Breakthrough Writer

Man's Search for Meaning Lesson #3 Updated for 2012

Introduction: Refutation and Defense Thesis of Frankl

Thesis That Refutes Viktor Frankl's Message That We Must Be Worthy of Our Suffering by Living with Purpose and Meaning

Viktor Frankl is a great person, an amazing person, and a saint, but his message that we must embrace "meaning" as a cure for the existential vacuum does not hold up to close scrutiny. For one, meaning, by Frankl's own admission, is subjective, varying from one person to another based on individual circumstances. This condition makes "meaning" impossible to define since "meaning" could be many things. A misguided soul chasing money or some other foolish chimera could be his "meaning." A despot chasing his fascist utopia or some other dangerous ideology, like Pol Pot or Hitler, could be a form of "meaning." My second objective to Frankl's idea of meaning is that Frankl's definition is too unattainable. Yes, Frankl lived a remarkable, extraordinary life, but the rarity of his heroism evidences how nearly impossible such a heroic form of meaning can be obtained. In other words, Frankl's "meaning" is not universal; it's unique to his pre-conditioned saintly existence, one he did not choose, and proves elusive to most of us. Finally, the idea of meaning, if it is to be discussed at all, should not be such an elevated, heroic term. Meaning, if it exists, is a matter of common sense. We derive meaning, as Freud said, from love and work. We find a job we like and we form connected bonds with our family, friends, and community. We treat others the way we would like to be treated. We avoid doing to others the things we don't want done to us. That's common sense. We don't need to read a book about some heroic definition of meaning to reach such a conclusion. Therefore, I must conclude that while I admire Viktor Frankl as a remarkable human being, I reject his "call to meaning," and I accuse McMahon of being a fake who assigns meaningless books, the very charges I read about while scanning the reviews on Rate My Professor.

Thesis That Defends Frankl

The above attempt to dismiss Frankl's message of meaning suffers various misunderstandings and misinterpretations, which me must address. First, the misguided writer fails to grasp what Frankl means when he says meaning varies from one person to the next. Frankl is not promoting moral relativism and some mushy subjectivism; rather, Frankl is arguing that meaning comes to us in many ways and must pass the test of being morally good and making us flourish. Secondly, the misguided writer argues that Frankl's remarkable life creates a standard of meaning that is too high for most of us to obtain. The misguided writer sadly wants us to capitulate to moral mediocrity or worse while Frankl gives us the uncompromising truth about meaning, that is it tough to obtain and requires courage and nobility. Finally, the misguided writer wants to reduce meaning to "common sense," arguing that we find meaning in our connections to our job, our family, our friends, and our community. However, these connections can not even exist unless we are able to endure life's main condition, suffering. Only someone with the fortitude (strength to endure in the face of suffering) described by Frankl can achieve the connections and bonds that are so blithely described by our misguided writer. Therefore, we would be in grave error to surrender to this misguided writer's dismissal of Frankl and his capitulation to a form of moral mediocrity. Let us, therefore, embrace Frankl's message regardless of its difficulties, for to embark on a journey toward meaning as described by Frankl is well worth the rewards and our failure to take on this journey will result in our spiritual death. 

In-class activity: Break down the refutation and defense thesis into their parts and decide which one superior. 

 

Part One. Is All Meaning Equal?

 

One. We’re all looking for meaning to transform us radically. It is universal that we hunger for change. But consider consumerism and the case of someone who buys an expensive overcoat:

 

In the famous, other-worldly short story by Nikolai Gogol, “The Overcoat,” the main character, Akaky Akakievich, a lonely anti-social clerk whose eccentricities and social inappropriateness suggest a severe case of Asperger syndrome, lives a life of self-imposed isolation. He has no friends, no love, no interaction with the community. He spends all his time copying documents to a degree of pathological obsession so severe that he takes work home and uses his tedious copying as form of refuge and solace. Living in destitution, he walks the cold windy streets of St. Petersburg in a coat so frail and tattered that his tailor cannot mend it. It must be replaced with a new overcoat that is beyond Akaky’s meager budget. But the devilish tailor persuades Akaky to see beyond his limitations and start saving for a new overcoat. In the process of saving and sacrificing for the overcoat, the nebbish Akaky finds meaning and undergoes cataclysmic psychological change, transforming from a depressed nobody to a self-confident being. His newfound bearing becomes like one who has successfully graduated from one of Viktor Frankl’s logotherapy sessions. We read:

From that time forth his existence seemed to become, in some way, fuller, as if he were married, or as if some other man lived in him, as if, in fact, he were not alone, and some pleasant friend had consented to travel along life's path with him, the friend being no other than the cloak, with thick wadding and a strong lining incapable of wearing out. He became more lively, and even his character grew firmer, like that of a man who has made up his mind, and set himself a goal. From his face and gait, doubt and indecision, all hesitating and wavering traits disappeared of themselves. Fire gleamed in his eyes, and occasionally the boldest and most daring ideas flitted through his mind. . . .

In other words, Akaky’s commitment to an ideal higher than himself makes him reborn and he lives a life full of meaning. Or does he? Without oversimplifying the symbolic meaning of the overcoat, which contains layers of contradictory meanings, on one level the overcoat does represent a man’s identity connecting with a consumer product and in the process his personality transforming from the power of that product, however imaginary that power may be. This of course is the essence of so many advertisements, which promise dramatic self-transformation. Indeed, Akaky is transformed, but has he really found meaning? And if he has, is his meaning as legitimate as the selfish billionaire who, inspired by some sort of Dickensian nightmare complete with chilling ghosts from past, present, and future, and wakes up resolved to become a philanthropist?

 

Two. Dangerous Ideologies Give Evil People “Meaning”

And what about the “meaning” found by the unflattering portraits of those zealous idealists in Eric Hoffer’s classic The True Believer? Therein Hoffer analyzes the types of people who find meaning in extreme political and religious programs. These are the losers and misfits of society, mediocrities straining for relevance; shrill fanatics with nothing to lose so they jump on some bandwagon or other promising revolution and massive societal change. Some of these fanatics are more dangerous than others. For example, some resort to suicide bombings in the name of their faith and some commit torture, massacres and outright genocide such as the Nazis and the Khmer Rhouge, to name a couple. Some joined these groups of coercion, but others did so with the sincere belief that they had found a worthy ideal that gave them meaning, even those who in the name of their God burned the innocent at the stake because they believed these poor souls were witches. Have killers, setting the innocent aflame, found meaning and if so is their meaning equal to everyone else’s?

 

Three. In Addition to Different Qualities of Meaning, Good to Bad, There Are Also Degrees of Meaning

Clearly, people are driven by all sorts of insane chimeras and delusions that they may interpret for themselves as constituting meaning. Also, there is probably some sort of a Meaning Scale.

Meaning As Common Sense

I imagine there are many healthy-minded people who find sufficient meaning raising their families and do so with a modicum of a good attitude. They may have never sunk to the depths of despair and may have never struggled with existential issues, yet their lives are admirable and, yes, their lives are full of meaning. But is this meaning as high on the scale as other, more dramatic types of meaning? It seems when we discuss people who have found meaning, the kind that inspires books and films, there must be a certain character arc: The individual descends into evil, crime, despair or indescribable suffering of some sort and finds redemption and transcendence. It’s these more dramatic, more extreme character arcs that appeal to us and it is these people we place higher on the Meaning Scale.

 

Four. For Frankl there is an absolute moral code.

We see an absolute code of morality and of meaning in Viktor Frankl’s book. For one, he uses an absolute moral basis to divide the world’s two “races”: The decent and the indecent. A “meaning” based on one human’s cruelty toward another is no meaning at all. Therefore, Frankl isn’t arguing that any absolute meaning is acceptable. Cleary, the kind of “meaning” that Akaky experiences after saving for his overcoat is not the kind of meaning Viktor Frankl described. Nor is the “meaning” the followers of Pol Pot, Jim Jones, and Hitler find.

To have true meaning, we must flourish

Frankl is arguing that there is a specific criterion for meaning that conforms to human flourishing, the kind he experienced and the kind that he saw in others in the camps.

 

To flourish means to blossom, to reach one’s potential, to live the good life. But while he would agree that humans should flourish, he would not be dogmatic about how get change our lives in order that we flourish.

 

Five. Frankl does not impose a One Size Fits All definition of meaning

Teaching Mean’s Search for Meaning does not give us an absolute meaning. Frankl writes that “the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour.” He also argues that in his particular type of therapy, logotherapy, it is up to the patient to decide whether he should interpret his life task as being responsible to society or to his own conscience.”

 

Six. Finding our own meaning will inevitably result in intellectual warfare

And he goes on to write that “Logotherapy is neither teaching nor preaching.” The logotherapist must help the patient find the truth from within himself. As a result of people finding their own meaning, there will be different, contrary meanings. Living according to one’s convictions will lead to, at the very least, intellectual warfare. Yes, perhaps most of us can agree that we should flourish as human beings, that flourishing is essential to finding meaning. But how we get there is another matter. We will find that not all meaning is equal. There is huge disagreement as to how to arrive at a life of meaning.

 

Seven. Different paths to meaning lead to different prescriptions

 

But how we get there is another matter. We will find that not all meaning is equal. There is huge disagreement as to how to arrive at a life of meaning. There are religious writers, such as Peter Kreeft and others, who will prescribe one method and there are nonreligious writes, or I should say anti-religious writers, like Sam Harris and others who will prescribe another, contrary method to finding meaning.

To complicate the matter of meaning, Frankl says that we don’t choose meaning; it’s the other way around: Meaning chooses us. One could argue that Peter Kreeft was “called” to write his books in defense of the God of his faith, but one could also argue that Sam Harris was called to save people from the dangers of religion. And then there is Bart Ehrman, a former Christian who had a long, arduous “deconversion,” and now feels called to write books about his deconversion and why it matters. And then there is Cat Stevens, raised by a Greek Orthodox father and a Swedish Lutheran mother, who converted to Islam. The doctrine behind his meaning conflicts with Peter Kreeft’s, Sam Harris’ and Bart Ehrman’s and on and on we could go.

You Must Find Meaning Inside Yourself Or Perish

Man’s Search for Meaning, therefore, does not prescribe moral absolutes or dogmas. It encourages to find the truth from within ourselves and to have the courage of our convictions, our sense of purpose, our sense of belonging, and our sense of goodness. You must reproduce these convictions within yourself or perish.

 

Part Two. Why Can’t Meaning be Served to Us on a Silver Platter?

 

One. Kafka’s famous quote. When I was nineteen perusing several Franz Kafka books at my university library I came across this quote: “Truth is what every man needs in order to live, but can obtain or purchase from no one. Each man must reproduce it for himself from within, otherwise he must perish. Life without truth is not possible. Truth is perhaps life itself.” Manly years later I’d read something attributed to Jesus in the a newly found Gospel quoted in Elaine Pagels’ Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas: "If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you."

 

Two. Meaning cannot be delivered to us in a package neatly wrapped with a bow on top. 

We are not according to Frankl to search for meaning in the abstract. Nor are we to derive meaning and “moral exhortation” from a master, a guru, or a therapist, or some other authority figure who dictates what is best for us. The dangers of looking for meaning outside ourselves are several, not the least of which we too often abnegate responsibility for our own decisions and never mature as a result; we find that embracing doctrines may make sense to us intellectually but not give us the power to change; and that if the authority later changes and contradicts his or her doctrine, the very one we came to embrace, we will be left feeling betrayed and lost and find ourselves looking for some other guru to take the responsibility of finding meaning for us.

 

Three. Frankl and logotherapy: Being Responsible for Our Meaning Is Part of Finding Meaning. We Can't Be Spoon-Fed

He argues that we must understand for ourselves what our responsibilities are. In the realm of therapy, specifically logotherapy, Frankl writes:

Logotherapy tries to make the patient fully aware of his own responsibleness; therefore, it must leave to him the option for what, to what, or to whom he understands himself to be responsible. That is why a logotherapist is the least tempted of all psychotherapists to impose value judgments on his patients, for he will never permit the patient to pass to the doctor the responsibility of judging.

Four. No one can rescue us but ourselves: This principle that the patient must find his own meaning, that he is responsible for defining his own meaning and his ensuing behavior is the central argument of psychotherapist Sheldon B. Kopp’s If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him! As he explains the dynamics between the patient, the “pilgrim,” and the therapist, the “guru,” he warns that the patient’s first instinct is to be a child and let the therapist, acting as a parent, take control of the patient’s problems and that if the therapist were to do this he would be perpetuating the patient’s core problem, of never maturing, of never developing, of never emerging from his childhood fantasy of being rescued. As Kopp writes:

And so, it is not astonishing that, though the patient enters therapy insisting that he wants to change, more often than not, what he really wants is to remain the same and to get the therapist to make him feel better. His goal is to become a more effective neurotic, so that he may have what he wants without risking getting into anything new. He prefers the security of known misery to the misery of unfamiliar territory.

