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.
Logotherapy Part 2
One. What may be the hardest principle in Frankl’s book for us to embrace?
That life is unavoidable suffering and that we are responsible to teach ourselves to “suffer bravely,” that such “brave suffering” is what gives us meaning.
Frankl knew a lot about suffering. In the concentration camps, he tells us, the chances of survival were one out of twenty-eight.
His manuscript, which was lost in the camp, was his “child” and the source of his meaning and purpose. He feels stripped of purpose, but then he finds in a dead man’s coat pocket a Hebrew prayer that calls on him to live his thoughts, not to merely write them down in a book (115).
Two. What is 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.
This proposition became the woman’s “therapy,” or better put, logotherapy.
Three. What does Frankl want us to understand regarding “super-meaning”?
Frankl asserts that “ultimate meaning necessarily exceeds and surpasses the finite intellectual capacities of man; in logotherapy, we speak in this context of a super-meaning. What is demanded of man is not, as some existential philosophers teach, to endure the meaninglessness of life, but rather his incapacity to grasp its unconditional meaningfulness in rational terms. Logos is deeper than logic.
Another path to super-meaning is seeing our suffering and loss as an occasion to be worthy of the people we loved and lost.
Frankl doesn’t want our sufferings to go in vain, but be the ingredients that make up our life meaning.
Four. What is the relationship between death and meaning?
Life’s brevity demands that our finite choices be meaningful. To live randomly and recklessly is to show contemptuous disregard for our existence.
Finding meaning through the finiteness of our existence is not pessimistic. As Frankl writes,
The pessimist resembles a man who observes with fear and sadness that his wall calendar, from which he daily tears a sheet, grows thinner with each passing day. On the other hand, the person who attacks the problems of life actively is like a man who removes each successive leaf from his calendar and files it neatly and carefully away with its predecessors, after first having jotted down a few diary notes on the back. He can reflect with pride and joy on all the richness set down in these notes, on all the life he has already lived to the fullest. . . . “Instead of possibilities, I have realities in my past, not only the reality of work done and love loved, but of sufferings bravely suffered. These sufferings are even the things of which I am proud, though these are things which cannot inspire envy.”
Five. Explain Frankl’s treatment for neurotic fears and anxieties (122).
We can be afraid of dying, sweating, blushing, having panic attacks, etc.
Frankl explains: “The fear is the mother of the event.”
How do we impede this fear response since the more we obsess over the fear the more the fear is likely to overtake us?
We cannot force fear away. Nor can we force pleasure. As Frankl writes:
Ironically enough, in the same way that fear brings to pass what one is afraid of, likewise a forced intention makes impossible what one forcibly wishes. This excessive intention, or “hyper-intention,” as I call it, can be observed particularly in cases of sexual neurosis. . . . Pleasure is, and must remain, a side-effect or by-product, and is destroyed and spoiled to the degree to which it is made a goal in itself.
To summarize, fear is both the mother of our affliction and the mother of the hyper-intention that impedes our wishes and desires.
To combat this fear, Frankl has implemented “paradoxical intention,” in which we are encouraged to intend the very thing we fear.
Frankl uses the example of a man with sweat phobia who is encouraged to demonstrate with great pride to the world the amazing volumes of sweat he can produce: “I only sweat out a quart before, but now I’m going to pour at least ten quarts!”
The fear is defused in part through humor and “a reversal of the patient’s attitude, inasmuch as his fear is replaced by a paradoxical wish” (124).
Frankl quotes Gordon W. Allport: “The neurotic who learns to laugh at himself may be on the way to self-management.”
Six. What is Frankl’s attitude toward the debate between free will and determinism?
Frankl makes it clear that any philosophy or psychotherapy rooted in the belief that we are the sum of biology and environment (determinism) with no free will is a dangerous principle, stripping us of an opportunity to find meaning.
Frankl cites examples of the depressed and hopeless that turned their life around. He even cites an evil Nazi who showed goodness in his character before he died of cancer (132).
Frankl’s argument that we are self-determining speaks to his primary thesis: that no matter how mired we are in excruciating circumstances we have the freedom to choose the attitude toward our suffering and that our attitude can determine if we will find meaning.
