After studies in Pisa and Perugia, I received my degree as a healer and veterinarian, and moved to Genoa. There, as you know, I enrolled in a course of philosophical studies, which I finished in Lyons. Four years later, fate blew me to Geneva, and a year after that to Vienna, where I met you. Of the year and a half I spent there, you know as much as I. From Vienna I went first to Tunis with the vague intention of forgetting Europe, but the dismal living conditions there forced my early return to Italy. I settled down in Cuneo and opened a veterinary practice. The following months, I admit, I suffered in agony; your decision seared me like a red-hot iron. Why were we not able to find a way to each other, despite my willingness — and, dare I say, your inclination toward me? What was it that kept us apart? What is it that makes a person so obstinate, so aloof? Why is it that people are not closer to one another? Why are the natural aspirations of humans so often frustrated by the rules and automatic behaviors to which we accede like unresisting puppets, filled with sawdust and slavishly submissive? Why is it that people are not able to listen to one another, that every conversation is nothing but the affectation of opinion, the result of mindless, ingrained reflexes which have absolutely nothing in common with either reason or emotion? I speak here not of social conventions, which are in and of themselves unimportant, but of people’s scant longing for liberty. Why is it that people are so afraid of freedom?
Ah! Why write about freedom to someone who has lived only for herself? You lack neither feeling nor intelligence, of that I have had the possibility to persuade myself many times. But of what use to you is feeling and intelligence? Often we have spoken together of the century of light, what the French call les Lumières, the Germans die Aufklärung, the English the Enlightenment. Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau…The first enchanted you, the second disturbed you, the third moved you. But! You, Madam, should have wanted the Encyclopédie in your library and the Penal Code in the public reading room, bread for all, but a ball gown only for yourself, free love in books, but a husband in life. You profess a dignfied life, but you fear death.
Philosophy? La belle affaire! Those whom today we call the light of humanity were perhaps flares rather than torches; we can become them only individually and only so long as we are willing to live our truth in spite of the idols to which the dull crowd, which we call society, kowtows.
Can human truth be concealed in books? Essays! Tracts! Treatises! Libido sciendi, you say; to which I reply to you: Libido dominandi. Writing books is but another way to enslave one’s fellow man, to force one’s will on him, to outwit one’s smallness and pettiness, to postpone the last sleepless night before death. Even the last of the botanists, occupying himself with the mystery of nature, sooner or later begins to see himself as an expert of the universe with the conviction that he has grasped something, and that something he shall call order; and he shall force his order on the entire world. Doxa, Madam, leads his steps, not epistémé. In the works of philosophers and scientists alike, we find each time the same thing, the desire to rob the reader of his free will in the name of this or that idol, of the freedom of the human interior in the name of the freedom of the more supreme and orderly. No, Madam, although I concede that in books I have found ideas, incentives, embryos of my later opinions, never in them have I found a recipe for happiness. Science and philosophy cannot lead to freedom. Freedom is the fruit of passion, not of reason; passion is a gift of nature, not of civilization. Freedom springs from our innocence, which science has taken from us.
For two and a half thousand years scholars have perfected their theories, seeking for ever more knowledge, promising a better world — and the world is ever more incomprehensible and painful. Why? The answer is so simple, we refuse to accept it: because they’ve never rid themselves of their prejudices, because they recognize only that which enters into their “natural order,” which they inherit from generation to generation. Certainly this order may allow an exception, a deviation, an anomaly, but to allow the slightest disturbance of the “natural character” of things is out of the question. Ah! What is natural about the fact that man starves, murders, sponges from the misfortunes of others, mates only with the consent of the community, submits to idols? Yes, man is starving and murdering, they say; let us enact a reform that he starve only should it have a higher meaning, and murder solely when it contributes to the Ideal. Let us enact that he may divorce and remarry — what freedom! — that he may choose between this or that idol — what progress! Look around you: as if the growth of human hatred were proportional to the number of proposed reforms. Wars, poverty, confusion, and despair. It is necessary, say the political philosophers, for us to reorganize the state, the church, the administration, the trades, science. Let us reorganize! And let us hide from ourselves the fact that two and a half millennia of reform have brought nothing — and that it is high time we replaced reorganization with disorganization. Even without the study of political philosophy you may come to this realization; just suppress the prejudices within yourself. You ask, what does disorganization mean? I reply: to open new paths to human passions. Let us awaken in people an aversion to life in marriage, in domestication, in the city, in civilization; and they will feel a vertiginous bliss at the fact that they may dwell freely with their loved ones anywhere on earth where the soil will feed them. Freedom will replace enslavement, solidarity will replace murdering, envy, and hatred. Is freedom any less passionate than death?
Humanity has succeeded in learning nothing more from history. Et pour cause: the revolts against society that have taken place in history have been led in the name of God — a different one, better, purer, more reliable. Man has been sacrificed on his bloody altar. Peasant uprisings? To be sure, hunger drives wolves from the woods. Toss them a bite to eat and they will lick your hand.
The French Revolution? Which one? The one which gave birth to the Declaration on the Rights of Man and of the Citizen? No, I cannot identify even with that. Sovereign nation! Inviolable and sacred ownership! Rights one, two, three. Rights! By what right does anyone mean to grant me rights?
Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains, says Rousseau. To be sure. And what next? The enthronement of a new order, the tyranny of the mob. Bloodthirsty fools who grasp hold of any excuse because they lack any reason; cutthroats who claim they intend to dispatch the enemies of the people, and murder the best of their ranks; thieves who plunder public property in the name of the national estates; firebrands who talk of home defense and devastate the land. The only ones of that time who were not hypocrites were the drunkards: they declared that they were thirsty and tapped every keg in sight. Let us respect the drunkards for their forthrightness and arm ourselves against the murderers whose slogan is revolution. Let us respect the drunkards for their unsteady step; he who staggers, murders not.