The patient appears resistant, then, to taking responsibility for his own life, for his own actions, for seeking his own change, even if change is ostensibly why he is in therapy. His real motives, however, are to remain a child and throw the responsibility of decision making on the therapist. As Kopp continues: “Given this all too human failing, the beginning pilgrim-patient may approach the therapist like a small child going to a good parent whom he insists must take care of him. It is as if he comes to the office saying, ‘My world is broken, and you have to fix it.’” Moreover, the patient wishes to be saved by an Absolute Truth packaged neatly and easy to understand in all its parts. As Kopp writes: “The seeker comes in hope of finding something definite, something permanent, something unchanging upon which to depend. He is offered instead the reflection that life is just what it seems to be, a changing, ambiguous, ephemeral mixed bag. It may often be discouraging, but it is ultimately worth it, because that’s all there is.” From Kopp’s perspective, we are not rescued by any definite truths that may be handed to us and even if such truths were explained to us they would not rescue us from our problems. Nor would they give us the power to change.

Frankl's message is that we can no longer be children being rescued by others' definitions of meaning. 

 

Man's Search for Meaning Lessons on One Post

Lesson One

Lesson Two

Lesson Three

Lesson Four

Lesson Five

 

Lesson #4: Contrasting Logotherapy and Psychotherapy

 

Reviewing a Definition of Meaning: It May be Relative, Not Absolute

I doubt meaning is a huge abstraction, the It that you spend you're whole life looking for. Rather, meaning is very specific and practical; it has application to your life.

For example, I've heard Colin Cowherd, ESPN radio host, say that success in life isn't about how we act; it's how we react. 

We all face struggles. We all face points in our lives where the wheels are about to fall off the wagon and we're going to spin out of control and fall off the cliff. 

I had a class where too many students were showing up not reading the book and not even pretending to be interested in the class. They were texting and talking. I had to give a very controlled lecture on The Student from Hell and explain the consequences for being such a student. The next class was great, no problems.

After my wife and I had twins, about four months into it we had our worst fight ever. Words could have been said that you can never take back but before that happened my Third Eye told me to feign a stomach ache and run to the bathroom where I stayed for about an hour to let our emotions settle down.

In both cases, I averted disaster by the way I reacted. And learning how to do this as I mature in life gives me meaning. 

Another thing that gives me meaning is pride and self-confidence so that I deliver the goods even when I don't feel like it. As a student or teacher, it's our responsibility to bring passion to our product, be it essay or lecture, no matter how we feel. We do so out of pride and conviction. Our self-identity demands high quality and maintaining standards gives us meaning.

Another source of meaning: Learning that virtue is its own reward. If I find a wallet with $500 and credit cards in it, I'm going to call the owner and give back all of the contents. I will be glad the owner got his wallet back. I don't need a reward but in principle I'd want to see the owner's gesture of appreciation even though I don't want his money. If I become a scumbag and keep wallets, I violate my sense of identity and doing so compromises my sense of meaning.

Another thing that gives me identity is discipline. Keeping in some shape, as opposed to being a fat blob, maintains my sense of pride.

None of the above things are examples of Absolute Meaning; they are partial definitions of meaning only but they point me toward the right direction.

For Frankl, meaning is more than the examples I gave; For Frankl meaning is about changing our attitude toward suffering and death and in this regard I'm still a Work in Progress.

Links for Logotherapy and Psychotherapy 

Frankl biography

What is logotherapy?

Will to meaning

Life Forums

Logotherapy Treatment Model

Wikipedia definition

Therapy through Meaning

Visual Guide to Logotherapy

 Major Differences between Psychotherapy and Logotherapy

1. While psychotherapy focuses on the frustrated sex drive as the basis of all conflict (Freud), logotherapy focuses on "the will to meaning," or the existential vacuum.

2. While psychotherapy focuses on unravelling the past to exorcise demons and resolve conflict, logotherapy focuses on finding meaning for the future.

3. While psychotherapy often ignores morality as a factor toward meaning and happiness, logotherapy integrates morality with the meaning quest.

4. While psychotherapy often focuses on deterministic factors that make our character, logotherapy emphasizes our responsibility for our actions regardless of our circumstances.

5. While psychotherapy emphasizes "self-actualization," logotherapy focuses on the ways in which we find meaning by becoming engaged with the world, by serving the world, and by taking focus off our self needs. 

Principle of Logotherapy: Frankl says we find meaning in our future, not our past: 

Don't Emphasize the Past; Emphasize a Better Future

In his chapter “Logotherapy in a Nutshell,” Viktor Frankl writes that a patient’s best path to healing and recovery does not result from immersing himself into his past demons but is based on finding a higher purpose for his future, namely, the meaning of his life.

A Therapist Cannot Hand You General Meaning on a Plate

But Frankl warns that the therapist should avoid generalities. Regarding the question “What is the meaning of life?” Frankl writes:

I doubt whether a doctor can answer this question in general terms. For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person’s life at a given moment. To put the question in general terms would be comparable to the question posed to a chess champion: “Tell me, Master, what is the best move in the world?” There simply is no such thing as the best or even a good move apart from a particular situation in a game and the particular personality of one’s opponent. The same holds for human existence. One should not search for an abstract meaning of life. Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out in a concrete assignment which demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated. Thus, everyone’s task is unique as is his specific opportunity to implement it.

You Have to See or Hear Meaning, an Epiphany

If an epiphany is required to find meaning, as I believe it is, then indeed epiphanies are very personal, individual experiences. As I heard comedian Patton Oswalt say in a recent radio interview, and I paraphrase, we cannot go out and seek our epiphanies; rather our epiphanies find us, catching us by surprise.

Likewise, Frankl writes that we do not go out and seek meaning. Rather, meaning seeks us. As Frankl explains:

As each situation in life represents a challenge to man and presents a problem for him to solve, the question of the meaning of life may actually be reversed. Ultimately, man must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible. Thus, logotherapy sees in responsibleness the very essence of human existence.

We Find Meaning During an Ironic Reversal

The essence to understanding meaning, then, is understanding that the meaning quest entails that the tables are turned, as it were; there is a reversal in which we begin making demands about what we want from life but if we’re paying attention, it is life, not us, that makes the demands.

According to Peter Kreeft’s analysis of meaning in his book Three Philosophies of Life, this reversal does indeed involve an epiphany or a revelation:

Viktor Frankl speaks of this experience of startling, sudden reversal of standpoint or perspective in the context of the concentration camps. He says in Man’s Search for Meaning that many of the prisoners learned to stop asking the question “What is the meaning of life?” and realized that life was asking them what their meaning was.

Instead of continuing to ask “Life, why are you doing this to me? I demand an answer!” they realized that life was questioning them and demanding an answer—an answer in deeds, not just words. They had to respond to this question, this challenge, by being responsible.

 

In Logotherapy meaning often comes to us in a radical change of path: 

These “sudden reversals” often change our original path. For example, I adopted my dog Gretchen from Rover Rescue, founded and operated by Cathy Rubin who before she died of cancer at the age of fifty-four committed her life to saving unwanted and abused animals. Her original career was that of a clinical psychologist. She had her own practice and also did forensic work for the courts, but after the Northridge Earthquake of 1994 she volunteered to help families find their dogs lost after the quake. But as her obituary states in The Easy Reader, a local newspaper, she had her own “reversal” in which life demanded something from her:

A turning point occurred in 1994 when she volunteered at an animal shelter after the Northridge earthquake, helping reunite lost pets with their owners. After a few months, the kennel still seemed as crowded as when it had begun, and she began to wonder. “I asked the kennel supervisor why it was still so crowded, and they explained to me that the shelters in LA are always crowded,” she recalled. “I had this thought that the shelter would be emptied out and that would be it. I found out that back then they were putting to sleep, in L.A. County, about 250 dogs a day.” Rubin was never a bystander. She became involved with the shelters, and soon made a huge impact. Oakland, who met her as a fellow volunteer in the shelters, said Rubin galvanized people into action. She introduced mobile adoption fairs, taking the animals out in public to find prospective new homes.

 

Cathy Rubin’s decision to respond to this demand changed many lives, including mine. I remember when my wife and I adopted Gretchen, a scared Finish Spitz, nine years ago. No one wanted her because she was so petrified of people that when approached she’d squat and pee. Some adopters returned her after no longer being able to deal with Gretchen’s “squatting” and cowering. But my wife Carrie and I, at Cathy’s prodding, adopted Gretchen and made her a happy and healthy dog. I remember Carrie telling me how our marriage was different, for the better, after we started caring for Gretchen. We argued less about trivial things. We were closer. And the nurturing of Gretchen planted the seeds in me that I, someone who never wanted to have children, might have something in me that could make me a viable father.

Cathy Rubin’s “turning point” saved over a thousand dogs from being euthanized and she changed the lives of thousands of people, myself included, as well.

Another example of someone who reached a point when meaning found him is Jeff Henderson, a world-class chef and mentor to young “high-risk” people who have lived lives of drugs and gang-banging. Henderson teaches these young individuals how to hone their cooking skills so that can find viable employment outside a life of crime. Henderson, who writes about his transformation in his memoir Cooked: My Journey from the Streets to the Stove, is a former drug dealer who lived in denial about the pernicious effects his drug dealing had on society until he saw something in prison. An inmate swallowed a balloon with heroin inside and when the balloon burst inside his intestines, the other inmates impeded anyone from getting the man medical help and the man died. Henderson saw that drug addiction would make people give up all their scruples and allow something like that to happen. Seeing that he was accountable for his actions, he no longer saw himself as a victim and in prison he started to find ways to improve himself.

It was during this phase of his life that he fell in love with cooking and found that his cooking could win people over in a good way. His behavior helped him get out of prison after almost ten years and when he got out, he struggled to become, eventually, head chef at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. His mentorship was televised on the Food Network as The Chef Jeff Project.  That’s how I found out about the book and soon after used it on my freshman composition syllabus. In my twenty-five years of teaching that class, no book has ever received so much praise from the students. Jeff Henderson didn’t so much choose his meaning, as Frankl writes. Meaning chose him.

Example of an Introduction, Transition, and Thesis for the Topic of Logotherapy

About twenty years ago four of my buddies were driving from their homes in Bakersfield to attend a Los Angeles Dodgers game. As they were riding over the steepest ascent of the Grapevine, they saw on the side of a road a smoldering, overheated vintage Volkswagen van. Standing outside of the van were four sweat-slick, nubile women, all Grateful Dead followers. Even though their orange rusted van was near ruin, the sun-darkened Dead Heads were still giddy from a Grateful Dead concert and they greeted their rescuers by undulating their bellies and waving their tie-dye bikini tops and spaghetti-strap tank tops in the air like glorious semaphores.

My mechanically-adroit friends helped cool off their van’s steaming engine and spent the next hour making the van road-ready. The women were grateful for my friends’ help and invited the young men to accompany them to Santa Barbara for its annual Summer Solstice Festival.

These were hotties, the men told me, earthy women who, abjuring perfume, wafted the natural-producing odors of musk and desire. But my friends had already bought their Dodgers tickets and were determined to catch the game, so after profusely thanking the women for their kind offer,  the apologetic men rode off to Los Angeles, leaving the glowing, irrepressible pixies behind.

Years later my friends do not remember the Dodgers game, but they are still haunted by all the “what ifs?” that accompany their stupid refusal to go with the harvest maidens to the Solstice Festival. Whenever they tell the story, they argue with one another over who was at fault for insisting that they go to the Dodgers game. 

They still hurl accusations toward one another. Each is to blame for declining the invitation and going to some stupid baseball game. 

I always tell my friends they are pathetic. The girls are probably not as hot as they remember. When we're jaded in our middle-age, we become desperate to feel ANYTHING, so often we will exaggerate the past, turning the mediocre into the spectuacular, just to create some fireworks.

Of course, my friends never heed my words. They prefer to be eternally miserable, still unable to live in the here and now because their minds remain fixated on that hot summer day when tie-die bikini tops fluttered in the wind like the irridescent gleam of a paradise now forever out of their reach. 

The problem these men suffer from is that they are fixated on their past and evidence an urgent need for logotherapy, which is about freeing ourselves from our past failures by _______________, ______________, _____________, and _____________________.

 

Sample Introduction, Transition, and Thesis

 

 

 

The Astrologist and the Psychotherapist Are Too Often Alike 

A successful astrologist is not really an astrologist at all. He is rather a clever and ruthless psychologist who knows how to pander to his readers’ weaknesses, their vanity, their fear of failure, their arrested emotional development and their laziness in order that he may amass a loyal following. Therefore, a good astrologist, by virtue of knowing his readers’ debilitation and decrepitude, must have contempt for the very people he “serves.” Does he at least pity his readers? No, he cannot pity them for if he did he would not exploit them with lies. So let us be clear. The successful astrologist scorns his readers, he is a liar, and he uses his psychological insights to exploit the weak.

