First Option
Defend, support, or refute the argument that Man’s Search for Meaning gives us a cogent, appropriate and insightful analysis for evaluating Nikolai’s moral dissolution in the Chekhov short story “Gooseberries.”
Second Option:
Defend, support, or complicate the argument that the determinism evident in the 1999 Alexander Payne film Election is a compelling refutation of Frankl's notion that we are free to find meaning as a cure for our despair and self-destruction. Recommended Research Link for Alternative Option: http://sensesofcinema.com/2012/feature-articles/chance-and-choice-biology-and-theology-in-alexander-paynes-election/
Third Option
Defend, support, or complicate the argument that even though Frankl’s philosophy is informed by his religious faith, one need not be religious to embrace Frankl’s precepts and principles. You can concede that Frankl’s book is “religious” but not in the narrow sense of the word. Rather, it is universally religious. On the other hand, some will argue that the theistic religion that informs Frankl’s philosophy is too narrow to accommodate secular and atheist thinkers. Take a position and explain. You may want to consult Elizabeth Anderson’s “If God Is Dead, Is Everything Permitted?”
Fourth Option
Defend, support, or complicate the argument that Groundhog Day character Phil Connors’ spiritual malaise and eventual spiritual transformation can be analyzed through the lens of the principles in Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning.
Fifth Option:
Defend, refute, or complicate the argument that Man’s Search for Meaning is the greatest anti-self-help self-help book ever written.
Consider these distinguishing qualities of traditional self-help books:
- They deny suffering as the central feature of human existence
- They play into reader’s narcissistic fantasy of being special and at the center of the universe.
- They promise easy solutions based on gimmicks intended to look like “insights.”
- They promise easy solutions using common sense dressed up in jargon and pretentious language.
- They tend to condescend to the reader, treating him like a child. There is an infantile, dumbed-down quality to them.
- They make false promises about happiness and self-fulfillment.
- They make being a selfish self-centered lout acceptable and “noble.”
- They place selfish self-interest and self-indulgence over responsibility to oneself and others.
Your guidelines for your Final Research Paper are as follows:
This research paper should present a thesis that is specific, manageable, provable, and contestable—in other words, the thesis should offer a clear position, stand, or opinion that will be proven with research.
You should analyze and prove your thesis using examples and quotes from a variety of sources.
You need to research and cite from at least five sources. You must use at least 3 different types of sources.
At least one source must be from an ECC library database.
At least one source must be a book, anthology or textbook.
At least one source must be from a credible website, appropriate for academic use.
The paper should not over-rely on one main source for most of the information. Rather, it should use multiple sources and synthesize the information found in them.
This paper will be approximately 5-7 pages in length, not including the Works Cited page, which is also required. This means at least 5 full pages of text. The Works Cited page does NOT count towards length requirement.
You must use MLA format for the document, in-text citations, and Works Cited page.
You must integrate quotations and paraphrases using signal phrases and analysis or commentary.
You must sustain your argument, use transitions effectively, and use correct grammar, spelling, and punctuation.
Your paper must be logically organized and focused.
One. Why does Frankl urge us to live in the present?
Without a future goal, we are doomed to become “retrospective,” wallowing in our past (71). Embracing our present crises, Frankl observes, “gives man the opportunity to grow spiritually beyond himself.”
To live in the past, to wallow in nostalgia, is dangerous. Such indulgence evidences a meaningless life (72).
Fearful of a sterile, barren present, we attempt to medicate ourselves on an imaginary idealized past, nostalgia, and romanticism.
Frankl observes that only “a few people were capable of reaching great spiritual eights. But a few were given the chance to attain human greatness even through their apparent worldly failure and death, an accomplishment which in ordinary circumstances they would never have achieved. To the others of us, the mediocre and the half-hearted, the words of Bismarck could be applied: ‘Life is like being at the dentist. You always think that the worst is still to come, and yet it is over already.’”
One of the most radical statements in Frankl’s book is that the concentration camp provided an unusual opportunity for spiritual greatness. One could turn life “into an inner triumph, or one could ignore the challenge and simply vegetate, as did a majority of prisoners.”
The overwhelming majority of us won’t suffer imprisonment in a concentration camp. We will face more ordinary challenges:
Financial
Education
Parenting
Employment
Family
Health
Whatever our challenge is, we can either embrace it with a courageous attitude and find meaning or we vegetate, become zombies, and constantly text, tweet, and check our social media status.
