McMahon Grammar Exercise: Parallelism
Correct the faulty parallelism by rewriting the sentences below.
One. Parenting toddlers is difficult for many reasons, not the least of which is that toddlers contradict everything you ask them to do; they have giant mood swings, and all-night tantrums.
Two. You should avoid all-you-can-eat buffets: They encourage gluttony; they feature fatty, over-salted foods and high sugar content.
Three. I prefer kettlebell training at home than the gym because of the increased privacy, the absence of loud “gym” music, and I’m able to concentrate more.
Four. To write a successful research paper you must adhere to the exact MLA format, employ a variety of paragraph transitions, and writing an intellectually rigorous thesis.
Five. The difficulty of adhering to the MLA format is that the rules are frequently being updated, the sheer abundance of rules you have to follow, and to integrate your research into your essay.
Six. You should avoid watching “reality shows” on TV because they encourage a depraved form of voyeurism; they distract you from your own problems, and their brain-dumbing effects.
Seven. I’m still fat even though I’ve tried the low-carb diet, the Paleo diet, the Rock-in-the-Mouth diet, and fasting every other day.
Eight. To write a successful thesis, you must have a compelling topic, a sophisticated take on that topic, and developing a thesis that elevates the reader’s consciousness to a higher level.
Nine. Getting enough sleep, exercising daily, and the importance of a positive attitude are essential for academic success.
Ten. My children never react to my calm commands or when I beg them to do things.
Ways to Improve Your Logical Thinking
Study the Templates of Argumentation
While Frankl’s arguments for meaning are convincing, they fail to consider . . .
While Frankl’s supports make convincing arguments, they must also consider . . .
These arguments, rather than being convincing, instead prove . . .
While these authors agree with Frankl on point X, in my opinion . . .
Although it is often true that . . .
While I concede that my opponents make a compelling case for point X, their main argument collapses underneath a barrage of . . .
While I see many good points in my opponent’s essay, I am underwhelmed by his . . .
While my opponent makes some cogent points regarding A, B, and C, his overall argument fails to convince when we consider X, Y, and Z.
My opponent makes many provocative and intriguing points. However, his arguments must be dismissed as fallacious when we take into account W, X, Y, and Z.
While the author’s points first appear glib and fatuous, a closer look at his polemic reveals a convincing argument that . . .
Example of a Concession Followed by a Refutation by a Frankl-Detractor
Viktor Frankl is a highly intelligent, sympathetic figure whose meditations on meaning and adopting a heroic attitude toward our suffering have resonated with millions of people all over the world. However, once you strip away the sympathetic surroundings of the book—Frankl surviving in a concentration camp and his helping of those who were fighting for their lives—the book’s value is negligible evidenced by the book’s many weaknesses.
For one, the message that we should adopt a positive attitude life, rather than a negative one, is little more than a self-evident truism, almost a statement of fact, and hardly deserves to be venerated as some special insight into the human condition.
Secondly, Frankl’s assertion that we all must choose our own meaning is yet another cliché tantamount to the platitude that we should follow our bliss.
Finally, the notion that we either live a life of meaning that makes us worthy of our suffering or we live a life of emptiness that inevitably will afflict us with a life of despair and regrets is contention that is both over-simplistic and fallacious, as it takes a page from any compendium of logical fallacies, namely, the either-or fallacy.
In fact, we do not live in such an either-or world. Our sense of meaning, or our lack of it, is constantly shifting and relative, so that it would be more valuable to talk about a continuously shifting meaning spectrum. The absolutes contained in Frankl’s dogmatic work fail to address that complexity of the human condition, yet Frankl gets a pass because he is such a justifiably adored figure.
The Writer’s Rhetoric (how he presents his argument)
He begins by agreeing that Frankl is a sympathetic and intelligent figure (para. 1)
His thesis ends paragraph 1: However, once you strip away the sympathetic surroundings of the book—Frankl surviving in a concentration camp and his helping of those who were fighting for their lives—the book’s value is negligible evidenced by the book’s many weaknesses.
In paragraph 2, the writer shows the three main supports for his claim:
Support One: For one, the message that we should adopt a positive attitude life, rather than a negative one, is little more than a self-evident truism, almost a statement of fact, and hardly deserves to be venerated as some special insight into the human condition.
Support Two: Secondly, Frankl’s assertion that we all must choose our own meaning is yet another cliché tantamount to the platitude that we should follow our bliss.
Support Three: Finally, the notion that we either live a life of meaning that makes us worthy of our suffering or we live a life of emptiness that inevitably will afflict us with a life of despair and regrets is contention that is both over-simplistic and fallacious, as it takes a page from any compendium of logical fallacies, namely, the either-or fallacy.