If the astrologist’s moral bankruptcy does not offend you, if you are confident that you have no scruples to speak of, and if you would like to earn a lucrative income by “reading the stars” for the emotionally-crippled masses, then there are a few principles you must learn in order to start your successful astrological enterprise.

The first thing you must do is call your horoscope a “forecast” while providing absolutely no “forecasting” whatsoever. In its place you must provide encouragement, moralizing,  and trite platitudes that are so general that anyone, no matter what their sign is, would benefit. Common words of moralistic advice and encouragement are as follows: You are working too hard and need to stop and smell the roses. You’ve become too lazy and indulgent at home and should replace your TV-watching and general sloth with a meaningful hobby like reading, yoga, or vegetarian cooking. Someone at work is stealing credit for your ingenuity and hard work and you should distance yourself from this parasitic employee in order to protect your interests. It’s time to delicately approach your boss about your overdue raise. You have needy people in your life who, because they sap your energy, you need to stop hanging out with. You have relationships, family or otherwise, that need nurturing, or at least a short phone call. You need to cut down on your junk food and start flossing your teeth like your dentist told you. Your relationship would benefit from a good talk, clearer communication, and improved intimacy. Your grumpiness at work must be dealt with either by an attitude change or by looking for a new job. Guilty feelings and other types of emotional baggage from a past relationship are adversely affecting your current one. You don’t really need that new wardrobe you’ve been lusting over at the shopping mall. Wait until you lose those unwanted pounds before you go on your next clothes shopping spree. You’ve been getting too stressed out at work lately. Unwind by treating yourself to a spa treatment and a enjoying a pedicure and full-body massage. You’ve been denying yourself adequate sleep lately. Getting a couple more snooze hours night will really recharge your batteries. Your big ego and bull-headedness are hurting your relationship. Stop trying to be right all the time and instead try to improve understanding with your mate, even if it means admitting you are a little wrong. Settling for a compromise is in your best long-term interests than expending all your energies to get your way.

The above examples show that you are not a “forecaster” in any sense of the word. You’re actually a third-rate life coach, doling out a spattering of common sense, a commodity that your readers are sorely lacking. Luckily, they have you to provide it for them. I’d recommend you make a list of 365 of these common sense sayings and recycle them so that you don’t repeat yourself more than once a year. Once you’ve collected 365 pieces of “advice,” you simply shuffle them throughout your different astrological signs and do your best to avoid repeating yourself too often.

In addition to giving cheap advice, must also learn to flatter your readers by appealing to their vanity. You must convince them that their belonging to their astrological sign makes them exceptionally intelligent, passionate, sexual, sensitive, caring, creative, artistic, and romantic. Many of you will worry that because you are telling all your readers that they are exceptional in these regards, that that means none of them are exceptional. This would be a problem if your readers had any brains or critical thinking skills that allowed them to see the illogicality of your bogus horoscope. But thankfully they do not and even if they did have the smarts to see through your charade, their vanity blinds them to this fact.

If you are worried, however, that your readers are becoming leery of your sugar-mouthed flattery and recognize you for the phony butt-kisser that you are, then you may want to upgrade the sophistication of your flattery by veiling it in the form of a kind and tender admonishment. For example, tell them that they’ve been too absorbed in addressing the problems of others and as a result have been neglecting their own issues, which have been festering lately. Thus criticizing your reader for his “neglect” is really a subtle way of telling him how compassionate he is toward others and how sometimes his compassion gets the best of him. Or you might gently scold your reader for being “too passionate” in his relationship which is suffocating his mate. In this way, you are flattering your reader’s need to believe he has exceptional “passion” when in fact he is emotionally needy and constantly craves approval and attention.

The final thing you need to remember about your reader is that he is essentially lazy but at the same time feels entitled to a life of romantic fulfillment, financial gain, and spiritual contentment. Your job is to make sure your reader never feels he has to get off his butt to accomplish these things. All he has to do is sit back inside his astrological cockpit and let the “stars do their work” as he rides gloriously along his grand cosmic journey. Thus in the name of astrological fatalism, you are encouraging your readers to live a life of passivity, laziness, and self-absorbed naval-gazing, even as you taut their alleged unique astrological virtues and make them feel special.

If this morally-depraved enterprise appeals to your entrepreneurial leanings and you feel you can address the infantile needs of the common astrological believer, then you have indeed found a lucrative market for which there is no shortage of dupes who will greedily devour your flattering, platitudinous “forecasts” and give you a reliable livelihood for which there is no end. 

While this unkind portrait pertains to the bogus business of astrology, there are many parallels to mainstream psychotherapy, especially the business angle as unscrupulous therapists make their patients forever dependent on their services to keep the cash revenue coming. In contrast, logotherapy is an uncompromising attempt to make us independent: to lift us out of our despair by addressing not our ego and self-esteem but our crisis of meaning, which is addressed through _________, ____________, ____________, and _________________. 

Man’s Search for Meaning Lesson #3: Is All Meaning Equal?

Introduction: Refutation and Defense Thesis of Frankl

Thesis That Refutes Viktor Frankl's Message That We Must Be Worthy of Our Suffering by Living with Purpose and Meaning

Viktor Frankl is a great person, an amazing person, and a saint, but his message that we must embrace "meaning" as a cure for the existential vacuum does not hold up to close scrutiny. For one, meaning, by Frankl's own admission, is subjective, varying from one person to another based on individual circumstances. This condition makes "meaning" impossible to define since "meaning" could be many things. A misguided soul chasing money or some other chimera could be his "meaning." A despot chasing his fascit utopia or some other dangerous ideology, like Pol Pot or Hitler, could be a form of "meaning." My second objective to Frankl's idea of meaning is that Frankl's definition is too unattainable. Yes, Frankl lived a remarkable life, but the rarity of his heroism evidences how nearly impossible such a heroic form of meaning can be obtained. In other words, Frankl's "meaning" is not universal; it's unique to his pre-conditioned saintly existence, one he did not choose, and proves elusive to most of us. Finally, the idea of meaning, if it is to be discussed at all, should not be such an elevated, heroic term. Meaning, if it exists, is a matter of common sense. We derive meaning, as Freud said, from love and work. We find a job we like and we form connected bonds with our family, friends, and community. That's common sense. We don't need to read a book about some heroic definition of meaning to reach such a conclusion. Therefore, I must conclude that while I admire Viktor Frankl as a remarkable human being, I reject his "call to meaning."

Thesis That Defends Frankl

The above attempt to dismiss Frankl's message of meaning suffers various misunderstandings and misinterpretations, which me must address. First, the misguided writer fails to grasp what Frankl means when he says meaning varies from one person to the next. Frankl is not promoting moral relativism and some mushy subjectivism; rather, Frankl is arguing that meaning comes to us in many ways and must pass the test of being morally good and making us flourish. Secondly, the misguided writer argues that Frankl's remarkable life creates a standard of meaning that is too high for most of us to obtain. The misguided writer sadly wants us to capitulate to moral mediocrity or worse while Frankl gives us the uncompromising truth about meaning, that is it tough to obtain and requires courage and nobility. Finally, the misguided writer wants to reduce meaning to "common sense," arguing that we find meaning in our connections to our job, our family, our friends, and our community. However, these connections can not even exist unless we are able to endure life's main condition, suffering. Only someone with the fortitude (strength to endure in the face of suffering) described by Frankl can achieve the connections and bonds that are so blithely described by our misguided writer. Therefore, we would be in grave error to surrender to this misguided writer's dismissal of Frankl and his capitulation to a form of moral mediocrity. Let us, therefore, embrace Frankl's message regardless of its difficulties, for to embark on a journey toward meaning as described by Frankl is well worth the rewards and our failure to take on this journey will result in our spiritual death. 

In-class activity: Break down the refutation and defense thesis into their parts and decide which one superior. 

 

Part One. Is All Meaning Equal?

 

One. We’re all looking for meaning to transform us radically. It is universal that we hunger for change. But consider consumerism and the case of someone who buys an expensive overcoat:

 

In the famous, other-worldly short story by Nikolai Gogol, “The Overcoat,” the main character, Akaky Akakievich, a lonely anti-social clerk whose eccentricities and social inappropriateness suggest a severe case of Asperger syndrome, lives a life of self-imposed isolation. He has no friends, no love, no interaction with the community. He spends all his time copying documents to a degree of pathological obsession so severe that he takes work home and uses his tedious copying as form of refuge and solace. Living in destitution, he walks the cold windy streets of St. Petersburg in a coat so frail and tattered that his tailor cannot mend it. It must be replaced with a new overcoat that is beyond Akaky’s meager budget. But the devilish tailor persuades Akaky to see beyond his limitations and start saving for a new overcoat. In the process of saving and sacrificing for the overcoat, the nebbish Akaky finds meaning and undergoes cataclysmic psychological change, transforming from a depressed nobody to a self-confident being. His newfound bearing becomes like one who has successfully graduated from one of Viktor Frankl’s logotherapy sessions. We read:

From that time forth his existence seemed to become, in some way, fuller, as if he were married, or as if some other man lived in him, as if, in fact, he were not alone, and some pleasant friend had consented to travel along life's path with him, the friend being no other than the cloak, with thick wadding and a strong lining incapable of wearing out. He became more lively, and even his character grew firmer, like that of a man who has made up his mind, and set himself a goal. From his face and gait, doubt and indecision, all hesitating and wavering traits disappeared of themselves. Fire gleamed in his eyes, and occasionally the boldest and most daring ideas flitted through his mind. . . .

In other words, Akaky’s commitment to an ideal higher than himself makes him reborn and he lives a life full of meaning. Or does he? Without oversimplifying the symbolic meaning of the overcoat, which contains layers of contradictory meanings, on one level the overcoat does represent a man’s identity connecting with a consumer product and in the process his personality transforming from the power of that product, however imaginary that power may be. This of course is the essence of so many advertisements, which promise dramatic self-transformation. Indeed, Akaky is transformed, but has he really found meaning? And if he has, is his meaning as legitimate as the selfish billionaire who, inspired by some sort of Dickensian nightmare complete with chilling ghosts from past, present, and future, and wakes up resolved to become a philanthropist?

 

Two. Dangerous Ideologies Give Evil People “Meaning”

And what about the “meaning” found by the unflattering portraits of those zealous idealists in Eric Hoffer’s classic The True Believer? Therein Hoffer analyzes the types of people who find meaning in extreme political and religious programs. These are the losers and misfits of society, mediocrities straining for relevance; shrill fanatics with nothing to lose so they jump on some bandwagon or other promising revolution and massive societal change. Some of these fanatics are more dangerous than others. For example, some resort to suicide bombings in the name of their faith and some commit torture, massacres and outright genocide such as the Nazis and the Khmer Rhouge, to name a couple. Some joined these groups of coercion, but others did so with the sincere belief that they had found a worthy ideal that gave them meaning, even those who in the name of their God burned the innocent at the stake because they believed these poor souls were witches. Have killers, setting the innocent aflame, found meaning and if so is their meaning equal to everyone else’s?

 

Three. In Addition to Different Qualities of Meaning, Good to Bad, There Are Also Degrees of Meaning

Clearly, people are driven by all sorts of insane chimeras and delusions that they may interpret for themselves as constituting meaning. Also, there is probably some sort of a Meaning Scale.

Meaning As Common Sense

I imagine there are many healthy-minded people who find sufficient meaning raising their families and do so with a modicum of a good attitude. They may have never sunk to the depths of despair and may have never struggled with existential issues, yet their lives are admirable and, yes, their lives are full of meaning. But is this meaning as high on the scale as other, more dramatic types of meaning? It seems when we discuss people who have found meaning, the kind that inspires books and films, there must be a certain character arc: The individual descends into evil, crime, despair or indescribable suffering of some sort and finds redemption and transcendence. It’s these more dramatic, more extreme character arcs that appeal to us and it is these people we place higher on the Meaning Scale.

 

Four. For Frankl there is an absolute moral code.

We see an absolute code of morality and of meaning in Viktor Frankl’s book. For one, he uses an absolute moral basis to divide the world’s two “races”: The decent and the indecent. A “meaning” based on one human’s cruelty toward another is no meaning at all. Therefore, Frankl isn’t arguing that any absolute meaning is acceptable. Cleary, the kind of “meaning” that Akaky experiences after saving for his overcoat is not the kind of meaning Viktor Frankl described. Nor is the “meaning” the followers of Pol Pot, Jim Jones, and Hitler find.

To have true meaning, we must flourish

Frankl is arguing that there is a specific criterion for meaning that conforms to human flourishing, the kind he experienced and the kind that he saw in others in the camps.

 

To flourish means to blossom, to reach one’s potential, to live the good life. But while he would agree that humans should flourish, he would not be dogmatic about how get change our lives in order that we flourish.

 

Five. Frankl does not impose a One Size Fits All definition of meaning

Teaching Mean’s Search for Meaning does not give us an absolute meaning. Frankl writes that “the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour.” He also argues that in his particular type of therapy, logotherapy, it is up to the patient to decide whether he should interpret his life task as being responsible to society or to his own conscience.”