That we can change speaks to Frankl’s belief in second chances. He writes that no matter how close we are to death, we can turn our life around: “Live as if you were living for the second time and had acted as wrongly the first time as you are about to act now” (150).
As someone who believes in meaning, Frankl is at odds with nihilistic therapists who believe life is a joke, place of random events with no grand purpose, a place with no justice, a place without meaning. Such people live in a condition of “learned meaninglessness” (152).
On a personal note, while I may concede that life is often random, stripped of justice, and appears to be too absurd as to cradle an ultimate meaning or grand scheme of things, such thoughts don’t abnegate my responsibilities to my personal morality, my duty to my wife and children, and my duty to society. To abnegate my responsibilities would be to surrender to complete nihilism and show reckless disregard and contempt for myself and others.
Even if there is no perfect, complete Meaning, we should fight against complete “Non-Meaning.”
Likewise, Freud was wrong when he said a diverse group of hungry people would all become the same group of animals. Frankl, who saw suffering and hunger in ways Freud never did, saw that people either maintained their humanity and dignity or they did not in varying degrees: “people unmasked themselves, both the swine and the saints.”
Comparing “Gooseberries” and Man’s Search for Meaning
Essay Assignment
In a 1,000-word essay, develop an analytical thesis that shows how the life lessons in Man's Search for Meaning explain the demise of Nikolai from Chekhov's "Gooseberries."
Some Things to Consider for Your Essay
Comparing Man's Search for Meaning and "Gooseberries," consider the following:
One. Nikolai has no ideal other than being a false god.
Two. He has no higher purpose other than to find comfort and hedonism
Three. He avoids conflict and stress, the very thing Frankl says fulfills us.
Four. By hiding from life, Nikolai is like the servant in the story Death in Tehran.
Nikolay's Irrational Mind Born from His Pathology Or the Other Way Around?
Nikolay suffers from the most extreme form of egotism, called solipsism. Solipsism can be defined in many ways:
Only one's mind exists.
No one exists as humans, only a two-dimensional, fawning audience.
The self can never know others, only its own self.
The solipsist can attach no meaning to others, only to himself.
The solipsist lives in an insular, private world disconnected from others. We could argue therefore that smart phones are a form of solipsism.
Ludwig Wittgenstein writes of solipsism: "Hell is not other people. Hell is yourself." And he writes, "I am my own world."
Nikolay's second pathology is self-complacency.
Complacency is being satisfied with mediocrity.
Complacency is being content without new challenges.
Complacency is being soothed and medicated on routine and the comfort of monotony.
Complacency dulls one's appetite for life.
Complacency is a form of the Jahiliyyah, a long period of ignorance and darkness.
Nikolay's third pathology is the spiritual death resulting from cocooning or contracting rather than expanding in life.
Cocooning is retreating into the home and creating a safe place while avoiding the challenges and anxieties produced by interacting with the outside world.
Cocooning in the modern age is constructing elaborate home entertainment systems and personal chefs that allow us to never leave the home.
“Gooseberries” Study Questions
One. What is Nikolai’s “disorder”?
He wants to find the comfort of his youth, the country. This “fixed idea” prevents him from broadening his horizons. Rather than move forward with his life as an adult, he longs to regress back to the cozy comforts of childhood. He wants to be a child again; he wants to go back to the womb.
In seeking the serenity and safety of country life, he chooses death. His longing for the country pushes him into a tiny world without adventure and challenge; it's the same as disappearing into the "TV cave."
The ego is not challenged in such a small world. A tiny world is the world of solipsism.
Ivan speaks about his brother’s longing to disappear into the country as a kind of death. We read, “He was a good fellow and I loved him, but I never sympathized with the desire to shut oneself up one’s own farm. It is a common saying that a man needs only six feet of land. But surely a corpse wants that, not a man.” He continues to contrast city life and country life: “To leave town, and the struggle and the swim of life, and go and hide yourself in a farmhouse is not life—it is egoism, laziness; it is a kind of monasticism, but monasticism without action. A man needs, not six feet of land, not a farm, but the whole earth, all Nature, where in full liberty he can display all the properties and qualities of a free spirit.”
A life eating cabbage soup in the isolation of the country is a life of inertia (stagnation) and entropy (degeneration).
