The Cloven Viscount dramatizes philosophical debates about human nature by literally splitting its protagonist into good and evil halves. This physical division evokes the question of whether humans are naturally good or evil—a debate central to Western philosophy. The novella parallels Thomas Hobbes’s argument in Leviathan (1651) that humans require societal constraints while also suggesting, like Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755), that excessive moral systems can distort natural development.

Calvino critiques moral absolutism through both halves of Medardo. The “bad half” commits obvious cruelties, while the “good half” creates suffering through excessive virtue. As the narrator observes, “[O]ur sensibilities became numbed, since we felt ourselves lost between an evil and a virtue equally inhuman” (100). This perspective reflects philosophical pragmatism, developed by William James and John Dewey, which rejects rigid moral frameworks in favor of contextual ethics.

The novella also explores psychological wholeness. The good Medardo tells Pamela, “I was whole and did not understand, and moved about deaf and unfeeling amid the pain and sorrow all round us” (77). This insight parallels Carl Jung’s theory of the “shadow” in Psychology and Religion (1938), which argues that psychological health requires integrating darker aspects of personality.

Through its fantastical premise, Calvino ultimately endorses moral complexity, suggesting that human completeness comes not from purity but from integrating contradictory aspects of our nature—a position aligned with existentialist thinkers like Albert Camus, who similarly rejected absolute moral systems.