The writer reinforces his final piece of evidence by elaborating on his final support that Frankl’s “either you have meaning or don’t view” is over-simplistic:
In fact, we do not live in such an either-or world. Our sense of meaning, or our lack of it, is constantly shifting and relative, so that it would be more valuable to talk about a continuously shifting meaning spectrum. The absolutes contained in Frankl’s dogmatic work fail to address that complexity of the human condition, yet Frankl gets a pass because he is such a justifiably adored figure.
Gathering Our Data to Refute Frankl’s Opponent in a Refutation Response
Frankl’s opponent who confidently asserts that Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning is an overrated affair sodden with cheap clichés, truisms, and glittering generalities appears to be so infatuated with his own rhetoric and Frankl-bashing that he fails to see that his argumentation stumbles at the gates, crashing with a myriad of logical fallacies and other egregious writing errors, including Straw Man, over-simplification, and, perhaps worst of all, gross misinterpretations of Frankl’s key points.
Our Frankl-detractor’s first assertion immediately raises our eyebrows: “For one, the message that we should adopt a positive attitude toward life, rather than a negative one, is little more than a self-evident truism, almost a statement of fact, and hardly deserves to be venerated as some special insight into the human condition.” Our detractor has failed to accurately summarize Frankl’s claim. Contrary to the “positive thinking” made popular by business guru Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, Frankl is talking less about “positive thinking” and more about the courage to find meaning, not in consumerism, popularity, or material success, but in embracing suffering and trying to address the needs that the suffering of the world demands us. It appears our Frankl-detractor either has not Frankl’s book or has purposely misread Frankl’s work in order to be the chest-thumping contrarian.
Equally flagrant and insufferable in its inaccuracy is our Frankl-detractor’s contention that “Frankl’s assertion that we all must choose our own meaning is yet another cliché tantamount to the platitude that we should follow our bliss.” Had our Detractor read Frankl’s book with a modicum of focus and understanding, he would know that Frankl claims we all must find meaning for ourselves; however, meaning is not a nebulously defined notion disconnected by a strong moral code. To the contrary, the principles of logotherapy—that we must act more than think, that we must find what life demands of us based on our talents and circumstances, to name a couple—is very specific. It is further the result of Frankl’s hard-fought wisdom that he acquired while enduring the concentration camps and the empirical evidence he gathered while helping patients in his practice of logotherapy.
Our Detractor’s final criticism is that Frankl is guilty of over-simplification by creating a binary world of those Who Have Meaning and those Who Don’t Have Meaning. This, too, is a gross misinterpretation of Frankl’s radical meaning tool, logotherapy, which is based on the idea that all of us are responsible for addressing our suffering as a gateway to meaning and all of us our responsible for embarking upon this Meaning Quest. Frankl has never stated that one is either in a complete state of meaning or in a complete state of non-meaning. That is the Detractor’s red herring and non sequitur that fails to address a clear understanding of logotherapy, which, if utilized accurately and correctly, is an enormous help in our search for meaning and speaks cogently to the human condition. Our Detractor, sadly, is so caught up in his bloated rhetoric and contrarianism that he has failed to see the benefits of Frankl’s wisdom.
Your Essays Becoming More Sophisticated, Elevated, and “Critical” When You Specifically Address Opposition
A positive review of Viktor Frank’s Man’s Search for Meaning by Kim Anthony Gentes:
Victor Frankl is the author of one of the most concise personal narratives of the holocaust of the Nazi concentration camps. Frankl, who survived no less than four camps personally, uses his profound analytic mind to explore the behavior and nature of human beings. Rejecting the Freudian premise of existentialism, Frankl develops a new way of viewing humanity in the psychoanalytic discipline. As both a psychologist and neurologist, Frankl's physiological and psychological findings are synthesized into his new psychoanalytic technique called "logotherapy."
In contrast to the existentialist foundations of Freud, Frankl establishes the belief that there is meaning in the universe, especially for mankind. Man’s Search for Meaning articulates that it is this search for meaning that becomes the primary question for all:
The greatest task for any person is to find meaning in his or her life. Frankl saw three possible sources for meaning: in work (doing something significant), in love (caring for another person), and in courage during difficult times. [1]
While staying away from religious archetypes to present his theory, the core of logotherapeutic beliefs are constructed with such care that they can sit squarely on top of the foundation of either Jewish or Christian orthodoxy (or perhaps any religious context in which God is viewed as good).