 

Six. Finding our own meaning will inevitably result in intellectual warfare

And he goes on to write that “Logotherapy is neither teaching nor preaching.” The logotherapist must help the patient find the truth from within himself. As a result of people finding their own meaning, there will be different, contrary meanings. Living according to one’s convictions will lead to, at the very least, intellectual warfare. Yes, perhaps most of us can agree that we should flourish as human beings, that flourishing is essential to finding meaning. But how we get there is another matter. We will find that not all meaning is equal. There is huge disagreement as to how to arrive at a life of meaning.

 

Seven. Different paths to meaning lead to different prescriptions

 

But how we get there is another matter. We will find that not all meaning is equal. There is huge disagreement as to how to arrive at a life of meaning. There are religious writers, such as Peter Kreeft and others, who will prescribe one method and there are nonreligious writes, or I should say anti-religious writers, like Sam Harris and others who will prescribe another, contrary method to finding meaning.

To complicate the matter of meaning, Frankl says that we don’t choose meaning; it’s the other way around: Meaning chooses us. One could argue that Peter Kreeft was “called” to write his books in defense of the God of his faith, but one could also argue that Sam Harris was called to save people from the dangers of religion. And then there is Bart Ehrman, a former Christian who had a long, arduous “deconversion,” and now feels called to write books about his deconversion and why it matters. And then there is Cat Stevens, raised by a Greek Orthodox father and a Swedish Lutheran mother, who converted to Islam. The doctrine behind his meaning conflicts with Peter Kreeft’s, Sam Harris’ and Bart Ehrman’s and on and on we could go.

You Must Find Meaning Inside Yourself Or Perish

Man’s Search for Meaning, therefore, does not prescribe moral absolutes or dogmas. It encourages to find the truth from within ourselves and to have the courage of our convictions, our sense of purpose, our sense of belonging, and our sense of goodness. You must reproduce these convictions within yourself or perish.

 

Part Two. Why Can’t Meaning be Served to Us on a Silver Platter?

 

One. Kafka’s famous quote. When I was nineteen perusing several Franz Kafka books at my university library I came across this quote: “Truth is what every man needs in order to live, but can obtain or purchase from no one. Each man must reproduce it for himself from within, otherwise he must perish. Life without truth is not possible. Truth is perhaps life itself.” Manly years later I’d read something attributed to Jesus in the a newly found Gospel quoted in Elaine Pagels’ Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas: "If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you."

 

Two. Meaning cannot be delivered to us in a package neatly wrapped with a bow on top. 

We are not according to Frankl to search for meaning in the abstract. Nor are we to derive meaning and “moral exhortation” from a master, a guru, or a therapist, or some other authority figure who dictates what is best for us. The dangers of looking for meaning outside ourselves are several, not the least of which we too often abnegate responsibility for our own decisions and never mature as a result; we find that embracing doctrines may make sense to us intellectually but not give us the power to change; and that if the authority later changes and contradicts his or her doctrine, the very one we came to embrace, we will be left feeling betrayed and lost and find ourselves looking for some other guru to take the responsibility of finding meaning for us.

 

Three. Frankl and logotherapy: Being Responsible for Our Meaning Is Part of Finding Meaning. We Can't Be Spoon-Fed

He argues that we must understand for ourselves what our responsibilities are. In the realm of therapy, specifically logotherapy, Frankl writes:

Logotherapy tries to make the patient fully aware of his own responsibleness; therefore, it must leave to him the option for what, to what, or to whom he understands himself to be responsible. That is why a logotherapist is the least tempted of all psychotherapists to impose value judgments on his patients, for he will never permit the patient to pass to the doctor the responsibility of judging.

Four. No one can rescue us but ourselves: This principle that the patient must find his own meaning, that he is responsible for defining his own meaning and his ensuing behavior is the central argument of psychotherapist Sheldon B. Kopp’s If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him! As he explains the dynamics between the patient, the “pilgrim,” and the therapist, the “guru,” he warns that the patient’s first instinct is to be a child and let the therapist, acting as a parent, take control of the patient’s problems and that if the therapist were to do this he would be perpetuating the patient’s core problem, of never maturing, of never developing, of never emerging from his childhood fantasy of being rescued. As Kopp writes:

And so, it is not astonishing that, though the patient enters therapy insisting that he wants to change, more often than not, what he really wants is to remain the same and to get the therapist to make him feel better. His goal is to become a more effective neurotic, so that he may have what he wants without risking getting into anything new. He prefers the security of known misery to the misery of unfamiliar territory.

The patient appears resistant, then, to taking responsibility for his own life, for his own actions, for seeking his own change, even if change is ostensibly why he is in therapy. His real motives, however, are to remain a child and throw the responsibility of decision making on the therapist. As Kopp continues: “Given this all too human failing, the beginning pilgrim-patient may approach the therapist like a small child going to a good parent whom he insists must take care of him. It is as if he comes to the office saying, ‘My world is broken, and you have to fix it.’” Moreover, the patient wishes to be saved by an Absolute Truth packaged neatly and easy to understand in all its parts. As Kopp writes: “The seeker comes in hope of finding something definite, something permanent, something unchanging upon which to depend. He is offered instead the reflection that life is just what it seems to be, a changing, ambiguous, ephemeral mixed bag. It may often be discouraging, but it is ultimately worth it, because that’s all there is.” From Kopp’s perspective, we are not rescued by any definite truths that may be handed to us and even if such truths were explained to us they would not rescue us from our problems. Nor would they give us the power to change.

Frankl's message is that we can no longer be children being rescued by others' definitions of meaning. 

 

Lesson #2: Being Worthy of Our Suffering . . . Or Not and a Bare Existence Vs. the Common Life

Part One. Cynic's Argument Against Meaning: Determinism Triumphs over Free Will

 

1. The George Carlin Factor: Hardly a day ever passes in which I do not hear a biting quote that the brilliant king of cynicism George Carlin once said during a performance: “When you’re born, you get a ticket to the freak show. When you’re born in America, you get a front-row seat.” What is Carlin telling us? He’s telling us that we’re a doomed species and the best we can do is laugh at our inevitable destruction. When I look at the human race, I often find myself agreeing with Carlin’s cynical pronouncements and the conclusions he draws from them. But at the same time I find myself drawn to Viktor Frankl’s very uncynical Man’s Search for Meaning, which chronicles his survival in the Nazi concentration camps and his observations of the ways we exalt or degrade our humanity in the face of abject cruelty, suffering and evil.
2. Rodney Dangerfield Factor. When I was in my early twenties, I read a newspaper interview with the comedian Rodney Dangerfield who said you can’t really change who you are. “You never really change. You’re born a certain way and that’s it.” I remember immediately agreeing with him. We are creatures molded at birth and we cannot escape who we are fundamentally. So what’s it matter if we read Man’s Search for Meaning or not? Why do we give a damn about our choices when the end result of who we are is going to be the same?

Counterargument

1. The Viktor Frankl Factor: Frankl bore witness to some of the most abjectly cruel freak shows on earth. He almost died many times in the camps, he suffered the loss of loved ones, including his father, his mother, his brother, and his wife, and he experienced the constant humiliations at the hands of sadistic brutes, “insults” that he described as hurting him worse than the physical pain, yet for all his suffering he would not give the Nazis and his other oppressors the victory of making him evil in their image. Even as other inmates surrendered all their scruples, living like animals so that they might survive in the camps, Frankl believed in preserving his moral code and he was steadfast in his compassion for the victims of evil. Tapping on an inner strength that became more and more prominent during his captivity, he aided others, using his training as a psychiatrist to help people gain their bodily strength and spirit so that they may live to see the outside of those camps and, more importantly, so that they might strengthen their humanity through a life of purpose and meaning.
2. The Nietzsche Factor: Free will is possible but only if we have a purpose. He says, “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.” Finding meaning and purpose in the midst of life’s cruelty and evil is what Frankl calls “Tragic Optimism.”
3. Free Will Is Limited and Finite: The free will/determinism debate on both sides is grievously in error, constituting an either/or fallacy: Both positions appear to be entrenched in the absolute idea, wrongly, of free will or determinism. But in fact there are only degrees of free will and determinism and we tend to progress from one pole to the other. We can see this spectrum in the realm of morality. Many years ago I saw a TV program about a corrupt police officer, interviewed from prison, who explained how easy it eventually became for him to steal money during drug busts. He said at first the stealing stung his conscience and he had ulcers and bouts of anxieties from his corrupt behavior. To show the growing effects of his criminal acts on his soul during the interview, he grabbed a sheet of crisp paper and crumpled it. He explained that doing wrong in the beginning was like crumpling the paper. There was a violence to the harsh crushing noise of the action, but after dozens upon dozens of times the paper became tissue thin and the action did not grate on him anymore. It seems in the beginning he had more free will to not steal but as he surrendered to his cravings for easy money, he numbed his conscience and lost more and more willpower, eventually becoming a slave to his own thievery. Thus he traveled from having an abundance of free will to a scarcity of it, until he was at the mercy of determinism. A similar case can be made for an adulterer. He may at first be pained by guilt for his infidelity, maybe even the fourth and fifth time. But after dozens, perhaps hundreds of times, he becomes numb, calloused, and debauched, and thus he loses his free will.
4. Enjoying self-discipline is a form of free will: We can journey from determinism to free will, going from a weaker to a stronger state. Take the man whose doctor just told him he needs to lose fifty pounds or he may soon die of a stroke or a heart attack. The overweight man knows he cannot resist his junk food temptations but that he can control his environment, so he learns how to keep his kitchen full of healthy foods and he learns how to prepare them in a way that makes him enjoy his nutritious meals. Thus, he misses his favorite junk foods less. As he loses weight and feels better, he feels motivated to stick to his new program. He was once mired in the self-loathing and the malaise of compulsive junk food eating, but he has taken control of his life in a way that makes him feel better about himself. He has in effect journeyed from determinism to free will. Another reason to agree with Frankl’s principle that we are responsible for our actions is that most parents believe in disciplining their children. To discipline someone means to teach someone, a child or a novice, how to behave in a way that produces positive results, which in turn become the reward for motivating good behavior. If you teach a child how to make her bed and how to enjoy the advantages of keeping a clean, well organized room, you have given her a lesson on how to impose her will over chaos to her favor. As she matures, she internalizes these teachings, preferring a clean, organized room to a messy, chaotic one, and she has what is called self-discipline.
5. Free-will is more difficult to choose than stagnation: Sometimes we don’t take action, not because we cannot, but because we will not. The reasons for not taking action are fairly compelling. Doing what it takes to get out of a bad situation can often entail immense suffering. I had a student, for example, who came here from Japan. She lived with her American boyfriend in a nice Beverly Hills apartment and she confided with me that she no longer loved him as a woman loves a man but as a mother loves a child. She wanted to move out, but it was difficult to do so in mid-semester and to most likely live in a less desirable place. And worse, she did not have the heart to crush him with the truth about her feelings for him. But do so she did. She suffered a lot upfront, as it were, but saved herself, and the man she had been living with, a lot more grief they would have afflicted them had she dragged the relationship out. I admire her courage. The pain to make such a move reminds me of a TV show I watched as a child,Adam 12. In one episode, paramedics were called to save a man who was being crushed by a fallen telephone pole. The victim of the accident was smiling with relief as the pole weighed on his ribs and said, “It’s funny, it doesn’t hurt that much.” But one of the paramedics had bad news: While the pain wasn’t so bad now, he explained, it would become unbearable when the fire department crew lifted the pole off his ribs. Whenever we need to unshackle ourselves from a bad situation or a self-destructive habit, the pain is as overwhelming as having a telephone pole being lifted off our ribs. In the long-run we’re better off, of course, but the immediate pain is so unbearable that many of us choose to stay right where we are. As we slowly die under whatever it is that is crushing us, we lose more and more of our free will until our condition becomes inevitable.

 

 

Part Two. What Is Frankl’s Ultimatum?

 Be worthy of your suffering. In the news, we read of a man in Albany, New York, who was arrested for throwing a Molotov cocktail inside a Taco Bell drive-through window. His reason? He was enraged earlier that there wasn't enough meat in his chalupa.

One. Ultimatum: Either we must be worthy of our suffering, or we will despise our lives. For Frankl, there is no inbetween: Either our hearts are courageous, giving, and compassionate, or they are cowardly, bitter, and pessimistic. The purpose in life is to journey from the latter to the former.

Two. Example in the book: Throughout Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl urges us over and over to be worthy of our suffering. He writes about a man in the camps who eventually saw his life as a sacrifice so that his loved ones could live and knowing that his death would benefit others, his death and suffering gave him meaning. In another example, Frankl talks to a rabbi who is overcome with bitterness and self-pity over the death of his children who died in the concentration camps. Frankl discovers that the rabbi’s real grief is that he feels his life lacks virtue, the kind that he knew would bring his children to heaven, would make him unworthy of meeting them in the afterlife. And that was the meaning Frankl helped the rabbi find: to devote his life to being worthy of someday joining his children in heaven.

