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“Everything Is Evil”: Why Life Is Necessarily Flawed

August 22, 2022

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.

“There is no other good except nonbeing”, wrote Giacomo Leopardi. If everything is evil, life is **necessarily** flawed.

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“Turtles All the Way Down”: The Problem of Infinite Regress

April 11, 2022

Philosophy

anthropocentrism, infinite regress, infinity, metaphysics, philosophy, truth

Forget about the existence of God, life after death, the meaning of life. There is only one real question in philosophy – and no, with apologies to Albert Camus, it’s not about suicide. It’s the problem of infinite regress, particularly in a metaphysical framework.

“Turtles all the way down” is a metaphor used to explicate the problem of infinite regress in metaphysics. There are many variants, but the basic idea is that someone (usually a member of a so-called primitive tribe), when asked about the origin or existence of Earth, argues that the world rests on a giant turtle. Faced with the question, but where then does that turtle stand on, he replies: “You don’t fool me, it’s turtles all the way down“.

To us modern Westerners, the problem of infinite regress usually appears when, as children perhaps raised to believe in the existence of God, we wonder: “But who made God?” We were never offered an answer, because there was none. “God was always there”, came the usual non-reply.

But even those of us (such as myself) who don’t believe in a supreme being, are still deeply troubled by infinite regress. It just doesn’t feel right, as we’ll see in this post.

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What Is Anthropocentrism: Examples, Problems, Solutions

March 14, 2022

Philosophy, Society

anthropocentrism, fallacy, ignorance, philosophy, society

Many of us think they’re individually the center of the universe. The irony is, they might be right, but that’s a discussion for another day. The same concept in a wider context is called anthropocentrism. In simple terms, anthropocentrism is the assumption that humans are the most important entities in the universe.

The problem is not so much the belief itself. After all, many of us would likely consider the possibility that other life forms exist in the universe. Probably many of us would also consider the possibility that alien life forms not only exist but are as or even more intelligent than we are.

So, is anthropocentrism “a thing”? Does it really exist?

The question is yes, indirectly. And that’s what makes it insidious. In other words, the true danger of anthropocentrism arises from the fact that it’s subconscious: We’re often not aware we express anthropocentric behavior. That is, we might state we don’t think humans are the center of the universe, we might really believe it, too, yet we act and think as if we were.

So let’s take a look at what anthropocentrism really is, together with examples of anthropocentric behavior. We’ll see what kind of problems such behavior produces, and what some possible solutions could be.

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