Born to be Bad or Born to Die? Evil and Finitude in Freud’s Death Drive
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Freud’s death drive hypothesis postulates an inherent drive towards destructiveness and aggression. His theory of the death drive has been conceived by many as the height of Freud’s pessimism, as an admission that we are indeed born evil. But, as I argue below, this is not the only moral position that can be derived from the death drive hypothesis. Even if we accept (albeit in reconstructed form) Freud’s hypothesis that we are born with an inherent aggressive drive, the problem of innate aggression does not have to be viewed pessimistically. In this paper I develop a different notion of an ethics of finitude, and show how this view can arise from the death drive and the terminality of human life.