In Praise of Finitude

Heidegger, Rebbe Nachman, and WAGMI

Should we live in dread of all the supposedly terrible things on the horizon? This was the question that left-leaning economist Paul Krugman asked to kick of 2022. My response below.

Zohar Atkins @ZoharAtkins

No, because I read Heidegger (and Rebbe Nachman) who taught me that the only cause of dread is finitude itself, and that this selfsame finitude is a gift and a joy, the source of my vitality, personality, and care. Thank you, Lord, for another day.

Paul Krugman @paulkrugman

Do you share my sense of dread about the year ahead? If not, why not? 1/

Asking how we should feel about the future is not an empirical question, but a normative one, perhaps even a spiritual one. And yet many act as if the question could be settled simply by defending the likelihood of good event X or bad event Y happening. In so doing, they make our attitude about the future conditional upon what the future actually unfolds. Mood becomes a leading indicator of prediction. Pessimists live in dread. Optimists live in hope. I’d like to question this assumption and offer an alternative way, expanding on the answer in my tweet.

Of course, it is human—and reasonable—to fear fearsome things, even as we can debate whether things really deserve to be feared.

But the point Heidegger makes in Being and Time is that the source of our fear is not this or that tangible thing, but death itself. Since death is inevitable, a structural feature of existing—not a bug—it doesn’t make sense to spend too much time in fear. Second, to the extent that fear is inevitable, existential self-observation can yield to the joy that one has agency in shaping the life one wants to live, that finitude provides the basis for care, for valuing things, and for deciding one to do with one’s precious life.

Rebbe Nachman teaches something similar, but makes the point theological. The spiritual task is to convert yirah k’tana, fear of small things, into yirah gedola, awe of awesome things (i.e., God, the Infinite). One should regard tangible fears as opportunities to see the larger picture, the kind that Rilke found when, staring at a Greek relic in a museum, he found it commanding him, “You must change your life.”

The point is not that Krugman is wrong about the future. It’s that even if he’s right, he’s wrong to let the factuality of the future have the final say on his attitude to the gift of life.

Rebbe Nachman’s approach works well if you’re a theist or a mystic. But Heidegger’s, I contend, also works, even if you’re more secular. For he shows that finitude itself makes possible all the good things, just as it does all the horrible things. To only focus on the bad is to deny that “life is a package.”