Nikolai becomes ruthless in the pursuit of his dream and “stingy.” He lives like a “beggar” to save for his country cottage, farmhouse, vegetable garden, and gooseberry bush.
Ivan pities his brother and tries to give Nikolai money for holiday, but his brother saves that money also. Nothing can change his mind: “Once a man gets a fixed idea, there’s nothing to be done,” Ivan says of his brother.
At the age of 40, Nikolai is still obsessed (since the age of 19) married an “elderly, ugly widow” with designs of her dying and using her inheritance to buy his dream farm. He keeps his wife “half starved” and siphons her money into his bank account. Her life with Nikolai is so dreadful that she loses her will to live, giving up “her soul to God,” and Nikolai without conscience or any sense of blame.
Two. Ivan says, “Money like vodka, can play queer tricks with a man.” Explain.
We hear Ivan tell a story about the merchant who poured honey on his riches so he could eat his money before he died. We see a connection between greed and spite. The connection is so strong that the greedy descends into madness eating his money coated with honey. He seems to be saying implicitly: "I want my riches and you can't have any." Ivan is attributing the same disease to his brother Nikolai.
To underscore the message of greed and insanity, Ivan offers yet another example of a work accident resulting in a severed foot and the foot’s owner being concerned about the twenty-five roubles he had left in the boot.
Without remorse for his dead wife, Nikolai uses his dead wife’s money to buy a country estate and transplants twenty gooseberry bushes to his property.
Three. Why does everyone, including the red dog and the cook, look like a pig at the estate? What does this all mean?
We matter to others. We affect others. Our life is not our own. Our own moral dissolution injures others as well. We get fat and our dogs and children get fat.
We can further infer that the fatness is a mental illness, the result of living a life without meaning. In our spiritual void, we seek eating as a substitute and get fatter and fatter as our souls get emptier and emptier.
We have gained the whole world (and gained weight), but we’ve lost our soul.
People who live in comfort, complacency, “fat off the land,” are maladapted to a life without meaning. Nikolai, the dog, and the chef, and others, all bloated with a penchant for seeming to grunt like pigs, are clearly in a state of maladaptation and moral dissolution. Human beings were meant to struggle and to be engaged with the real world. To retreat into comfort may be a fantasy, but it is a misguided one, which will surely result in some kind of pathology or other, overeating, gluttony, boredom, fatness, lethargy, acedia, a life without purpose.
In many ways, Nikolai is like those middle-class Americans who disappear into the suburbs, become complacent, withdraw into the TV room, and grow fat, their eyes glazed, their countenance zombie-like.
In the case of Nikolai, he becomes a bloat Fat God, commanding the local peasants call him “Your Lordship.” As Big Fish in Little Pond, he reinforces his rule by giving the peasants fake sick remedies, trinkets, and buckets of vodka. A state of drunkenness, it appears, is the only way to enable and tolerate this pompous False God with his protruding belly.
Our Lordship is surrounded by drunken sycophants who tell him what he wants to hear, that he is a sort of god, and of course, he begins to believe in their saccharine flattery and suffers a form of delusional grandeur on the scale of utter madness. Nikolai lives inside his echo chamber, what we could call solipsism.
Forgetting his peasant background, Nikolai truly believes he is a philanthropic nobleman when in fact he is a self-serving sloth and hedonist.
Nikolai becomes pathetic in a comical and sad way (lugubrious) as we see that he enjoys pronouncing his peasant name in an elevated elocution as if he is marinating in the glory of his nobility.
The contrast between his grandeur and his bloated, sluggish, infantile self is both comical and sad. We see that he gloats like a “child,” a man-child, someone who’s never grown up.
We see that Ivan is not impressed with the gooseberries because they are sour, but his brother laughs with giddy pleasure as he pops the berries in his mouth. He believes they’re great, so they are great. He is in love with his own illusion. To explain this, Ivan quotes the poet Pushkin (spelled differently today) who said, “the illusion which exalts us is dearer to us than ten thousand truths.”
Four. What change takes place in Ivan during the brief period he visits his brother?
Seeing his brother happy, Ivan feels guilty and troubled because he is not happy for his brother’s joy; rather, he is in a state of despair.