Two. How did a future goal propel Frankl forward with his life and help him rise above his agony?
We read on page 73:
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.
Three. Throughout the book, is Frankl telling us to turn away from the source of our suffering or to confront it? Explain.
Over and over again, Frankl explains that we are prisoners of our suffering. Suffering is our oppressor, it is our prison, it is our inevitable condition. Suffering makes us feel closed in, trapped, and claustrophobic.
In the Hebrew religious tradition, there is this idea of mitzrayim. Either through external oppressors or the internal demons and moral failings that make us our own worst enemy, we find ourselves in a hellish place of tightness, confinement, and imprisonment. We often become so inured to our condition of imprisonment, our mitzrayim, that we’re not even aware that we are in our condition of “narrow straights” or of being closed in. We’ve acclimated to our claustrophobia. I’m reminded of a famous quote by the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard: “Despair is not knowing it.”
For Frankl, finding a higher purpose and the energized attitude that accompanies such a purpose is the antidote or cure for mitzrayim. Our human struggle is to identify our mitzrayim and find a purpose that liberates from our personal prison.
If we don’t overcome our mitzrayim and the hopeless and helplessness that accompanies it, we will fall prey to our own broken hearts, our bodies, minds, and souls will break down, and we will begin a decline that leads to death.
Ironically, though, suffering in our mitzrayim is also the source of our spiritual greatness, but we must first experience our suffering in all its totality first:
We read on page 74:
What does Spinoza say in his Ethics? –“Affectus, qui passio est, desinit esse passio simulatque eius claram et distinctam formamus ideam.” Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it.
He develops this idea of confronting our suffering in the Logotherapy section of the book where he writes we should use humor to exaggerate our suffering in a technique he calls paradoxical intention.
Comedians use paradoxical intention all the time.
A lonely woman leaves empty beer cans around her house and keeps her TV on ESPN 24 hours a day with messy dishes in the sink and unpaid bills on the kitchen counter so she’ll feel she has a man around the house.
Four. Much of Frankl’s book addresses the need for us to radically change our expectations. Explain.
One of the most difficult things to change is our attitude, which becomes hardened and calcified over time.
Frankl writes:
What was really needed was a fundamental change in our attitude toward life. We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing me, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in the talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. 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.
In other words, coming up with some generic or universal definition of meaning is useless. Meaning depends on individual circumstances and identifying our highest responsibilities based on those circumstances.
We change to adapt to our circumstances. For example, studies show a lot of men who suffered drug addiction quit their drug habit, not through rehab or therapy, but because they got old, got tired, had families, and their responsibilities demanded a change in their behavior.
A second point from above is that we cannot meditate or think too much about what meaning may or not be; rather, we have to act in the circumstances we find ourselves in.
A third point is that if our attitude bleeds of self-pity and entitlement, we will sit around and wait for life to happen to us.
People who wait for the world to stop for them and to give them things and to love them will find that nothing happens to them. They simply die alone in their delusional attitude.
Much of Frankl’s book is about waking up to identify that we may be the creators of our own prison. Our creation is our delusional attitude.
The biggest challenge we face is changing our attitude. This type of change sometimes happens in the blink of an eye, spurred on by some epiphany or other, but usually our attitudes change gradually as we fight tooth and claw to cling to our old attitude.
Much of our inadequate attitude is rooted in the childish delusion that there should be no suffering in life. To the contrary, Frankl wants us to know that suffering is the central feature of human existence, and that the sooner we embrace this fact the better we will be:
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.
Frankl’s book differs from other self-help books in that he doesn’t rely on cheap feel-good aphorisms to “help” us; rather, Frankl tells us the brutal truth: Suffering is something that is avoided in modern consumer society but in reality our meaning is rooted in how we embrace our suffering. Frankl writes:
Once the meaning of suffering had been revealed to us, we refused to minimize or alleviate the camp’s tortures by ignoring them or harboring false illusions and entertaining artificial optimism. Suffering had become a task on which we did not want to turn our backs. We had realized its hidden opportunities for achievement, the opportunities which caused the poet Rilke to write, ‘Wie vie list aufzuleiden!’ (‘How much suffering there is to get through!’). Rilke spoke of ‘getting through suffering’ as others would talk of ‘getting through work.’ There was plenty of suffering for us to get through. Therefore, it was necessary to face up to the full amount of suffering, trying to keep moments of weakness and furtive tears to a minimum. But there was no need to be ashamed of tears, for tears bore witness that a man had the greatest of courage, the courage to suffer. Only very few realized that. Shamefacedly some confessed occasionally that they had wept, like the comrade who answered my question of how he had gotten over his edema, by confessing, ‘I have wept it out of my system.”
