Viktor Frankl Principle
You don't choose meaning; meaning chooses you: NPR Story about Laundry Love
Example of an Essay That Refutes Viktor Frankl's Core Message
Youngtae An
McMahon
English 1C
2014.4.16
Man's Search for Meaning
In Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor E. Frankl tells the very personal story of his experience as a prisoner in a concentration camp during the Holocaust. He presents this story in the form of an essay in which he shares his arguments and analysis as a doctor and psychologist as well as a former prisoner. This paper will argue Frankl’s story as well as his main arguments, and will evaluate the quality of Frankl’s writing and focus on any areas of weakness within the story.
Frankl begins his book by stating that his purpose in writing the book is not to present facts and details of the Holocaust, but to provide a personal account of the everyday life of a prisoner living in a concentration camp. He states, “This tale is not concerned with the great horrors, which have already been described often enough (though less often believed), but…it will try to answer this question: How was everyday life in a concentration camp reflected in the mind of the average prisoner?” (21). Frankl then goes on to describe the three stages of a prisoner’s psychological reactions to being held captive in a concentration camp. The first phase, which occurs just after the prisoner is admitted to the camp, is shock. The second phase, occurring once the prisoner has fallen into a routine within the camp, is one of apathy, or “the blunting of the emotions and the feeling that one could not anymore” (42). The third phase, which occurs after the prisoner has been liberated from the camp, is a period of “depersonalization”, in which “everything appears unreal, unlikely, as in a dream” (110). In this phase, released prisoners also feel a sense of “bitterness and disillusionment” when returning to their former lives (113). Frankl describes each of these phases using psychological theory and provides personal experiences to exemplify each of the stages (Avila).
As described above, Frankl’s main purpose for writing this book is to present and analyze the average prisoner’s psychological reactions to the everyday life of a concentration camp. His three main arguments are his presentation and analysis of each of the psychological stages that the average concentration camp prisoner experiences: shock, apathy and depersonalization. He bases his analyses of each of these stages on the actions of the prisoners and his own personal thoughts and reactions as he experienced life in a concentration camp (Criner). For example, Frankl argues that the second phase of apathy forces “the prisoner’s life down to a primitive level” (47) in which “all efforts and all emotions were centered on one task: preserving one’s own life and that of the other fellow” (47). He bases this theory on events he witnessed while living in the camp himself, and states, “It was natural that the desire for food was the major primitive instinct around which mental life centered. Let us observe the majority of prisoners when they happened to work near each other and were, for once, not closely watched. They would immediately start discussing food” (48). Frankl continuously uses examples from his experiences in the concentration camp to illustrate and strengthen his psychological arguments throughout the text.
Firstly, the author is a survivor of the Holocaust and was a prisoner of a concentration camp himself, which gives him the personal insight to be able to comment on the psychological conditions of an average prisoner. However, this also creates a bias and because of his personal experience, he is unable to be entirely objective in writing his analysis. Frankl acknowledges this bias in the beginning of his book, by stating, “Only the man inside knows. His judgments may not be objective, his evaluations may be out of proportion. This is inevitable. An attempt must be made to avoid any personal bias, and that is the real difficulty of a book of this kind” (24-25). Although he is aware of this bias, it creates a partiality that will sway the readers throughout his story and it serves as a minor weakness in his writing style (Avila).
A second weakness in Frankl’s writing is in the assumptions he sometimes makes to prove his point. He makes overarching generalizations several times in his book, making statements that, although may have been true for himself and those around him, might not have been true for every prisoner in every concentration camp during the Holocaust (Criner). For example, in one instance, he says, “The prisoner of Auschwitz , in the first phase of shock, did not fear death” (37). It is very bold to say that no prisoner of Auschwitz, one of the most well-known and deadly concentration camps of the Holocaust, did not fear death, as death was all around them and was a very real threat in their daily lives. Although he might have not feared death during his phase of shock, it is impossible for him to guarantee that no prisoner was at all fearful of death in this first psychological phase, and for him to make overarching assumptions like this is a weakness to the overall quality of his book.
