Images of Animal Predation in Giacomo Leopardi's Dialogo della Natura e di un Islandese

This article explores the relationship between the philosophies of Leopardi, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. Three figures deeply concerned with the relationship of the human to the animal, their different engagements with animal philosophy reveal a great deal not only about their anxieties regarding the philosophical status of animal predation, but also, on a larger level, much about how they attempt to address the problem of suffering itself. Ultimately this article argues that Leopardi presents us with images of animal predation so as to force us to come to grips with a larger cycle of destruction and regeneration for which animal predation is a direct metonymy. This cycle of destruction and regeneration is a necessary part of life, but one that the Islandese finds to be without value. Ultimately the rejection of the value of animal predation, in the Dialogo della Natura e di un Islandese, stands in for the true nature of Leopardi's pessimism.