Three. The Deathbed Test: Frankl also talks about the woman who attempted suicide after her younger son died and she was left with her older son, who was afflicted with infantile paralysis. The mother actually had tried to commit suicide with her paralytic son and it was her son, wanting to live in spite of his debilitation, who had stopped her.

Frankl conducted a group therapy session in which he asked another woman, thirty years of age, to imagine herself at eighty on her deathbed judging her own existence. She saw that her life had been devoted to trifles and vanity. Frankl quotes her exactly: “Oh, I married a millionaire, I had an easy life full of wealth, and I lived it up! I flirted with men; I teased them! But now I am eighty; I have no children of my own. Looking back as an old woman, I cannot see what all that was for; actually, I must say, my life was a failure!” Contrasting her life with the rich thirty-year-old, the mother of the paralyzed son that making a fuller life for her crippled son was her meaning, and even a privilege, and she learned that embracing her struggle to help her son with a entirely different attitude was the beginning of her freeing herself from her suicidal depression.

Frankl presented the mother with a moral choice: Either be resigned to a meaningless, self-absorbed existence or find meaning through devotion to her son.

Four. To be worthy of our suffering, we must see ourselves as being needed in the world, not as primarily consumers of pleasure.

Ninety-nine percent of the human race does not want to embrace suffering in the service to the world, but as Frankl writes: “The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity—even under the most difficult circumstances—to add a deeper meaning to his life. It may remain brave, dignified and unselfish. Or in the bitter fight for self-preservation he may forget his human dignity and become no more than an animal.”

Five. Choosing the courageous life, one that makes us worthy of our suffering, is rare:

Frankl has no illusions about the difficulty of choosing a meaningful, brave, dignified, unselfish life over a shameful, undignified one.

Most prisoners in the concentration camps took the wide road to hell, surrendering to base self-preservation and apathy while only a small percentage traveled the narrow road to heaven and found meaning. As Frankl writes:

It is true that only a few people are capable of reaching such high moral standards. Of the prisoners only a few kept their full inner liberty and obtained those values which their suffering afforded, but even one such example is sufficient proof that man’s inner strength may raise him above his outward fate. Such men are not only in concentration camps. Everywhere man is confronted with fate, with the chance of achieving something through his own suffering.

Frankl makes his ultimatum clear. We can choose a life of empty despair or one of meaning and most choose the former. It is the choice, we can safely infer, of the masses the hordes who distract themselves with bread and circus.

Part Three. The Bare Existence Vs. the Common Life

In the book's opening narrative, Frankl shows people being stripped of everything, their possessions and identity, and being forced to find out who they really are.

Steps Toward a Bare Existence

Selection process ( based on who's healthy and who's not) in the concentration camps pits human vs. human. Everyone is competing against everyone else to live. There is only one god for many and that god is death and the only thing to say to death is "Not today." People did all they could, no matter how ruthless, to say to death, "Not today, Death."

Morals become irrelevant: "The best of us did not return."

There are 3 phases in the camps.

The first is shock. How can this really be happening? This is surreal. This is a nightmare from which I must wake up. In this state, there is the "delusion of reprieve." We believe we will be rescued and that the evil will stop.

In the state of shock, we cling to our former selves, or try to, and we go into denial over what is happening to us.

Gradually, we see that our attempts are feeble, ridiculous even, and we are "overcome by a grim sense of humor. We knew that we had nothing to lose except our ridiculously naked lives."

It's like being told the world is going to end on Saturday and saying, "It can't end Saturday because my eBay auction isn't over until Sunday."

As we accept our crazy condition, we develop a cold curiosity as if we were studying a horror movie from afar.

None of these reactions are abnormal. In fact, an abnormal reaction to an abnormal event is NORMAL.

In the second phase, the prisoner becomes hardened and numb to suffering, his own, and others'. He develops a condition known as apathy. He no longer cares about anything. He "surrounds himself in a necessary protective shell."

The third reaction occurs after release from the camps. Frankl call is "depersonalization."

People become disaffected, emotionally withdrawn. Some become angry at the world and say, "Look what the world has done to me. It's my right to return the favor. I shall exact revenge on the world." From thereon, Frankl started his life afresh.

Other "moral deformities" included bitterness and disillusionment.

Many become bitter because people from their old world could not imagine their hell and assumed everyone suffered the same hell. Their townspeople's failure of imagination and empathy sent many of the freed prisoners into seething bitterness.

Disillusionment was with the universe or with fate itself, that we lived in a world in which senseless suffering without limits could be allowed. This could make many reject the idea of a God.

For Frankl, his faith in God intensified.

Frankl is stripped of everything, stripped to a naked existence. After he is freed he wanders in the wilderness, and he calls out to God from his "narrow prison." And God answers him from the "freedom of space."

Can we believe in God in such an aftermath? Whether we can or not, one thing for sure: Being stripped to our naked existence, we lose our facade, our pretensions. Either we become primitives, animals, survivalists, throwing morals out the window, or, like Frankl, we become our Higher Selves, courageous, meaning-filled souls. 

Most of us are not stripped to our bare existence. Most of us lead the common life.

The Common Life: Characteristics

One. Coveting others' achievements and possessions. The result of this coveting is that we're never happy with what we have and we resent with great envy the idea that others enjoy life's niceties more than we do.

Adorning ourselves with pretentiousness and fakery. We want to project a pleasing image to others to convince them that we are happy even though we are not. In fact we are miserable and lonely, yet we continue to project a facade that tells a different story about us. This story or facade is what we obsess over while we distract ourselves from the hell within us.

Self-esteem inflation and other forms of self-deception. There is a huge gap between our inflated self-image and the rather pedestrian talents and competence. Studies show a few people full of anxiety and doubt have the highest talent and competence, not the inflated self-esteemers.

Fondness for BS over the truth. Most people BS so much they don't even have a model of being real and honest so they don't even know how to be real.

 

Man’s Search for Meaning Lesson #1: It's Impossible to Discuss Meaning without Specificity and Context

Part One. Essay 1: Man’s Search for Meaning

Option One

In a 6-page essay, argue whether or not we can overcome the "existential vacuum" by finding meaning as prescribed by Frankl or if "meaning" is merely an illusion that "keeps us going." Include no fewer than 4 research sources for your Works Cited page.

What is the "existential vacuum"?

It's a wasted life. If you're spending more than 5 minutes a day on Facebook playing stupid games like Bubble Shooter, Trollface Launch, or Whack Your Boss, you're most definitely wasting your life and therefore languishing inside the existential vacuum.

It's the anxiety you suffer when in the back of your mind you know you're wasting your life and that life is passing you by. By life I mean a MEANINGFUL LIFE.

A wasted life is mindless reptition of the same mistakes over and over again.

Some couples break up and re-unite for ten years until they finally get married to get a divorce.

Americans typically go on 10 diets in a lifetime and get fatter every time but this failure doesn't stop them from going on a new diet. 

A wasted life is dedicated to materialism, a form of egotism. 

A wasted life is dedicated to superficial distractions. 

Maybe I shouldn't teach this book. Not all the time, but sometimes I enjoy the existential vacuum.

I drive an expensive car. I could sell it, by a cheap car, and use the leftover money to feed the poor, but I don't.

Some would argue only people whose lives are rich in meaning and who totally believe in Frankl's book are qualified to teach it.

But I disagree. Sometimes a cynical, highly-flawed person makes a better teacher than the upright true believe because the cynic makes you see both sides of meaning, the cynic's disbelief and the acolyte's belief. An acolyte is a follower of a doctrine. 

 

Option Two

In a 6-page essay, contrast psychotherapy and logotherapy in an argumentative essay format. Include no fewer than 4 research sources for your Works Cited page.

 

Part Two. Frankl’s Central Argument in 3 Sentences

No matter the circumstances, we all have the free will and therefore the responsibility to choose a dignified, meaningful life in the face of even the worst suffering. Failure to create a meaningful life for ourselves will result in the existential vacuum or unbearable emptiness. Without meaning we will try to fill the gnawing void with misguided distractions that will destroy us.

Part Three. There are 3 points of view regarding Frankl’s message

1. Kool-Aid Drinkers or Cheerleaders: We embrace his message without having a specific understanding of it, so all we can do is recycle feel-good clichés and hackneyed truisms about living a meaningful life. People who become cheerleaders for a cause without rigorous questioning are called many things: true believers, homers, Kool-Aid Drinkers, clones, ditto-heads. Such people tend to be mediocrities or ciphers, nonentities, who wish to hide their vapid personalities by losing themselves in a cause that is larger and more glorious than they will ever be on their own.
2. Cynics or Nihilists: We dismiss the idea of meaning as a fool’s illusion, a societal construction. There is no meaning. We do what makes us happy, what makes us tick, what gets us out of bed in the morning. There is no moral absolute, just doing things relative to our happiness. Many cynics will simply see life as a cruel joke from which we must insulate ourselves with brain-numbing distractions and cheap thrills. Many nihilists will devote their lives to pleasure, hedonism, and egotism because there is no meaning. Some people argue that a lot of nihilists know there is meaning but deny it to justify a lazy, irresponsible, head-in-the-sand life. 
3. Open-Minded Skeptic: With a specific understanding of Frankl’s terms, the OMS may, or may not, accept some of Frankl’s message with certain conditions or caveats. This latter point of view is, in my opinion, the most reasonable and sophisticated for reasons we will now look at:

 

 

Part Three. Evaluating Frankl’s Message Without Being His Cheerleader or a Cynic

The problem isn’t the message. Man's Search for Meaning contains a great message, indisputable in many ways. The problem is threefold:

The Problem of Specificity

Specificity: dealing with specific notions of meaning, free will, responsibility, to name a few. Without specifics, we’re simply rehashing feel-good clichés. As a result, the level of writing is fifth grade instead of college. We must avoid writing like fifth graders.

When dealing with terms like meaning, free will, responsibility, and other grandiose abstractions, we achieve specificity in several ways. Here are a few:

One. Be skeptical of clichés, overused terms and phrases like “think outside the box,” which is, ironically, so “inside the box.” 

 

Here’s an example of the term meaning being reduced to a cliché:  A man says, “My family is my meaning. Taking care of them, providing for them, that is my meaning. So don’t talk to me about meaning.”

This is a cliché that doesn’t mean anything. In fact, this man may work his butt off for his wife and children to the point that his life is one thing: MAMMAP—make as much money as possible. There’s good reason to make lots of money. It’s helpful, but it doesn’t define meaning. In fact, this man may be teaching his family that money is the elixir for all of life’s woes, thus afflicting his family with materialism and greed. In fact, this man may be addicted to work even as he becomes more and more emotionally disconnected from his family.

Here’s another example.

Someone says, “My faith in God gives me meaning.” That’s very possible, since in fact Frankl’s faith in God helped him find meaning in the concentration camps, but too many people engage in religious ritual and carry religious beliefs out of unquestioned habit. Meaning cannot be achieved by repetitious, unexamined behavior. Such behavior is mindless and being mindless cannot forge a path to meaning.

Here’s another example.

I derive meaning from my job, my career. We would be wise to gain meaning from our career, but too often our job title gives us a certain status and identity that becomes a mask. Take away our job and often we lose our identity; there’s no meaningful core behind the title, just an emptiness. You hear about professional athletes all the time who retire from their sport and then live a life of moral dissolution, becoming drug addicts and alcoholics. You hear of people retiring from any job and going into a depression. A lot of people die shortly after retirement.

 

Two. Turn away from the absolute and move toward the relative by positioning the term on a scale. In other words, see the gray or nuance of a definition. Don’t use the term meaning in terms of black and white such as your life either has meaning or it has no meaning. Rather, consider the idea of meaning moving up and down a scale.

 

We get into trouble when we talk about meaning as in Absolute Ultimate Meaning. Now we’ve turned meaning into this elusive Holy Grail, Elixir, or Chimera, a cure-all mirage.

Rather, we should look at meaning as relative on a scale. Instead of saying our life has meaning or does not meaning, we can say we are tending toward meaning or tending away from meaning.

Examples

A forty-five-year-old man, living with his mother, who sits in his pajamas all day while surfing the Internet and eating Hot Pockets is probably tending away from meaning. He’s probably trending away from meaning.

A woman who has devoted her life to rescuing dogs from cruel puppy mills is probably tending toward meaning. She’s probably trending toward meaning.

A wealthy doctor languishes in his unfurnished house two years after his wife left him, taking all the furniture with her. He’s probably low on the Meaning Scale, that is to say, he is trending away from meaning in his narcissistic self-pity.

Any kind of addictive behavior in which one is seeking oblivion and numbness and disengagement from others is probably tending away from meaning.  

 

Three. Put your term in a context or circumstance. Talking about meaning is difficult, so difficult I quit teaching this book several years ago, but a lesson on meaning can be down if it’s in a concrete context.

