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Unlike what you might think, the expression “everything is evil” is not an ethical assessment. Rather, it’s an existential one. This becomes apparent if we incorporate a bit more of the context: “Everything is evil. That is to say everything that is, is evil”.

These words belong to Giacomo Leopardi, an Italian poet of the 19th century – a literary giant with whom English-speaking audiences are not too familiar. One reason is that translating his poetry is considered notoriously difficult. Indeed, nobody dared to even attempt it until almost a century after his death.

At this point, I should make it clear: I’m not, by any stretch of the imagination, an authority on Leopardi’s poetry. Not even remotely. What I’m doing in this post is literally taking one of Leopardi’s most (in)famous passages out of context, to discuss why “everything is evil”. That is, why life is necessarily flawed.

“Everything Is Evil”: Giacomo Leopardi

Before I talk about whether everything is evil – that is, whether life is necessarily flawed – let’s see the passage in its entirety. I’m quoting from Giacomo Leopardi’s Zibaldone, 4174:

Everything is evil. That is to say everything that is, is evil; that each thing exists is an evil; each thing exists only for an evil end; existence is an evil and made for evil; the end of the universe is evil; the order and the state, the laws, the natural development of the universe are nothing but evil, and they are directed to nothing but evil. There is no other good except nonbeing; there is nothing good except what is not; things that are not things: all things are bad. All existence; the complex of so many worlds that exist; the universe; is only a spot, a speck in metaphysics. Existence, by its nature and essence and generally, is an imperfection, an irregularity, a monstrosity.

It’s a long quotation, and I’ve still taken its second half out (we’ll return to it in a moment). But its affective thrust is immense.

Parenthetically, now would be a good time to also reveal something about Giacomo Leopardi – in case you didn’t know: He was a tortured soul. Not only did he grow up in a strict, conservative environment (his mother in particular was cold and relentless), but he suffered from very poor health during his short life – he died when he was 38. Even as an adult, he never managed to escape the control of his parents, and his personal life – also as a result of his ailments – was nonexistent.

All this might make you ascribe this strong scent of nihilism to his personal tragedies. Indeed, that’s how his contemporaries approached his poetry – Leopardi had to constantly defend his work against such accusations.

However, there is more at play.

Forget the Man, Approach the Text

In other words, let’s separate the art from the artist. Regardless of who Leopardi was, and what kind of life he endured, there is an intriguing immunity in his words. That is to say, there is a certain meta- quality, a self-referential shield, that protects the argument as a result of its very ability to materialize.

To make the (admittedly complex) leap from word to idea: The very fact that we exist, makes existence flawed. Perhaps Hegelians would like to find some in-between state, but being/non-being might be one of the few genuinely binary states (indeed, dilemmas!) out thereJust in case you thought I made a mistake adding the links the way I did: It was deliberate. I wanted to link to the "Binary Dilemmas" post, which I linked to from "genuinely binary states", but the idea of there being a dilemma between being and non-being is strongly reminiscent of Camus and the existential absurd, hence the link to the "Philosophical Suicide" post..

Therefore, if we assumed – and I believe we are justified to do so – that existence is a binary condition, being versus non-being, it follows that the only alternative to being is non-being. That is to say, being alive has only one possible “evolutionary state”.

Another Literary Example

Writing the sentence above, “being alive has only one possible ‘evolutionary state'”, triggered a memory. Indeed, a literary memory. I’ve written about this before. Here’s an excerpt from my novel Musings After a Suicide:

I felt intense sorrow in what I’d come to consider the grand flaw of being alive: Not having something is terrible but it can get better, there’s nowhere but up; having something is also terrible because you can lose it, there’s nowhere but down. If before meeting Laura I was at the bottom of the barrel, I could at least float upward with every drop of love. But I’d now reached a point precariously close to the rim, and every temporal drop and any emotion brought me a step closer to falling out altogether. Why couldn’t I simply swim in the middle… A primordial organism, peacefully drifting in the watery void, a soul in the universal womb tracing the contour of my journey from nothingness back to nothingness.

The predicament of my protagonist as well as the core of Leopardi’s text (at least as I read it here), is a temporal one, as we’ll see in more detail in the next section.

Everything Is Evil Because Everything Is

Another cryptic way of expressing it. It probably also reveals linguistic limitations (or merely attributes), but that’s a story for another day. In any case, and as I said in the introduction, I believe we shouldn’t see Giacomo Leopardi’s text as an ethical assessment, but as an existential one. What it reveals to us isn’t a problem of behavior or state but of quality or system.

In other words, there is a somewhat paradoxical timelessness in Leopardi’s words. I call it paradoxical because, although it’s certainly not time-bound (as a result of its being connected not to a behavior/state but to a quality/system), at the same time it reveals problems inherently related to time.

Being alive having only one possible “evolutionary state”, as I mentioned in the section above, is a characteristically temporal problem. As perhaps Schopenhauer would agree, humans are both blessed and cursed (another paradox!) as a result of their ability to visualize far into the futureHere’s another paradox: Let’s expand my sentence and say "Being alive has only one possible ‘evolutionary state’, that is, being dead". It sounds like a natural thing to say, until you discover there’s something conceptually wrong with the expression being dead..

Life Is Necessarily Flawed

That is, life, by its very existence, is flawed; everything is evil. This is a hard pill to swallow. But even Giacomo Leopardi allows for at least the hope things could be different – if not for us living beings, individually or collectively, at least on a conceptual level. Here’s how the quotation continues:

But this imperfection is a tiny thing, literally a spot, because all the worlds that exist, however many and however extensive they are, since they are certainly not infinite in number or in size, are consequently infinitely small in comparison with the size the universe might be if it were infinite, and the whole of existence is infinitely small in comparison with the true infinity, so to speak, of nonexistence, of nothing.

This system, although it clashes with those ideas of ours that the end can be no other than good, is probably more sustainable than that of Leibniz, Pope, etc., that everything is good. I would not dare however to go on to say that the universe which exists is the worst of possible universes, thereby substituting pessimism for optimism. Who can know the limits of possibility?

Life is flawed, necessarily so. But if Giacomo Leopardi, who suffered significantly during his entire life, could still ponder on “the limits of possibility”, then maybe we can too.