Man’s Search for Meaning Essay Assignment
There is a camp of thinking that is skeptical of the idea meaning for the reason that meaning is so subjective, varying from person to person, that to discuss it as an essential life force therefore is absurd. Secondly, the skeptic will argue that people don’t have any objective meaning. Rather, they pursue some illusion or other that gives them a sense of purpose—perhaps a false one—that gives them motivation. In other words, people motivate themselves by making up all sorts of incentives, but these incentives could be less about “meaning” and more about chimeras. A third point of skepticism is that there are people who find meaning in very disturbing ways, most notably by being brainwashed and manipulated such as a person who converts to a religious cult or perhaps to some extremist ideology. The skeptic’s fourth point of contention is that she will argue that we cannot choose meaning because we are not agents of free will; rather, we are agents beholden to forces we cannot control, namely, determinism, the philosophy that states our biology and environment affect our behavior and that “choices” are just an illusion. We say we “chose” to do something after the fact, but in truth, we were hard-wired to act in such a way.
Addressing the skeptic’s points above, support, refute, or complicate Frankl’s argument that we are responsible to be Destiny Seekers and find our own meaning in order that we make the appropriate response to a life of suffering and that failure to find meaning will doom us to the hell of the “existential vacuum.”
Suggested Structure:
Introduction
Thesis
Paragraphs Address Each of the Skeptic’s Points
One or two paragraphs address the idea that meaning is too individual and subjective.
One or two paragraphs that address the idea that meaning is an illusion we use to motivate ourselves.
One or two paragraphs that address the idea that “meaning” or a found purpose can be the result of brainwashing and manipulation.
One or two paragraphs that address the idea that we don’t choose meaning; some of us may have a sense of meaning, but only because we are hard-wired to. In contrast, some of us are hardwired to NOT have a sense of meaning and be okay with that.
Two counterargument-refutation paragraphs that address your opponents’ views.
Important Note
If you're refuting the skeptics point by point, the counterargument section is not necessary because your WHOLE essay is a refutation.
Conclusion is a more emotional (pathos) restatement of your thesis.
Important Note: Successful essays will address specific points in Frankl’s book.
Choice 1: Support, refute, or complicate the assertion that Frankl Lite is a more compelling orientation than Full Potency Frankl. Use Toulmin or Rogerian model.
Frankl Lite
You lead a decent life.
You fulfill the 8 Essential Human Needs.
You live a comfortable life.
You live a balanced life as you meet your financial and family needs.
Full Potency Frankl
You begin with the premise that "all can be taken from you in a blink of an eye."
Basing your comforts on finances and material goods is a fool's errand.
Suffering is the key component of existence.
We must create the appropriate response to suffering, one that involves finding a Higher Purpose. Therefore, we are Destiny Seekers.
To find our destiny, we must give up comforts and sacrifice our selfish desires for a higher purpose.
Some refutations about searching for meaning:
People can be manipulated and brainwashed to believe in their "meaning."
Meaning is an illusion that we create to find motivation.
Because meaning is so subjective, varying from person to person, it's worthless to talk about it.
Frankl's discussion about meaning is just common sense. Had he not lived to tell such an amazing, courageous survival story, his points about meaning would be seen for what they are--obvious cliches.
For the above, use the Toulmin model.
Choice 2: Support, refute, or complicate the assertion that unless we can sacrifice on the scale described in Peter Singer's essay "What Should a Billionaire Give--What Should You?" we cannot live a life of true meaning as defined by Viktor Frankl. Use the Toulmin essay model.
Choice 3: Support, refute, or complicate the assertion that the lifestyle described in Joseph Epstein's essay "The Perpetual Adolescent" is antithetical to the kind of meaning that Viktor Frankl defines in his book Man's Search for Meaning. Use the Toulmin essay model.
The Four Realms of Meaning Mountain
At the bottom of Meaning Mountain is the bottom-dwelling realm, the land of the sloths, miscreants, narcissists, predatory hedonists, fops, dandies, pathological liars, impostors, grifters, mountebanks, snake oil salesmen, and other members of the Moral Dissolution Club. No fair-minded or decent human aspires to exist in this loathsome realm.
Traveling north up Meaning Mountain, we arrive at the middle realm, the land most people aspire to. Middle Mountain, as it's often called, hosts the world's decent people who do their work, fulfill their responsibilities, remain faithful to their partner and seek a life of security and comfort according to society's social contract.
These individuals seek the 8 Essential Needs, which we will peruse below. The people are "nice" but they tend to be invisible and rarely achieve anything "groundshaking" pertaining to the progress of the planet. For them meaning takes a back seat to comfort and security. They don't "make waves"; they simply get cozy in their cave and put their life on auto-pilot. But they fall short of Frankl because they avoid tension and conflict (105).
Between the middle and the top realm are the creative producers, those who flourish in their passion. They may not pursue Frankl's edict of self-sacrifice, but they do not settle for the mediocrity that pervades the people just below them. Often these people change society with their scientific breakthroughs and innovations. Think Apple and Steve Jobs. More generally, think about comedians, entertainers, actors, writers, musicians, artists, etc. These people cannot bear living without the torment of a struggle to better their work and art. To quit working would be, for them, a death.
Climbing past the cumulus clouds and then the misty shroud, we are now at Realm Four, the peak of Meaning Mountain. We are now in the presence of a rarefied breed of people, those disciples of Full-Potency Frankl. These are brave souls who cast away comfort and comformity to pursue Frankl's edict to take their cross and give up their life for the sake of others, to embrace suffering, theirs and the world's, and to seek what Life demands of them. For the Full-Potency Frankl acolytes, comfort and security take a back seat to meaning, sacrifice, and public service. Most people who change the world for the better come from this hard-to-reach mountain peak.