Five. Does Frankl prescribe a one-size-fits-all meaning for all of us? Explain.
Frankl does not prescribe one type of meaning that should fit us all. While he wants us to all embrace an attitude of courage, sacrifice, and service, he says meaning varies from person to person:
These tasks, and therefore the meaning of life, differ from man to man, and from moment to moment. Thus it is impossible to define the meaning of life in a general way. Questions about the meaning of life can never be answered by sweeping statements. “Life” does not mean something vague, but something very real and concrete, just as life’s tasks are also very real and concrete. They form man’s destiny, which is different and unique for each individual. No man and no destiny can be compared with any other man or any other destiny. No situation repeats itself, and each situation calls for a different response. Sometimes the situation in which a man finds himself may require him to shape his own fate by action. At other times it is more advantageous for him to make use of an opportunity for contemplation and to realize assets in this way. Sometimes man may be required simply to accept fate, to bear his cross. Every situation is distinguished by its uniqueness, and there is always only one right answer to the problem posed by the situation at hand.
If you’re a parent, your priorities are clear and obvious. If you’re not a parent, you have more free time and more “open space” to decide where you find your meaning.
Parents are wrong-headed to think they’re superior to adults who don’t have children. No one can make claim to having found “ultimate meaning.”
Meaning differs based on our individual situation. As Frankl writes in the second half of his book:
Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he 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.
This emphasis on responsibleness is reflected in the categorical imperative of logotherapy, which is: “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!”
An Aside or Digression
I wish Viktor Frankl were alive because I have some questions for him about Finding meaning.
Question for Frankl: What happens when one person’s “meaning” conflicts with anothers?
For example, Dan Barker is a former Christian preacher, now atheist, who travels the world proclaiming the gospel of atheism. He sees the bible as an evil force with evil teachings and he wants to show that people who don’t believe in a god live normal, moral, meaningful lives. Preaching atheism gives Barker meaning.
Often Dan Barker has debates with Christian theologians whose meaning is to spread the Christian gospel.
My question for Frankl: How do we reconcile these two contradictory “meanings”? Does it even matter? Why? Why not?
Six. Over and over Frankl says we are accountable to others—our family, our friends, even our god. How does this accountability and responsibility free us?
In a state of fatigue and hunger, Frankl gives a speech to his fellow prisoners in which he explains that having no accountability is equal to having nothing to live for:
So I began by mentioning the most trivial of comforts first. I said that even in this Europe in the sixth winter of the Second World War, our situation was not the most terrible we could think of. I said that each of us had to ask himself what irreplaceable losses he had suffered up to then. I speculated that for most of them these losses had really been few. Whoever was still alive had reason for hope. Health, family, happiness, professional abilities, fortune, position in society — all these were things that could be achieved again or restored. After all, we still had all our bones intact. Whatever we had gone through could still be an asset to us in the future…
Then I spoke about the future. I said that to the impartial the future must seem hopeless. I agreed that each of us could guess for himself how small were his chances of survival. I told them that although there was still no typhus epidemic in the camp, I estimated my own chances at about one in twenty. But I also told them that, in spite of this, I had no intention of losing hope and giving up. For no man knew what the future would bring, much less the next hour. Even if we could not expect any sensational military events in the next few days, who knew better than we, with our experience of camps, how great chances sometimes opened up, quite suddenly, at least for the individual. For instance, one might be attached unexpectedly to a special group with exceptionally good working conditions—for this was the kind of thing which constituted the ‘luck’ of the prisoner.
But I did not only talk of the future and the veil which was drawn over it. I also mentioned the past; all its joys, and how its light shone even in the present darkness. Again I quoted a poet — to avoid sounding like a preacher myself — who had written, ‘Was Du erlebst, kann keine Macht der Welt Dir rauben.’ (What you have experienced, no power on earth can take from you.) Not only our experiences, but all we have done, whatever great thoughts we may have had, and all we have suffered, all this is not lost, though it is past; we have brought it into being. Having been is also a kind of being, and perhaps the surest kind.
