Giacomo Casanova begins his autobiography proclaiming his faith in the Christian God, laying out a few of his beliefs. At the end of the very first page he states ” Man is free; but not unless he believes he is, for the more power he attributes to Destiny, the more he deprives himself of that power which God gave him when He granted him reason“. Paragraph after paragraph, the notorious 18th century womanizer lightheartedly explains a rather deep philosophy he lived his life by. One moment he is explaining the importance of free will, the next he is expounding on the difference between “those we call stupid” and “fools” and why he felt no moral qualms with deceiving fools.
Casanova’s second sentence is a challenge to the Stoics overemphasis on Destiny, and in some fundamental sense, Casanova lived in opposition to the Stoic philosophy. The Stoics made it clear that death was not a bad thing or a thing to be feared. Zeno, the founder of Stoicism is quoted as saying “No evil is honorable; but death is honorable; therefore death is not evil”. Casanova on the other hand, despised detested the idea of death. He writes:
“Whether happy or unhappy, life is the only treasure man possesses, and those who do not love it are unworthy of it…Cicero says that death delivers us from our suffering. But the great philosopher notes only the expenditure, and does not tally the receipts…Death is a monster that chases the rapt spectator from the theater before the play he is watching with infinite interest has ended. This alone is reason enough to despise it.”
And so Casanova sets the stage for the telling of his life, which can only be described as “lustful”. Lustful not only of beautiful women, but of life itself, the adventure and perils of life. He tells of the many women he seduced and how he enjoyed the process of seduction as much as the end result—to put it one way.
Funnily enough, while Casanova opposes some aspects of Stoicism, he often found aid from the philosophy. While reflecting on a decision, Casanova says, ” I realized that thinking about it could keep me from deciding, and that if I was to arrive at a decision, it must be in consequence of not having thought about it. It was a case of the Stoics’ sequere Deum [‘follow your god’]”.
Casanova’s story is one of a true love for life, a satisfaction in the ecstasy as well as the trying times. Throughout his autobiography, he makes playful and profound remarks such as “Happy are they who can boast about being self sufficient. My profession was not a noble one, but I did not care”.
In Buddhism there are two kinds of enlightened beings, the Pratyeka-Buddha, and the Bodhisattva. The Pratyeka-Buddha reaches enlightenment and stays there, goes off into bliss, and does not return. The Bodhisattva is enlighted, but instead of staying in a state of ecstasy, he comes back and plays the game of everyday life—he shows glimpses of enlightenment through living completely in the world. Casanova was a philosopher playing the role of an adventurous lover, and although he was chased out of the theater, he left us an infinitely interesting play.
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