Perhaps not all happiness is equal. Happiness apart from sanity, morality, and meaning is a false happiness, is the worst kind of happiness, and in fact is not worthy of being called happiness at all. It is a sort of diseased dream from an emotionally arrested man-child and therefore does not affirm life. Instead, Nikolai’s “happy dream” affirms that we can live in peace with our own self-induced hell and live fat, lethargic, and self-complacent existence while thinking “we have won.” Perhaps this vision of a man trapped in hell who has convinced himself of his own pathetic “happiness” is a vision that is too much for Ivan to bear. Perhaps this is why Ivan is in despair.
Later that night, Ivan’s despair and dread grows deeper at bedtime when Nikolai, like a drug addict, is unable to sleep as he gorges “again and again” on plates of gooseberries. He is trying to fill his emptiness while using his gooseberries as medication for his disease of being an isolated man-child living a life without purpose and meaning.
No longer despairing for only his brother, Ivan despairs for the whole human race, a delusional lot who live a life of vanity, hypocrisy, and falsehood. In short, Ivan affirms that life is a cynical joke without meaning, and this nihilistic vision overwhelms Ivan with a sense of sickness and rot.
People like Nikolai depress Ivan because they are so insulated from reality and so lacking in empathy that they are full of smug self-satisfaction and fail to lift a finger to help a world full of suffering, starving children, “and all the horror of life goes on somewhere behind the scenes.”
All this suffering goes on, Ivan thinks, because people are as selfish as his brother Nikolai: “apparently a happy man only feels so because the unhappy bear their burden in silence, but for which happiness would be impossible.” Nikolai retreated to his farm in part to avoid the suffering of the masses.
Ivan begins to hate the human race and wishes they were built differently. As he says, “Every happy man should have some one with a little hammer at his door to knock and remind him that there are unhappy people, and that, however happy he may be, life will sooner or later show its claws, and some misfortune will befall him—illness, poverty, loss, and then on one will see or hear him, just as he now neither sees nor hears others. But there is no man with a hammer, and the happy go on living, just a little fluttered with the petty cares of every day, like an aspen-tree in the wind—and everything is all right.”
Thinking these thoughts, Ivan feels that up until visiting his brother he has been living a life of superficial vanity and false contentment.
Ivan grows to believe that the pursuit of happiness is a sham and that the real aim should be to help suffering, to pursue a life of real meaning. He says, “Happiness does not exist, nor should it, and if there is any meaning or purpose in life, they are not in our piddling little happiness, but in something reasonable and grand. Do good!”
Ivan’s do-gooder philosophy seems just as extreme as his brother’s self-centered, hedonistic one. We read, “Ivan Ivanich’s story had satisfied neither Bourkin nor Aliokhin.” They found the story “tedious” and depressing and were tired and wished to go to bed.
Five. How does the story contrast a communal life and a solipsistic life and for what purpose?
Communal life requires empathy, cooperation, and adaptation. Solipsistic life requires nothing and is therefore a form of death.
Six. How does egotism infect everything Nikolai does including his acts of charity?
He descends more and more into narcissism and solipsistic hell. He’s outwardly pious but dying inside. Yes, he gives money to inflate his image, but he has contempt for the human race. This reminds me of Pascal who wrote we live for image more than for substance. He uses liquor to soak the peasants’ brains so the peasants will be his sycophants and treat him like a god worthy of lecturing them on the greater truths.
Seven. Explain Nikolai’s gooseberry fetish.
They must be fake, a mirage, a chimera because we read a quote by Pushkin: “Dearer to us the falsehood that exalts/Than hosts of baser truths.” What do they represent? Rosebud? Unconditional love? Transcendence? Permanence? All of the above? The way I see it, the gooseberries represent medication. Nikolai has a huge ego and going through the world with a giant ego is tiring. I would even say the ego poisons us. So what does this have to do with gooseberries? The gooseberries are like Alka-Seltzer you take after getting a bloated stomachache.
Eight. Why does Ivan say there is sadness to seeing people who have achieved fulfillment and happiness?
Could it be that this sadness is seeing the illusion and misguided passions that are behind this happiness so that what is happiness is something perverse? Perhaps the sadness is that people who think they’ve achieved happiness have in truth become complacent and self-satisfied with their isolation and mediocrity.