Man's Search For Meaning is one of the most profound modern works I have read. Perhaps Frankl's most significant concept presented therein is his thorough and profound treatment of human suffering. Frankl does not dismiss suffering as meaningless (unlike existentialism), but places it within a triad of human experience that he says brings meaning: doing significant work, caring for others, and enduring suffering. He contends that without human thought and activity based on one or more of those three, a person will lose meaning in life and destruction (either external or internal) is sure to follow.
According to logotherapy, we can discover this meaning in life in three different ways: (1) by creating a work or doing a deed; (2) by experiencing something or encountering someone; and (3) by the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering. [2]
and
In some way, suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice [3]
The key for Frankl's thesis is the rooting of human expectation in the future, not the present. Meaning comes, he contends, by placing hopes in spiritual or earthly goals. Failing to do so will cause discouragement and loss meaning, spiraling people into trying to scratch out meaning in temporal pleasure of the day, which will eventually lead to abandonment of hope and self-destruction.
Logotherapy focuses rather on the future, that is to say, on the meanings to be fulfilled by the patient in his future. (Logotherapy, indeed, is a meaning-centered psychotherapy.)[4]
This book starts off being our hosted view into the unfathomable world of concentration camps in Nazi Germany, and the psycho-analytical understandings that Frankl comes to. But the more you read, the more you are drawn into Frankl's so thoroughly rendered understanding of suffering that the book becomes a way for us to enter into the story by Frankl's genius. Very few books come close to the profundity of human experience and, therefore, understanding that is present in this book. I can't imagine that it isn't one of the greatest writings in the last century.
Life changing!
Major Points of Kim Anthony Gentes’ essay:
Frankl’s contention that there is meaning and that our drive for meaning is our most powerful drive is in direct opposition to the world’s most influential psychoanalyst of the time, Sigmund Freud, who believed in a philosophy called existentialism, the idea that there is no meaning, that we can barely understand each other, and that we are lost in a tangle of unconscious drives that define us more than the assertion of our “free will.” For Freud, the best we could do is undergo intense analysis, discuss our past, and try to unravel the mysteries of our unconscious so we could manage our behavior better.
To support Gentes, we might say that Frankl was not teaching a cliché when he spoke of the way we embrace suffering, that in fact Frankl’s opponent has over-simplified Frankl’s message and failed to point out that Frankl’s claim, that we could find meaning through the way we approached our suffering, was a debatable and radical claim, especially in the context of Freud’s popularity.
We could elaborate on our contention that Frankl is not resorting to cheap clichés and aphorisms by pointing out that Frankl’s thesis, suffering is a source of deeper purpose, meaning, and inner peace, goes against the cultural mores of Frankl’s time: That consumer experience is the great source of pleasure and that we should avoid “stress” in order to maximize our happiness. Frankl is not saying the safe thing; he is saying the radical thing. Therefore, his claim is radical and rooted in the truth of empirical evidence.
We could further support Gentes’ and refute Frankl’s opponent by observing that Frankl’s opponent misreads Frankl’s definition of meaning as being different to all people and therefore having a meaningless definition of meaning. To the contrary, Frankl, while allowing individuals to find meaning for themselves, is very specific for laying out the logotherapy-driven path to finding meaning.
McMahon's Sample of an Intro That Frames the Debate and a Thesis Paragraph That Uses a Refutation Structure
We’ve been asked to argue if there is this thing in life called “meaning” and if this meaning is the cure for the terrifying emptiness, the “existential vacuum,” that haunts us when our lives are empty of meaning. Viktor Frankl tackles this question in his timeless classic Man’s Search for Meaning and while his book’s theme is difficult to comprehend and while there are many flaws in arguments that defend meaning, Frankl’s argument that meaning must be embraced to be saved from the despair of the “existential vacuum” is compelling. One effective way to examine the compelling nature of Frankl’s argument is to study intelligent attempts to dismiss the existence of meaning and argue that Frankl’s book addresses those refutations. The most compelling reasons to not believe in meaning are that meaning is relative to the point that to discuss it as a definitive, absolute, “one size fits all” entity is an absurdity; that while some lives, like Frankl’s, are rich in meaning, they don’t choose their meaningful life; rather it is the result of hard-wiring and upbringing so that the idea of “choosing” meaning is to some degree an absurdity; that the chaos, evil and senseless suffering that dominate the world evidence there is no meaning, only absurdity; that a meaningful life is not about meaning per se but, with the risk of relying on semantics, more about attitude and character, so that to argue for meaning misses the point: we should argue about our moral development and attitude and even these things can’t be entirely chosen.
The above refutations against meaning are compelling, but as I will show, Frankl’s masterful book addresses each point and makes a convincing case that there are two kinds of lives we must choose: one that is full of emptiness and despair; the other that is full of meaning and contentment.