Review of Life’s 8 Essential Needs
Whether or not we agree with Frankl’s argument that meaning is the answer to the existential vacuum depends on our definition of meaning.
For example, is meaning contained in Life’s 8 Essential Needs?
One. We must have a passion outside ourselves to free us of, among other things, self-centeredness and vanity
Two. Self-awareness or the Third Eye so we can make rational decisions
Three. Humility, so we can admit and learn from our mistakes
Four. A job that compatible with our personality and pays us enough money so we can buy stuff we want
Five. A mate or reproductive success
Six. A sense of belonging and a sense of connection to others
Seven. Enough time for recreation
Eight. We need a strong moral character that gives us integrity (since connection to others and long-term happiness is the result of a strong moral core). Some say this character is part of evolution and society cooperation.
The problem with the above, it could be argued, is that it’s “Frankl Lite,” contains universal wisdom and common sense but falls short of Frankl’s definition of meaning. Further, these comforts can be taken away.
Full Potency Frankl
“Frankl Full Potency” requires that meaning be based on self-sacrifice, that we lose our convenience, safety, and material pleasures for the sake of helping others. While most people are content with Frankl Lite, fewer, far fewer, aspire to Frankl Full Potency.
Analyze your argument in terms of Toulmin model and Toulmin on Owl Purdue.
Review of Toulmin terms, especially warrant
Evidence of Being Low on the Meaning Scale
HomeTown Buffet is a sign of America's loss of meaning.
Gluttony is a sign of trying feebly to overcome the existential vacuum.
The ritual of gluttony is based on "feeding," not eating.
The ritual is based on ignorance of food, not knowledge.
Warrant: Eating at HomeTown Buffet is a sign of moral decay.
Eleven Tenets of Logotherapy (Meaning Therapy)
- We do not go to therapy to pour our grief in a great purge to the therapist; rather, the therapist, the logotherapist, asks us disagreeable questions that turn our self-pity on its head and demand us to take responsibility for the crapulent quagmire of our loathsome existence. We are asked to “get off our butt” and find something useful to do with our lives.
- We do not mire ourselves in our demon-haunted past, a recurring loop of failure and misery, but look toward a future possibility of meaning.
- Frankl agrees that we are at our essence possessed by a will to live but this will is not for pleasure or power but for meaning.
- We cannot search for meaning; rather, life questions us: What unique task must we perform based on our individual life circumstances?
- We must live life as if we were saved from death and from the guilt of our past mistakes and living life a second time, this time around giving life all of our heart and integrity.
- We must discover meaning in the world, not in our psyche.
- We find meaning in three different ways: work or deeds; experience with something or encounter with someone; our attitude toward suffering
- Suffering is an opportunity to turn “one’s predicament into human achievement” but only through a radical change of attitude.
- Logotherapy transcends logic, especially as it pertains to the sense of meaningless suffering that we contemplate in the world. In this sense logotherapy is transcendent in the religious sense.
- We must use paradoxical intention, exaggerating our fears, to distance ourselves from our fears and see the humor of our situation.
- Determinism is only partly true. Indeed, we are limited by our hardwiring and environment but we have some limited free will at our disposal.
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.
Thesis in support of Frankl
Frankl is correct to argue that meaning is the cure for our emptiness. We see meaning is born from things we can control such as finding reasons behind suffering (death bed part of VF's book), establishing boundaries (moral and physical), finding faith in something to look forward to in the future, discipline (VF refers to how the hopeful save rations for later and the hopeless need instant gratification), exercising morality (VF's Moral Code is to sacrifice our comfort and convenience for the better of others. This is also part of societal reciprocity or self-interested altruism), and finally asserting a courageous, noble attitude in the face of the suffering (suffering, VF observes, is "inevitable").
Thesis That Refutes Frankl
Meaning as VF defines it is a fiction, a hoax, a charade, a chimera, a cruel fantasy devised by religious zealots. We see that in fact there can be no meaning when we honestly examine a lot of suffering in the world is meaningless. For example, some people are intractable slaves to the tedium of meaningless work; children are sold into all kinds of vile slavery; there are natural disasters, acts of gratuitous human cruelty against others.
There can be no meaning because there is no free will. We act in accordance with our hard-wiring.
We can find a better life, not through "meaning," but through the acquisition of the 8 Essential Human Needs.
Meaning in VF's book is too relative to even be a viable idea. Then what we're talking about is not finding "meaning," but finding our niche.
Defending Frankl
Reviewing Mapping Components for Causes Behind a Life of Meaning (At Least Relative Meaning; I'm Not Sure I Believe in Ultimate or Absolute Meaning)
1. Boundaries, including self-gratification and the quest for happiness; we need to balance this quest by searching, not for happiness, but for meaning. See "There's More to Life Than Being Happy," a good research source.
2. Core Values
3. Discipline (failure to have discipline, also called self-control, leads to despair)
4. Progression. Choosing Centrifugal over Centripetal Motion
5. Find a purpose, a higher goal, for your future. This is the essence of logotherapy. You have to move forward. You can't wallow in the mire of your past.
6. A radical turn-around happens when "meaning finds you" in a sort of epiphany.
All of the above cannot be achieved unless we develop metacognition, also called self-awareness, also called the Third Eye.
We must also have a moral foundation.
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. Logotherapy is a way of practicing ways to combat neurotic, self-destructive behavior such as overreacting to problems. In the latter case, the overreaction is always worse than the problem.
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. Rather than panic, I kept my cool. I then gave 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.
Developing the Third Eye to Stop Overreacting and to Identify the Causes of 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 is core values:
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
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