Then I spoke of the many opportunities of giving life a meaning. I told my comrades (who lay motionless, although occasionally a sigh could be heard) that human life, under any circumstances, never ceases to have a meaning, and that this infinite meaning of life includes suffering and dying, privation and death. I asked the poor creatures who listened to me attentively in the darkness of the hut to face up to the seriousness of our position. They must not lose hope but should keep their courage in the certainty that the hopelessness of our struggle did not detract from its dignity and its meaning. I said that someone looks down on each of us in difficult hours — a friend, a wife, somebody alive or dead, or God — and he would not expect us to disappoint him. He would hope to find us suffering proudly — not miserably — knowing how to die.
And finally I spoke of our sacrifice, which had meaning in every case. It was in the nature of this sacrifice that it should appear to be pointless in the normal world, the world of material success. But in reality our sacrifice did have a meaning. Those of us who had any religious faith, I said frankly, could understand without difficulty. I told them of a comrade who on his arrival in camp had tried to make a pact with Heaven that his suffering and death should save the human being he loved from a painful end. For this man, suffering and death were meaningful; his was a sacrifice of the deepest significance. He did not want to die for nothing. None of us wanted that.
The purpose of my words was to find a full meaning in our life, then and there, in that hut and in that practically hopeless situation. I saw that my efforts had been successful. When the electric bulb flared up again, I saw the miserable figures of my friends limping toward me to thank me with tears in their eyes. But I have to confess here that only too rarely had I the inner strength to make contact with my companions in suffering and that I must have missed many opportunities for doing so.
Seven. What are the “two races of men” Frankl discovers in this world?
Human kindness can be found in all groups, even those which as a whole it would be easy to condemn. The boundaries between groups overlapped and we must not try to simplify matters by saying that these men were angels and those were devils.
[…]
From all this we may learn that there are two races of men in this world, but only these two — the “race” of the decent man and the “race” of the indecent man. Both are found everywhere; they penetrate into all groups of society. No group consists entirely of decent or indecent people. In this sense, no group is of “pure race” — and therefore one occasionally found a decent fellow among the camp guards.
Life in a concentration camp tore open the human soul and exposed its depths. Is it surprising that in those depths we again found only human qualities which in their very nature were a mixture of good and evil? The rift dividing good from evil, which goes through all human beings, reaches into the lowest depths and becomes apparent even on the bottom of the abyss which is laid open by the concentration camp.
Eight. When the prisoners are liberated, they come to a fork in the road, so to speak, in which they can turn their life around for the better or sink into an abyss of bitterness and nihilism. Explain.
Viktor Frankl had a deep spiritual connection to his God. After being liberated from the concentration camps, he describes in his book how he walked alone through the country and contemplating the nature surrounding him, he fell to his knees and repeated a passage from the Psalms: “I called to the Lord from my narrow prison and He answered me in the freedom of space.” Rather than be a bitter nihilist in the aftermath of his imprisonment, Frankl used his newfound freedom as an opportunity to start a new life. After falling to his knees and quoting the Psalm, he writes, “How long I knelt there and repeated this sentence memory can no longer recall. But I know that on that day, in that hour, my new life started. Step for step I progressed, until I again became a human being.”
But not all traumatized prisoners react like Frankl. We read the following:
During this psychological phase one observed that people with natures of a more primitive kind could not escape the influences of the brutality which had surrounded them in camp life. Now, being free, they thought they could use their freedom licentiously and ruthlessly. The only thing that had changed for them was that they were now the oppressors instead of the oppressed. They became instigators, not objects, of willful force and injustice. They justified their behaviour by their own terrible experiences.
This was often revealed in apparently insignificant events. A friend was walking across a field with me toward the camp when suddenly we came to a field of green crops. Automatically, I avoided it, but he drew his arm through mine and dragged me through it. I stammered something about not treading down the young crops. He became annoyed, gave me an angry look and shouted, ‘You don’t say! And hasn’t enough been taken from us? ‘My wife and child have been gassed – not to mention everything else – and you would forbid me to tread on a few stalks of oats!’
Only slowly could these men be guided back to the commonplace truth that no one has the right to do wrong, not even if wrong has been done to them.
We had to strive to lead them back to this truth, or the consequences would have been much worse than the loss of a few thousand stalks of oats.”
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