The Problem with Meaning Is That the Word Is "Loaded" and We Dismiss All Meaning When We See False Meaning
Examples of False Meaning
People who are delusional and commit acts of evil in the name of an ideology that gives them "meaning" like the white American settlers who wanted to be free from European tyranny but then relied on slavery to fuel their economy under the justification of white supremacy.
People who are vain posers and feel they have "meaning" when they post Facebook photos of themselves "helping the poor" for a weekend.
People who are eager to talk and write about their "meaningful" doctrines but don't live what they speak and are odious hypocrites.
People who find "meaning" supporting their family when in fact they wake up every morning and kiss the giant butt of Blind Ambition. They're superficial.
What Is Real Meaning?
Moral results
Transformative (learned helplessness and self-pity transform into courage and self-reliance, for example)
Redemptive (similar to above)
Meaning must be lived, not spoken
But do we all achieve "Power Meaning" like Frankl or relative meaning through the acquistion of the 8 Basic Human Needs?
Meaning Is a Learned Behavior and Meaning Comes from Moral Character Development
We are not born with meaning. We are born blank, a tabula rasa.
We need to learn boundaries to find meaning. A film about boundaries and the lack thereof is Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory starring Gene Wilder. We see in both the film and VF's book that without boundaries we become animals:
August Gloop
Veruca Salt
MF
Stallion
Either we learn and emulate the common life of hedonic pleasures, vanity, and envy, or we learn and emulate the life of moral character, which consists of the following:
1. respect
2. integrity
3. dignity
4. honesty
5. caritas, charity and compassion for others
6. sacrifice
7. fortitude
8. listening for meaning, asking what life demands of us
9. wisdom: being wise enough to see the emptiness and danger of hedonic or hedonistic quests and reject the common life of vanity, envy, and hedonism.
When we have character, our lives are more meaningful, but is "more meaningful" the same as "meaning"?
Example of a Thesis Regarding Absolute and Relative Meaning
While I love and admire VF's heroism, I reject his argument for absolute meaning in favor of relative meaning. First, absolute meaning is not realistic and may trap us into the either/or fallacy of meaning (my life is absolute meaning or it is nothing). It's better to approach meaning from a realistic point of view, not an ideological one. A realistic point of view says it's okay to not have meaning sometimes. It's okay to suffer the existential vacuum here and there. Life is not a constant rich, meaty steak sandwich of meaning every second of our life. That's unrealistic.
Second, we can build our moral and intellectual character toward achieving Life's 8 Essential Needs in a way that creates relative meaning, which is to say, that our life of values and personal growth is more meaningful than a life of moral dissolution. In this regard, we agree with Frankl, at least to some degree.
Third, we need not be meaning absolutists to hunger for Mystery, Enchantment, and More as evidenced by our creative and artistic pursuits. Being creative is not the same as being an ideological moral absolutist.
Fourth, we can devote our lives to some meaningful pursuits yet still experience despair, self-doubt and the exisential vacuum as part of the natural human condition. The human condition, as I state in my first point, is not always full of meaning. It's often absurd and pointless and it's okay, even natural, at times to feel that way.
Counter-Thesis That Defends Frankl:
The above writer does not embrace Frankl's definition of meaning because, through Frankl's own words, it's a life that only a tiny remnant will choose. In other words, Frankl is teaching us what the great religions have told us for centuries: That the path to hell is wide and that the path to heaven is narrow. Frankl has given us a narrow path based on self-sacrifice, not comfort and convenience.
Secondly, Frankl never proposes an absolute meaning as the writer erroneously states. Rather, Frankl argues that meaning varies from one individual to another based on particular circumstances.
Third, the argument that creativity will lead to meaning ignores the fact that our creative pursuits do not guarantee the development of our humanity.
How to Transition into Your Thesis: An Example
We love Viktor Frankl, the eloquent spokesperson for meaning. How could we not love him? He is after all a hero who risked his comfort, convenience, safety, and even his life to serve the needs of the suffering during the Holocaust. He is a saint, in fact, a rare human being worthy of our utmost love and admiration. However, his ideologically-based assertion that meaning is absolute and the cure for the existential vacuum contains certain weaknesses and fallacies that we need to address.
First of all, life cannot be one big meaty steak sandwich of meaning, filling us to the brim so that we never experience the existential vacuum. Frankl is presenting us with a dangerous either/or fallacy, what could also be called the mistake of All or Nothing. In fact, meaning is not an all or nothing affair. Life at times is senseless, absurd and meaningless and it is dangerous for us to feel guilty when we don't interpret every significant event of suffering as an occasion for meaning. But we are not entirely without meaning. Some periods of our lives will be more meaningful than others, especially as we mature and achieve greater and greater wisdom.
