executive functions. Those are the most precious things we have precisely because they define who we are. Which means that we should cultivate them and should take care to preserve them as much as possible. Moreover, Seneca would add, the moment we see that such faculties begin to significantly deteriorate we would be better off “slipping the cable,” as he puts it in Letter 70. Because without such faculties, what, exactly, is the point of living?