Example:

When Tennessee Williams the playwright became famous, he gave up writing, holed himself up in a hotel suite and ordered room service, champagne, and prostitutes until about six months into his debauchery he realized he was going crazy. He left the hotel, went to Mexico, and wrote his masterpiece A Streetcar Named Desire. For him, meaning was about struggle, hard work, and vocation. He discovered an important truth about meaning: The creative energy inside him to fulfill his artistic gifts had to be used; otherwise it would turn inward and kill him with self-destructive behavior. This is a truth Frankl witnessed in the concentration camps.

 

It’s difficult to imagine meaning existing at all in some circumstances. For example, a student came to my office to tell me she didn’t believe in meaning. This is an 18-year-old whose boyfriend drives a BMW M3. She explained that a starving 3-year-old girl in Ethiopia watching her family die of starvation and disease and knows she has just a few months left to live has no meaning. I think we can say that such a person finds little relevance in a discussion about meaning.

While there are no absolute definitions of meaning, or non-meaning, there are extreme circumstances that make us even wonder if meaning exists for everyone.

 

Four. Use negation, what the term is NOT. Abstractions like meaning, love, fulfillment, etc., can be effectively understood when we examine their negation, fallacies, and misguided definitions.

 

Examples of Negation:

Meaning is often not talking about meaning. We should quit right now, go home, drink beer, eat apple pie, and watch reruns of American Idol.

Why? Because with few exceptions, meaning is not talking about it. As we learned from the people of Thailand, if we live a rich life, we don’t think or talk too much. We’re too busy living. My cousin in Studio City seems like this. He’s a man with little thought or talk about meaning who lives a very full life.

However, Viktor Frankl was forced to think about meaning when he saw people lose or gain their humanity in the concentration camps. Under these extreme circumstances, he felt compelled to meditate on the effects of meaning, or its absence, in people’s lives. In other words, he’s earned the right to talk about meaning.

In his book he explains what meaning is NOT:

Meaning is not a panacea handed to you on a silver platter that instantly changes your life.

Meaning is not something your therapist can give you.

Meaning is not ONE THING that everyone finds.

Meaning is not something everyone is going to agree upon. The God of your religion that gives you meaning might very well be at war with the God of someone else’s religion.

 

 

Part Two. The Thirteen Tenets (Principles) from Man’s Search for Meaning

Before we examine disingenuous and sincere nihilism, we should first look at nihilism’s opposite, the belief in meaning as laid out by Viktor Frankl, of which there are thirteen major tenets:

1. The human condition is suffering and the only viable response to suffering is to find meaning. We must therefore acknowledge that there is a purpose in life, greater than the purpose we find in creative work and passive enjoyment, which “admits of but one possibility of high moral behavior: namely, in man’s attitude to his existence, an existence restricted by external forces.” It is imperative that we are motivated first and foremost by this higher purpose. Without a purpose, our life drags on day after day in a tiring monotony that we try to fill with consumerism, addictions, texting friends, etc.
2. “Man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind, even in such terrible conditions of psychic and physical stress” as was endured in the concentration camps. Acknowledging this freedom, we must defy being a “plaything of circumstance” and thus we must understand that “there is a danger inherent in the teaching of man’s ‘nothingbutness,’ the theory that man is nothing but the result of biological, psychological and sociological conditions, or the product of heredity and environment. Such a view of man makes a neurotic believe what he is prone to believe anyway, namely, that he is the pawn and victim of outer influences or inner circumstances.” We are neither pawn nor victim. Rather, we possess an inner freedom that cannot be lost no matter how extreme the circumstances. This inner freedom allows us to be worthy of our suffering. And being worthy of our suffering is the ultimatum life presents us: Either be worthy of our suffering, or not. 
3. Life presents us with the moral imperative to treat our life as something of significance and consequence and the converse is also true: We must not despise our lives and treat our lives as if they were of no consequence at all. As Frankl writes: “And there were always choices to make. Every day, every hour, offered the opportunity make a decision, a decision which determined whether you would or would not submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, your inner freedom: which determined whether or not you would become the plaything of circumstance, renouncing freedom and dignity to become molded into the form of the typical inmate.”
4. There are moral absolutes in this world evidenced in part by Frankl dividing the world into two races of people, decent and indecent.
5. We have to do more than imagine a life of meaning; we must actually live it. Frankl writes: “Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.” We are additionally accountable for the responsibilities life demands of us.
6. We must embrace suffering, the finiteness of life, and death to maximize and complete our life. “Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete.”
7. We must radically alter our attitude by changing our orientation from “What do I expect from life?” to “What does life expect from me?” This question brings up our number one responsibility in life, to embrace meaning when it knocks on our door. We don’t choose meaning; meaning chooses us.
8. There is no One Size Fits All Meaning. Every person’s meaning is specific to his or her circumstances.
9. We must confront the emotions that seem so overwhelming; otherwise those emotions will devour us. Quoting from Spinoza, Frankl writes: “Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it.” It’s another way of saying that when we confront our demons, they often lose their power over us.
10. We must not abuse and squander freedom by imitating our oppressors. For example, if our boss abuses us, we should not later in life abuse our workers when we ascend to positions of high authority.
11. Meaning cannot be found within ourselves; it must be found in the world. As Frankl writes: “By declaring that man is responsible and must actualize the potential meaning of his life, I wish to stress that the true meaning of life is to be discovered in the world rather than within man or his own psyche, as though it were a closed system. I have termed this constitutive characteristic “the self-transcendence of human existence.” It denotes the fact that being human always points, and is directed, to something, or someone, other than oneself—be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter. The more one forgets himself—by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love—the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself. What is called self-actualization is not an attainable aim at all, for the simple reason that the more one would strive for it, the more he would miss it. In other words, self-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence.”
12. No matter how despicable and worthless our lives have been, we are called to redeem ourselves by living out the essential rule of logotherapy: “Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!”
13. Only a few people are capable of reaching great spiritual heights but the difficulty and small percentage of people who do reach such great heights does not abnegate our responsibility for pursuing a life of higher meaning.

 

 

 

Revised Lesson Ideas for Man's Search for Meaning: May 18, 2011

Each lecture is a contrast essay or perhaps an excerise in point/counterpoint or refutation. Take the cynical worldview and refute with Frankl's.

One. Battle between Meaning Vs. the Cynicism of Nothingbutness and Determinism

Two. Bare Existence Vs. the Common Life and the Existential Vacuum

Three. Misguided Self-Preservation Vs. Purposeful Self-Preservation (Death in Tehran)

Four. Logotherapy Vs. Psychotherapy and Truth from Within Vs. Imposed Dogma; you don’t choose meaning; meaning finds you

Five.  Is Suffering Senseless as Bart Ehrman argues or can we find meaning from it? Also: Frankl’s Moral Code (We must be worthy of our suffering. What’s that mean?) 12 Tenets 

 

Man's Search for Meaning Essay Assignments Addendum

Option One

In a 5-page essay, argue whether or not we can overcome the "existential vacuum" by finding meaning as prescribed by Frankl or if "meaning" is merely an illusion that "keeps us going."Include no fewer than 4 research sources for your Works Cited page.

Option Two

In a 5-page essay, contrast psychotherapy and logotherapy. Include no fewer than 4 research sources for your Works Cited page.

Man's Search for Meaning Essay Options

Option 1: Man’s Search for Meaning

In a 5-page research paper, explain the search for meaning in the face of the crisis that Frankl describes in his book. What are the consequences of both failing and succeeding in this search?

Your essay should have a salient introductory paragraph, which can be as long as a page; a thesis paragraph with at least four or five mapping components; no fewer than eight body paragraphs, each paragraph about a half page; and a brief conclusion.

Paragraph 1: Introduction

Paragraph 2: Thesis with 4 or 5 mapping components

Paragraphs 3-9: Elaborate on your mapping components 

Paragraph 10: Conclusion in which you restate your thesis with rhetorical power

Final Page: Works Cited with no fewer than 4 sources

Successful papers will use personal examples to illustrate the major points. Be sure to have a Works Cited page with at least 4 sources.

Option 2: Variation of Essay 1:

Contrast two people. One suffers from the "existential vacuum" discussed in Man's Search for Meaning. The other person, who embraces meaning and higher purpose, is worthy of his or her suffering. Your essay must incorporate ideas and terminology from Frankl's book. 

Your outline might look like this:

In your first page summarize Frankl's major points. 

Two and a half pages profile the person who, living without meaning, exists in the "existential vacuum." 

Two and half pages profile someone whose life is full of meaning.

Last paragraph: Conclusion. 

Final Page: Works Cited with no fewer than 4 sources

Successful papers will use personal examples to illustrate the major points. Be sure to have a Works Cited page with at least 4 sources.

Option 3: Groundhog Day

Write an analysis of Phil Connors' journey from damnation to redemption in the context of the existential vacuum and adopting the right attitude as they are presented in Man's Search for Meaning. Your essay must be 5 pages with a sixth page, the Works Cited page, including a minimum of 4 sources.

Option 4: Refution Essay

Using a refutation essay format, argue for or against the idea that Frankl's book is not persuasive for many reasons not the least of which most people cannot be as heroic as Frankl, most of us don't have the same "free will" that Frankl exercises, that in fact "free will" is an illusion, and that there really is no meaning since meaning is, like free will, an illusion.

The Foundation of All Your Essays: Thesis Statement: A meaningful assertion that can be demonstrated with logic and examples. 

A Successful Thesis Is Both Demonstrable and Provocative

A Failed Thesis May be Demonstrable but Is Too Obvious

Examples of  Failed Thesis

A life without meaning is really horrible.

Without meaning, our lives are drab and empty.

To live a life of meaning, we must give up our fears and superficial desires. 

Better, More Successful Thesis Examples:

The existential vacuum discussed in Man's Search for Meaning is both insidious and pernicious because it is so common and thus accepted; we often suffer from it without knowing it; the existential vacuum becomes self-feeding; and it becomes habitual, resulting in a form of learned helplessness.

Now that I have finished reading Man's Search for Meaning I am frightened to the marrow of my bones because now I realize that if I continue with my mediocre, superficial existence, my life will be comprised of three curses: One, I will be compelled to distract myself from the "existential vacuum" by "pissing my life away on nonsense," resulting in addictive, self-destructive behavior. Two, I will lose my individuality as I allow marketing forces to determine my aspirations and desires. Three, I will find that my whole life has been wasted and that the one emotion that defines my existence on this planet is this: regret, a knife that will twist and turn until I take my last breath. 

Viktor Frankl would have us believe that we choose who we are by adopting either the right or wrong attitude in the face of suffering, but his thesis is an illusion for what we perceive as a "choice" is actually predetermined mostly by biological and environmental forces beyond our control. Indeed, Frankl's "choice" to be heroic in the face of insurmountable suffering of the concentration camps was not a "choice" at all. Rather, he was programmed to be a good person from his biological code and his family's moralistic upbringing. Thus the idea that we have free will is a fallacy. In truth our lives are governed by determinism evidenced by ___________, ___________, ____________, and ______________. 

My friend Fedor is worthy of his suffering evidenced by _________, _________, _________, and _________ while my cousin Xavier is abysmally not worthy of his suffering evidenced by ___________, ___________, _____________, and _____________. 

 

Man’s Search for Meaning Lesson #4: What Are the Impediments to Finding Meaning?

Part One. The Cult of Youth Denies That Our Lives Our Finite

Viktor Frankl makes it clear that we must have a sense of our finiteness and our limitations to find meaning. If we live day to day with no ultimate goal in mind, we will find ourselves trapped in a “deformed time” warp and begin to “decay,” our spirits starving from lack of meaning. A word that defines this phenomenon is acedia, the condition of apathy and lethargy resulting from a lack of purpose and focus. I can remember my friend and I, when we were about ten, argued with our mothers who both wanted us to go to summer school. We made our case that we deserved a rest, won the argument, and did not have to attend school during the summer months. For the month of June, we were fine, but as late July set in, we were miserably bored and aching for the school year to begin. Daily watching of Mr. Ed, Kimba the White Lion, and Speed Racer did little to disrupt the agonizing monotony. We were jealous of our friends who went to summer school and listened enviously as they described their projects, guitar lessons, cooking classes, and sports activities. They had what we didn’t have. A daily focus on something that required discipline and commitment. We knew deep down they were getting something out of their summer that we weren’t: an opportunity to learn and grow as human beings.

One of the strongest renderings I’ve seen of the despair of living a provisional day to day existence is Groundhog Day in which Bill Murray plays a misanthrope, Phil Connors, who is fated to live is despairing, empty life over and over, seemingly for eternity, unless he can connect with the human race and grow up beyond his adolescent self-absorption.

 

Two. The Cult of Youth Leads to stagnation, the centripetal cycle: In Thomas S. Hibbs’ Shows About Nothing: Nihilism in Popular Culture from The Exorcist to Seinfeld, he contrasts the many films and TV shows that show characters trapped in a cycle of “entrapment” in which the characters never learn freedom and maturity with Phil Connors, who breaks out of his recurring private hell: “Predictably, Murray eventually learns the difference between love and self-gratification and comes to acknowledge the humanity of others.”