Second, we can reject VF's assertion that meaning is absolute and ultimate without discarding our morality. In fact, from a purely practical point of view, it is easier to be a moral and decent human being than it is to be a scoundrel and a libertine. Therefore, embracing morality is in our self-interest and gives us relative meaning. We may not have absolute meaning in the sense that VF writes about, but we can have relative meaning and for most of us relative meaning is more realistic goal than absolute meaning.
Third, while I reject that meaning is absolute and a reliable cure for the existential vacuum, I opine that we can pursue relative meaning by striving for Life's 8 Essentials, which I will elaborate on in my essay. Finally, for those who hunger for More, for the Beyond, for Mystery, for Divine Beauty, I have the answer and it is not rooted in the quest for absolute meaning or its related religious dogmas. We pursue the Beyond through the arts, through creativity, and through philosophy, which explores life's painful questions and is never so vain as to think the answers we receive will be neatly packaged and reassuringly absolute.
Part One. Cynic's Argument Against Meaning: Determinism Triumphs over Free Will
- 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.
- 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?
- Sturgeon's Law, which states that 95% of everything in life is crap.
Counterargument
- 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 and morals, 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.
- 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.”
- 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.
- 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.
- 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. As imperfect as my life is, my life has relatively speaking more meaning than Mr. Chalupa Man.
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, a Life Without Meaning: 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.
Frankl’s Central Argument in 3 Sentences
One. 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.
Two. Failure to create a meaningful life for ourselves will result in the existential vacuum or unbearable emptiness.
Three. Without meaning we will try to fill the gnawing void with misguided distractions that will destroy us.
Some might conclude that Frankl's world is binary or either/or: Either we connect to life with meaning or we fail to find meaning and suffer the despair and regret of disconnection.
Others might conclude that meaning, contrary to Frankl, exists on a sliding scale or is relative and that this nuanced view of meaning eludes Frankl's strident message.
There are 3 points of view regarding Frankl’s message
- 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.
- 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.
- 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:
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 and Definition
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.
So we must be cautious of equating our job with meaning.
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 of People Trending Away From Or Toward Meaning
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.
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. To strengthen your definition, put your term in a context or circumstance.
Example:
Meaning: From Sloth to Creativity
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.
Not all suffering leads to meaning
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 not talking about it.
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.
Indeed, meaning is often not talking about meaning. Meaning is living life in a way that gives us hope for a better future and purpose.
Meaning is not happiness and success.
Happiness and success can be taken from us at any time. As Frankl tells us, meaning is having the moral character to embrace suffering with courage.
In his book Frankl 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.
Overview: 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:
- 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.
- “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.
- 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.”
- There are moral absolutes in this world evidenced in part by Frankl dividing the world into two races of people, decent and indecent.
- 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.
- 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.”
- 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.
- There is no One Size Fits All Meaning. Every person’s meaning is specific to his or her circumstances.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.”
- 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!”
- 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.
Use Present Verb Tense for Argument Research Paper and Textual Analysis
Sample MLA Research Paper Uses Present Tense
Ways to Improve Your Critical Reading
- Do a background check of the author to see if he or she has a hidden agenda or any other kind of background information that speaks to the author’s credibility.
- Check the place of publication to see what kind of agenda, if any, the publishing house has. Know how esteemed the publishing house is among peers of the subject you’re reading about.
- Learn how to find the thesis. In other words, know what the author’s purpose, explicit or implicit, is.
- Annotate more than underline. Your memory will be better served, according to research, by annotating than underlining. You can scribble your own code in the margins as long as you can understand your writing when you come back to it later. Annotating is a way of starting a dialogue about the reading and writing process. It is a form of pre-writing. Forms of annotation that I use are “yes,” (great point) “no,” (wrong, illogical, BS) and “?” (confusing). When I find the thesis, I’ll also write that in the margins. Or I’ll write down an essay or book title that the passage reminds me of. Or maybe even an idea for a story or a novel.
- When faced with a difficult text, you will have to slow down and use the principles of summarizing and paraphrasing. With summary, you concisely identify the main points in one or two sentences. With paraphrase, you re-word the text in your own words.
- When reading an argument, see if the writer addresses possible objections to his or her argument. Ask yourself, of all the objections, did the writer choose the most compelling ones? The more compelling the objections addressed, the more rigorous and credible the author’s writing.
Essay for Analysis: “Why Executions Should be Televised” by Zachary Shemtob and David Lat
One. In one sentence, summarize their claim.
Two. Do they support they claim convincingly?
Three. Do they address objections?
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