Perhaps the gooseberries represent a drug that produces self-hypnosis that we can deny the world’s suffering and experience happiness in a cocoon. Perhaps the gooseberries are an indulgence, a self-medication.
I remember when a professor agreed to help me and a few other students prepare for our Masters degree test, the professor's wife gave us store-bought cookies while he ate Danish, stacked high on a plate and we weren't allowed to touch the Danish.
Nine. What is Ivan’s psychological state after telling his friends the story of his brother Nikolai?
He is in a state of urgency to warn his friends about self-complacency and the false happiness of being idle and mediocre.
Ten. What is behind the pathology of wanting to be a Big Fish in a Little Pond?
Since we know the pond is small and that our feeling big is relative to the smallness of the pond, we are guilty of engaging in a delusion with self-awareness.
In other words, we are not innocent of our delusion of being a Big Fish. We are willing participants in our own delusion.
What can we infer about the character of someone who decides to be a willing participant in his own delusion?
For one, he’s a coward because he’s scared to compete on an even playing field. He doesn’t want real competition. He wants all of life’s games to be lopsided in his favor.
When I was a child playing with my plastic soldiers, my “side” had twice as many soldiers as the other side, so I could crush my enemy.
There’s something of the child in wanting to be a Big Fish in a Little Pond.
So far the Big Fish in the Little Pond is a coward and a child.
Because he is never tested in the little pond, he resigns to a life of stagnation. He prefers a life of stagnation, what seems to him a stress-free and safe life, to the real world. He has chosen death over life.
His choice is not really safe. He has succumbed to the disease of a child’s warped fantasy of dominance in a kingdom too tiny and insignificant to lord over.
He is a false god living in his own grave.
Using an Analogy Or Extended Comparison As an Introduction:
During my first marriage I lived in a five-bedroom house, had four kids, the whole works. Then I got a divorce, remarried, and with the kids all grown up, I got into a three-bedroom house. I got divorced again, remarried and with all the alimony I had to fork out, I found it more practical for my third wife and me to live in a modest two-bedroom bungalow. I got divorced again and now I find myself living alone in a one-bedroom condo. The thing is the condo feels too big for me and I really hate doing housework. I prefer to drive my BMW up and down the Pacific Coast Highway. It relaxes me. Going back to the empty condo, however, is completely depressing. It’s a mess. I hate doing house chores. I’m sorry but at my age I’m simply not motivated to clean up around the house. That’s when I decided to say the hell with making mortgage payments. I sold the condo and moved into my Beamer. What a difference this has made in my life. For one, sleeping inside my car means I don’t have to get up at all hours of the night to make sure thieves haven’t stolen the rims or to wipe bird crap off the roof before it calcifies on the paint. You know how it is, getting up at four A.M. because you remember you forgot to vacuum the corn nut that your buddy got lodged underneath the passenger seat.
As I’ve indicated, I never spent time in my condo anyway. I don’t cook so my car doesn’t need an oven, just a toaster inside the glove box. I haul a port-a-potty so I don’t have to keep doing my business at restaurants. As far as showers go, I work-out at a gym three days a week. That’s more showering than any man needs.
As far as my car’s limited “closet space” goes, I don’t use a closet anyway. Then there’s your car cleanup, which inside a car is a helluva lot easier. There are fewer square inches in a car than your smallest apartment by a long shot. Besides, I’d rather detail my car than vacuum and mop my condo any day of the week.
Living inside my car seems kind of cozy. Like when I was a little kid and I took my baths inside the sink. Yeah, I’m talking about being a baby again. Feeling safe, comforted, and insulated inside the womb. I’m talking about the days when life was simple and I had a minimum of responsibilities.
This is it for me. Inside my car, I have found paradise.
The narrator of the above is a misguided soul who has stumbled across a false paradise based on cocooning inside his car. Similarly, we see that Nikolai has retreated into his own cocoon, the false paradise of his small country town in which he feeds his ego and disappears into a world of solipsism. This human tendency to retreat back into the womb is one of the major components of losing meaning and higher purpose, which also includes _____________, _____________, ________________, and _________________.
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