 The private hell of sloth and stunted emotional growth is indeed a sort of time warp, referred to by both Frankl and Hibbs. This time warp is the direct result of the obsession with youth as the highest ideal, a time for which we must always place ourselves. Obsessing over one phase of life, the time of adolescence, has dangerous consequences that pertain to a failed search for meaning. For one, as explained in Joseph Epstein’s essay, “The Perpetual Adolescent,” we lose a meaningful narrative to our existence. As Epstein writes:

Life in that different day was felt to observe the human equivalent of the Aristotelian unities: to have, like a good drama, a beginning, middle, and end. Each part, it was understood, had its own advantages and detractions, but the middle--adulthood--was the lengthiest and most earnest part, where everything serious happened and much was at stake. To violate the boundaries of any of the three divisions of life was to go against what was natural and thereby to appear unseemly, to put one's world somehow out of joint, to be, let us face it, a touch, and perhaps more than a touch, grotesque.

Epstein argues that is in adulthood where so much is at stake, but we forego the meaning of adulthood if we intractably cocoon ourselves in the attitude and façade of adolescence. This façade is actually encouraged by the majority of advertising. Epstein explains:

All this is reinforced by the play of market forces, which strongly encourage the mythical dream of perpetual youthfulness. The promise behind 95 percent of all advertising is that of recaptured youth, whose deeper promise is lots more sex yet to go. The ads for the $5,000 wristwatch, the $80,000 car, the khakis, the vodka, the pharmaceuticals to regrow hair and recapture ardor, all whisper display me, drive me, wear me, drink me, swallow me, and you stop the clock--youth, Baby, is yours.

Our longings for eternal adolescence, Epstein argues, are reflected not just in our consumer habits but in our favorite TV programs.

 

Three. Seinfeld is about centripetal time: One of the most popular sitcoms ever, Seinfeld, captures our hunger to live in a time warp where no one grows up, no one assumes responsibility, and no one holds anyone to a high aspirations. If anything, one’s low aspirations become a badge of honor. It is a form of catastrophic self-betrayal to never aspire to anything far-reaching, to capitulate to a slacker mentality, and to veil one’s shortcomings behind a veneer of adolescent youthfulness. As Epstein writes:

The greatest sins, Santayana thought, are those that set out to strangle human nature. This is of course what is being done in cultivating perpetual adolescence, while putting off maturity for as long as possible. Maturity provides a more articulated sense of the ebb and flow, the ups and downs, of life, a more subtly reticulated graph of human possibility. Above all, it values a clear and fit conception of reality. Maturity is ever cognizant that the clock is running, life is finite, and among the greatest mistakes is to believe otherwise. Maturity doesn't exclude playfulness or high humor. Far from it. The mature understand that the bitterest joke of all is that the quickest way to grow old lies in the hopeless attempt to stay forever young.

Epstein and Frankl agree that it is dangerous to blind oneself from the finite and to live perpetually a warped time bubble in which one is trapped in a vacuum.

 

Four. Centripetal time is about “nothingbutness.” Not so, argues Frankl. He writes “there is a danger inherent in the teaching of man’s ‘nothingbutness,” the theory that man is nothing but the result of biological, psychological and sociological conditions, or the product of heredity and environment. Such a view of man makes a neurotic believe what he is prone to believe anyway, namely, that he is the pawn and victim of outer influences or inner circumstances. This neurotic fatalism is fostered and strengthened by a psychotherapy which denies man is free.”

The appeal of this “nothingbutness,” as Frankl calls it, is that is suggests a life of freedom, freedom to do nothing, which is really no freedom at all. Surrendering to hopelessness and sloth is hardly a worthy definition of freedom. Real freedom, Frankl argues, is our responsibility to find meaning in the face of suffering. However, our freedom is not unlimited. As Frankl explains: “To be sure, a human being is a finite thing, and his freedom is restricted. It is not freedom from conditions, but it is freedom to take a stand toward the conditions.”

Five. The cult of adolescence encourages nihilism, the belief that we are helpless and doomed to a life of stagnation, so this cult dismisses the idea of maturity and meaning and to embrace nihilism as one’s core belief.

But is nihilism really a belief, that is, something that someone really believes is real, or is it a rationalization for choosing to take the easy way out? Take the example of a student I had ten years ago or so. Against her father’s wishes, she enrolled in college to become an education major. He didn’t believe in college or education of any kind, both of which he called a “waste of time.” He was an alcoholic, she explained in one of her essays. He’d drink beer and do bench presses in the garage while she got ready in her bedroom to go to sleep. She wrote that sometimes he’d come in with alcohol on his breath, look down at her while she feigned sleep, and shouted, “Think you’re better than me!” Then he’d look up at himself in her mirror, flex his muscles, take a swig of beer, and return to the garage to resume with his chest workout.

Did he really believe education was a farce or was he rationalization away his own fear of it and his own lack of discipline? It seems his behavior was guided less by belief and more by self-justification and delusion. And these attributes impeded her father’s search for finding meaning, for maturing, and as such he was jealous of her daughter’s desire to carve a better place in her life.

Six. Maturity, not adolescence, leads to meaning.

My student soon after told me she planned on moving out of her father’s house to escape his constant hostility. Her focus and commitment to her education in the face of her father’s discouragement and hostility attests to her strong character and maturity.

In fact, it is clear that to find meaning, in the sense that Frankl describes it, we must become mature. The more meaning we have, the more mature we are. And vice versa. Therefore, we cannot talk about a Meaning Scale without talking about a Maturity Scale.

 

Part Two. Nihilism is an obstacle to achieving meaning

One. Nihilism is Anti-Frankl: Generally speaking, nihilism is against everything Viktor Frankl stands for because it is a philosophy that explicitly states there is no meaning, that values are relative, that the way we are is the product of environmental and biological factors and we are helpless in shaping who we are, which is essentially animals, and that since we experience nothing after death, “anything goes.” Additionally, nihilism tells us, “morality” is a middle-class affectation, a cunning invention of the Powers at Be to keep the masses, the peasants, and the dumb, toothy hordes in check. There are variations of this view but it seems there are two major divides of nihilism, disingenuous and sincere. Both forms can impede our search for meaning but the former is the far more pernicious variety while the sincere form, while providing a stumbling block, can actually strengthen our search for meaning.

 

Two. Nihilism means we have no free will, no freedom: We have no freedom to choose our dignity or a life of high moral purpose. There is no purpose in life except for the maniacal mirages and chimeras that we become obsessed with unless we reasonably accept the “nothingness” of existence. Our lives are of no consequence at all and any our belief in our consequential existence is a sign of phony sanctimony and delusional grandeur.

Three. One cause of nihilism is depersonalization: Viktor Frankl writes about the forces that led to this type of nihilism in the concentration camps. The first cause of nihilism was the loss one’s individuality and self-respect leading to depersonalization. As Frankl writes:

A man’s character became involved to the point that he was caught in a mental turmoil which threatened all the values he held and threw them into doubt. Under the influence of a world which no longer recognized the value of human life and human dignity, which had robbed man of his will and had made him an object to be exterminated (having planned, however, to make full use of him first—to the last ounce of his physical resources)—under this influence the personal ego finally suffered a loss of values. If the man in the concentration camp did not struggle against this in a last effort to save his self-respect, he lost the feeling of being an individual, a being with a mind, with inner freedom and personal value. He thought of himself then as only a part of an enormous mass of people: his existence descended to the level of animal life. The men were herded—sometimes to one place then to another; sometimes driven together, then apart—like a flock of sheep without a thought or a will of their own. A small but dangerous pack watched them from all sides, well versed in methods of torture and sadism. They drove the herd incessantly, backwards and forwards, with shouts, kicks and blows. And we, the sheep, thought of two things only—how to evade the bad dogs and how to get a little food.

Four. Other causes are fear, loss of faith in the future, and bitterness. The second cause of nihilism is fear, the kind that made camp inmates believe they had no free will but were the pawns of merciless fate. Such feelings led to apathy and helplessness and in this state it was impossible to find any meaning in their suffering.

 

Nihilism’s third cause is losing faith in the future, which, Frankl says, made the prisoners lose their “spiritual hold.” Once a prisoner gave up any possibility of hope in his future, his system would shut down and he would accelerate his own death. Over and over, Frankl gives examples of prisoners who died shortly after losing hope for their freedom.

Finally, bitterness and disillusionment experienced by the prisoners when they returned to their former life contributed to nihilism. They became bitter when after they returned to their home towns, they met people who, ignorant of the atrocities the prisoners faced, seemed lacking in empathy and the imagination to comprehend the suffering endured by the survivors. And they became disillusioned with their God or life itself when they could not reconcile the amount of cruelty they had witnessed with a life-affirming worldview regarding God, fate, or both.

 

These prisoners and survivors of the concentration camp put up no pseudo-intellectual façade of nihilism; they had through their experiences become nihilistic to the bone.

 

Part Three. Consumerism Impedes Our Meaning Quest: No doubt our DNA is coded for self-preservation, the instinct to ferociously pursue and protect our self-interests. But in Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl explains that this coding does not totally define us. In fact, if we ignore our responsibility to find meaning, and the values required to create meaning, our self-interest degrades us into an animal existence stripped of all dignity as we become a corrupt, denigrated version of ourselves. A wise form of self-interest, according to Frankl, focuses on an ultimate goal in life.

 

Two. Self-Interest Diminishes When We Have a Future Goal: To define ultimate, Frankl explains the two meanings of the Latin word finis, “the end or the finish, and a goal to reach.” If we cannot reach for a higher goal, a commitment to some higher ideal greater than ourselves, he says, we will be trapped in the cycle of living a day to day “provisional” existence. When existence becomes “provisional,” as Frankl calls it, we live only to survive and kill time as we having nothing to look forward to. In such a state, our lives become consumed by self-interest and apathy as we turn inward, recoiling from the burden of ongoing suffering. Always feeling burdened by overwhelming hardships, we become fatigued and what little energy we have is devoted to placating ourselves and filling the “existential vacuum.”

 

Three. Filling the Existential Vacuum with Consumerism

The misguided attempts at filling this vacuum are, Frankl writes, forms of “neurotic” behavior, which include all sorts of distractions, the “Sunday drive” phenomenon in which people drive because they are bored and consumer addictions, which have become worse since Man’s Search for Meaning was first published.  The danger of being bored and living a provisional day to day existence is that we focus too much on our misery and the selfish attempts to quell our misery backfire and make our condition worse and worse. Selfishness as a reaction to the existential vacuum endangers us by creating a hoarding impulse, other wise known as a consumer addiction; asserting vain displays of Darwinian superiority over others, and exaggerating our suffering to the point that we see our personal distress as especially bad, a type of exceptional pain that compels us to ignore the pain of others and assume the temperament of a petulant malcontent. Selfishness can be about investing all our energy on devoting our thoughts to ourselves.

 

Four. The Three Stages of Consumerism. In the realm of consumer addiction, it appears there are three stages of the disease. Stage One is the ways we waste our time “researching” sales and rationalizing unnecessary purchases within limits that don’t endanger our finances. Stage Two is taking the addiction so that our basic needs our sacrificed. And Stage Three is engaging in outright sociopathic behavior to get what we want.

I appear to be an example of Stage One. I relish in the exhilarating delights of consumerism as much as the next person and as a result I have seen how consumerism can intoxicate and make me behave irrationally, exhibiting behaviors that do not protect my self-interests. I once bought a $300 watch, for example, and swore as was on a watch-buying hiatus, for at least six months, but then a $400 that I had been lusting over suddenly became available for $130. This was too good to be true. I violated my self-sworn hiatus and explained to my wife that by purchasing a watch that I had planned on buying anyway, the cheaper price was in essence giving me $270. It felt like some invisible lever had placed $270 cash in my hand after I bought the watch. Let me repeat that. After paying $130 on a watch I wasn’t supposed to buy at that time, I felt like had been paid money to buy it. When I explained this to my wife, she explained that I suffered from a condition known as “creative budgeting,” a form of self-justifying my compulsive purchases. Fortunately, my family obligations have curbed my appetite for indulging my watch obsession so that I still have money for my nine-month twin girls’ diapers, formula, and organic baby food.

Of course, the more destructive form of selfishness, Stage Two, causes people to undermine their priorities so that they buy the object of their desire but have no money left for basic necessities. I can recall the student essay I read about a young man who was hell-bent on living in the chic condo in Brentwood and leasing a BMW. However, he had no money for food and clothes, so he depended on his siblings’ hand-me-downs and a diet of crackers and sardines. According to Frankl, if this young man had an ultimate purpose in life, he would not be compelled to buy things he cannot afford. His overspending is a misguided attempt to fill the void.

When the void becomes truly aching and the person in question has no scruples whatsoever, we’ve arrived at Stage Three, the level of the sociopath.  About twenty years ago, a student wrote an essay about her sister whose fiancé was a struggling auto mechanic. The bride to be cancelled her wedding three times because she wanted her fiancé to have more money to make the wedding more elaborate. But the sociopathic element isn’t evident until we consider that this bride to be was, months before her wedding, already planning on divorcing her fiancé. What she wanted from him was a posh ceremony, nothing more, and she was willing to trick him into believing she cared about him enough to make a marriage commitment if doing so got her what she wanted.

Five. Consumerism as an expression of dominance.

Selfishness isn’t just about hoarding and desire for material things. It’s also about the need to assert dominance over others. We’re talking about the Darwinian instinct gone awry when compounded by the compulsions of the ego. When real meaning is replaced with false meaning, like the striving to be superior to others, these misguided attempts often lead to self-destruction. For example, one of my students had a friend, a man in his early twenties, who bought a very fast car, a Subaru WRX STI, and his obsession with having the fastest car in town compelled him to lighten it by removing the front passenger seat. Where there was once a leather-bound cushion, there was now a metal stub, not a comfortable arrangement for the young man’s girlfriend who, after one insufferable ride, gave him an ultimatum: Put the seat back or I’m gone. She ended up leaving him.

Compromising relationships because of the obsession with power is bad enough, but this obsession can even be fatal as one student explained to the class: He and his father were shopping one summer at a bazaar in Buenos Aires. The temperature was over 105 degrees and there was an old woman wearing a full-length fur coat, presumably for no other reason than to show everyone how rich she was. The father and son noticed she was sweating profusely and her eyes rolled into the back of her head before she collapsed and died of heat stroke.

Six. Consumerism becomes a substitute for meaning.

Most of us don’t die a physical death from consumeristic addiction, but a spiritual death, one in which we substitute real meaning with false meaning, is more prevalent as described by Laurence Shames in The Hunger for More: Searching for Values in an Age of Greed. As he explains:

People look to their goods not just of pleasure but for meaning. They want their stuff to tell them who they are. They ask that inanimate things, mere objects, serve as stand-ins for momentous notions. Not just pretty flowers but a built-in serenity is taken to exist in the pattern of a Laura Ashley wallpaper. Not just style but stateliness of person is presumed to be made manifest by a Ralph Lauren blazer. “Taste” becomes a sort of cult by whose expensive magic such eminently human traits as sensuality, dignity, even humor are transubstantiated into consumer goods; and since those traits are taken to exist in such readily accessible and uncomplicated form on store shelves, there is less reason to search for them in other people or even in oneself. People disappear into their clothes. Their conversation becomes merely a part of the ambience of the restaurants they frequent. The pen they write with is taken to be more revealing than what they might scrawl.

In the throes of consumerism, our soul appears to be leeched away by our shopping obsessions until the soul completely dissipates and is replaced entirely by our arsenal of products, a feeble bastion for warding off the existential vacuum. To drive his point home, Shames uses the example of two shopping fiends:

Shopping, for some, had become a macabre detour in the otherwise unstylish quest to find oneself. Consider the “Sonia Sister”—women who frequented designer Sonia Rykiel’s boutique at Henri Bendel in Manhattan, and who, according to the floor manager there, “gradually . . . bec[a]me obsessed with acquiring all the right pieces” and took on a “spooky resemblance to one another.” For them, the clothes became a sort of exoskeleton, which, as in the case of insects, was the sole protection and support of the gelatinous and trembling critter inside. When you bought “taste,” you bought yourself a personality, and it was that, over and above the much-blabbed-about “quality” of the goods, which justified the price.

Seven. Selfishness becomes an expression of an undeveloped personality.

The hunger for personality, identity, and meaning, and the misdirected ways we try to satisfy that hunger, makes us selfish. Of course, selfishness raises its ugly head in more ways than materialism and dominance. There is the simple lack of consideration for others, which requires all sorts of rules to be imposed where consideration for others is lacking. Take the example of gyms putting 20-minute limits on their cardio machine during peak hours so that some members don’t hog the cardio equipment, doing an exercise for two hours straight while a long line of members wait their turn. Or take the all-you-can-eat buffet that has a sign telling people to stand in an orderly line and avoid touching the buffet food with their hands.

There is also the selfish impulse to be heard, to lecture, to talk over everyone and never learn to listen to others.  Living insulated in a Universe of One is perhaps the ultimate selfishness.

So the selfish personality looks like this: He is someone whose needs must always be met; he is someone who constantly jockeys for attention; he is someone with in insatiable craving for power; he is someone forever hoarding his trinkets and trophies. This is not the picture of a happy person but a disturbed, lonely child, an adult suffering from arrested development. And once again we are looking at the Maturity Scale as a way of measuring our success, or failure, in finding meaning.

 

Part Four. How Do We Not Despise Our Lives?

 

One. We often treat our lives with contempt without even knowing it. Reckless self-indulgence. Self-admonishment is at times appropriate.

 

Two. Taking Self-Admonishment Too Far.

Viktor Frankl argues that we are responsible for our attitude in the face of tough circumstances, that we are not helpless pawns, that our decisions have consequences, and that we should not despise our lives or at the very least we should not treat ourselves with contempt. But I see that most of us do just that. I’ll resolve to stick to healthy diet, for example, and then go to a family event where I’ll eat three slices of pumpkin cheesecake and overall consume five hundred percent more calories than I had allocated myself. Or I’ll buy a scintillating watch I don’t need because “it’s so damn cheap I can’t afford not to buy it.” Other times I’ll condemn myself for road-raging after I had promised myself I’d be “chill on the road.” Or I’ll berate myself for using ill-advised language in front of my young children right after promising myself I would not contaminate their ears with my salty sailor tongue and then suffer the embarrassment of them repeating my words in front of others.

Three. Self-pity is a form of self-contempt. To a degree there is something normal about the way we admonish ourselves for it is natural that we will consistently fall short of our standards and ideals. But take some more extreme examples that go beyond self-admonishment. My Shakespeare professor once told the class about a wealthy surgeon he knew whose wife had left him. The wife let the surgeon keep the house, but she took all the furniture. When my professor visited the doctor three years after the divorce, he said he was surprised to find the doctor in a tattered robe and his house was empty, still unfurnished. As my professor tried to offer words of counsel to the doctor, the still grieving man, with dried saliva in his beard, was holding a calculator and whispering the cost of the furniture to himself over and over. My professor said, “The doctor was dead and there wasn’t a shrink big enough in this world who could help him.”

This doctor must have hated himself for not being able to shake himself loose from the sense of betrayal and self-pity that consumed him after his wife divorced him. Clearly, his reaction to the divorce was worse than the divorce itself.

Another example: My wife told me about a radio advice show in which a man called in and said upon driving home he could not go inside his house. He would park his car in the driveway and drink from a flask of whiskey while listening to the commotion between his wife and children inside. Only after being sufficiently brain-numbed from the alcohol could he muster the nerve to go inside his own house.

Clearly, in both examples, the two men hate their life. They despise themselves and they see themselves as enslaved men, shackled to demons they are convinced they cannot conquer. Furthermore, they see their suffering and life as completely meaningless and therefore they despise their lives.

 

Four. Feeling trapped and having lost control of our lives in the extremes rendered above, we hate who we are and who we’ve become. There are other, equally compelling, reasons for coming to a point of self-loathing.

 

Example. Often we see ourselves as helpless to an addiction that is ruining our life. Or we hate ourselves for screwing up at a job interview because of anxieties.

 

Five. Childish view of success, all or nothing, which tells us we must ascend to an extravagant level of wealth and fame; otherwise we are merely ciphers unworthy of the esteem of others, including our own.

 

Six. Frankl argues we are never totally helpless. No matter what the scenario, we are challenged in Man’s Search for Meaning to not surrender to these forces that would cause us to despise ourselves. It is one of  Frankl’s major tenets that we must reject the idea that we are completely helpless, lacking in self-control, and being subject to forces outside ourselves. We must not, he says, submit to powers that will steal our inner freedom. One of the dangerous consequences of submitting to those powers is that we will despise ourselves and come to believe, in error, that our lives are of no consequence. And why wouldn’t we come to this conclusion? Overcome with powerlessness and the sense of being a nonentity, what other emotions are there but ones of despair and self-hatred?

 

Seven. Frankl makes it clear that self-loathing is no option. In fact, we must live a dignified life, the very opposite of one full of self-hatred. For Frankl, the way out of self-hatred is not self-introspection but by finding a higher purpose, a way to fill the void with meaning. Only by working toward a higher purpose can we change our fundamental character and eventually become worthy of our suffering.

 

Part Five. Logotherapy: An attempt to find purpose as a way of eradicating self-loathing.

One. Meaning is not handed down to us on a silver platter.  Rather, we struggle through logotherapy to arrive at meaning based on our individual circumstances. As Frankl writes:

Logotherapy is neither teaching nor preaching. It is as far removed from logical reasoning as it is from moral exhortation. To put it figuratively, the role played by a logotherapist is that of an eye specialist rather than that of a painter. A painter tries to convey to us a picture of the world as he sees it; an ophthalmologist tries to enable us to see the world as it really is. The logotherapist’s role consists of widening and broadening the visual field of the patient so that the whole spectrum of potential meaning becomes conscious and visible to him.

How do we see the world as it really is when we are blinded by disgust, self-loathing, and self-pity? Frankl explains that one way of seeing is having a sense of doing something meaningful in our future. As an example, Frankl writes about his weariness in the camps, struggling day to day, and reaching a point where he had hit a wall, as it were, at the point of giving up:

I became disgusted with the state of affairs which compelled me, daily and hourly, to think of only such trivial things. I forced my thoughts to turn to another subject. Suddenly I saw myself standing on the platform of a well-lit, warm and pleasant lecture room. In front of me sat an attentive audience on comfortable upholstered seats. I was giving a lecture on the psychology of the concentration camp! All that oppressed me at that moment became objective, seen and described from the remote viewpoint of science. By this method I succeeded somehow in rising above the situation, above the sufferings of the moment, and I observed them as if they were already of the past. Both I and my troubles became the object of an interesting psychoscientific study undertaken by myself. What does Spinoza say in his Ethics?—“Affectus, qui passio est, desinit esse passio simulatque eius claram et distintam formamus ideam.” Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it.

Two. What about the aforementioned doctor walking around his empty house in his robe as if he were living in a tomb? And what about the husband who needs to get drink before entering his house? How can these men get a “clear and precise picture” of their emotions? If they did have an objective grasp of not only their emotional state but how they were contributing to it, wouldn’t they then change? I don’t know. As a cynical person, I find it a difficult challenge to get an objective grasp of my own emotions, for it is the habit of a cynic to indulge in the masochistic pleasure in one’s despair and self-loathing. There is a huge amount of egotism in this kind of indulgence. Further, this ego-generated self-loathing is a compulsion and a habit, a very hard habit to break.

 

Three. Frankl didn’t just teach logotherapy; he lived what he said about suffering: “When a man finds that it is his destiny to suffer, he will have to accept his suffering as his task; his single and unique task. He will have to acknowledge the fact that even in suffering he is unique and alone in the universe. No one can relieve him of his suffering or suffer in his place. His unique opportunity lies in the way in which he bears his burden.”

Four. The opposite of Frankl’s tragic optimism: Being overwhelmed and enervated by the Sisyphean nature of life is not the orientation Viktor Frankl wants us to have. We are, Frankl says, to joyfully embrace suffering when we know it’s committed to our higher purpose, such as raising children.

But Frankl’s orientation toward suffering presents a challenge to me since my hardwiring evidences that I’m entrenched in the Sisyphean or Futility worldview. For example, I was sixteen in the summer of 1978. The past few months had been tough. My parents separated, and eventually divorced, and my grandmother had just died of leukemia at the age of sixty-four. It was decided I’d spend the summer with my grandfather in San Pedro. He was working for his friend, Forbes, in Carson. Forbes owned a machine shop and my grandfather and I would load and deliver parts in a flatbed truck to industrial centers and ports around Los Angeles. I hated the work. Long back-busting days starting at six and ending around four after which I’d drag myself to the YMCA to workout. I’d come home and go straight to sleep, knowing the monotony would be repeated all over again. I remember one night in particular as I tossed and turned on the pull-out couch, I thought to myself: “So this is what’s it’s going to be like after I get out of school. A full-time job. Misery day in and day out. And for what? So I can go home, catch a workout, steal a little dinner before bedtime, and go to sleep so I’ll have enough energy to drag myself through the same drudgery the next day? And for what? Nothing, that’s what. Life is shit.” In my mind, all jobs were the same, more or less. You had to show up, you had responsibilities, and you were essentially doing something you didn’t want to do. So at the age of sixteen I had found the truth of existence: Life is shit.

And here I am many years later trying to teach Man’s Search for Meaning, but at my very core I am, and always have been, a cynic and a nihilist. What does this make me, a vegetarian butcher?