Finally, Frankl sometimes becomes too technical and verbose in his writing style, which makes it very hard for the average reader to understand (Avila). One example of this is as follows. Frankl states, “I remember an incident when there was an occasion for psychotherapeutic work on the inmates of a whole hut, due to an intensification of their receptiveness because of a certain external situation” (102). This sentence, which is overly wordy and complicated, makes it difficult for the average reader to understand exactly what he is saying. A reader can easily get frustrated when trying to decipher the author’s meaning due to overly complicated language, and this is a third weakness of Frankl’s writing (Avila).
The psychological theories that Frankl presents are very interesting and he does a good job of illustrating these theories with his own personal experiences. However, his writing is weakened by the presence of bias, the overarching assumptions he occasionally makes, and his sometimes overly technical and verbose language.
Example of an A Paper for Man's Search for Meaning
Rahma Arafa
Professor McMahon
English 1C
15 April 2014
The Antidote
In the 2010 film The Switch, Wally Mars is famous for saying, "It seems that everywhere around the world, humans are rushing to find something. Maybe that is why we are called the human race."
Indeed, most of us are all yearning and looking for meaning. If we suffer from the existential vacuum and have the deep, sick feeling that we are living a wasted life, then the solution is meaning. We can overcome the existential vacuum with meaning, evidenced by moral values, boundaries, and discipline. Meaning is not something out there that we find. It is in us. Attempts to ignore the value of meaning as the antidote to the existential vacuum occur at our own peril. In fact, we can see empirical, real-life evidence that we can, as Frankl argues, strive for meaning in these three compelling ways.
We find that in spite of our cynical and nihilistic proclamations, we have core values that are essential to our identity and that our identity is tied to a meaningful existence. They produce our identity. For example, as McMahon states, if a person shot another for a million dollars and "got away with it," he would be unhappy because killing violates his core values and as such he violates his identity and "who he is." Who we are, our identity, gives us a sense of meaning. Core values can also teach us self-sacrifice, that we lose our convenience, safety, and material pleasures for the sake of helping others. It is only moral that we help others, because by helping others in a form of self-sacrifice, our character should strengthen; it teaches us compassion and kindness. If we were to assist the rest of the community, or even the world, in any way possible, we would feel better. We would be making a difference, no matter how small, in society and bettering ourselves. This purpose would lead anyone out of the existential vacuum due to the fact that we would not feel that we are wasting our lives. In Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl was constantly in the mindset of the doctor he was. Being a doctor, someone who assisted others, was Frankl’s identity, which kept him connected with a meaningful existence. With strong core and moral values, Frankl helped others, obtained medicine for typhus patients, inspired others, and hid comrades. By building his character, Frankl was able to make a difference in the lives of other prisoners. Life is simply the sum of all our choices, which is the reason why the heroic and inspiring Frankl survived the Holocaust. As simply put by Frankl, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing; the last of the human freedoms — to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way” (Frankl 66). Our attitude towards our core values pulls us away from living an empty life of nihilism and misery. Furthermore, by being morally good, we flourish. We have a universal hunger for centrifugal motion, moving outward toward a positive transformation and flourishing. In contrast, we shudder with despair and anxiety at the prospect of living a centripetal existence, one defined by stagnation and selfishness. Flourishing, or living a life of fulfillment by living a virtuous life with core and moral values, is compatible and supports Frankl’s contention that we should not be like the many or the ordinary who live a life of “bitter self-preservation”; rather, we should “remain brave, dignified, and unselfish” (Frankl 46). By disagreeing to helping others, we evolve into selfish, self-centered humans, spiraling into the existential vacuum.
Moreover, by maintaining our core and moral values, we establish boundaries in our lives and learn discipline. When we have boundaries, both morally and physically, we veer towards meaning and away from reckless nihilism. When we do not, we collapse under the weight of moral dissolution and self-degradation. Discipline empowers us so that when we learn discipline we are happier and when we are undisciplined we often face the abyss of despair. Meaning is born in things we control, such as boundaries and discipline. Without boundaries, we simply become animals with no purpose or meaning. For example, if a person lacked a set of boundaries, he would even drink himself to death. Without a limit, we would not know when to stop. Another instance of how a lack of boundaries leads to self-degradation is in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. In this book, Agustus Gloop, Veruca Salt, Violet Beauregarde, and Mike Teavee all follow their desires, having no boundaries or discipline. By not knowing when enough is enough, these characters collapse under the weight of moral dissolution. Failure to have discipline, or self-control, leads to the existential vacuum. Furthermore, we need boundaries to balance the quest for happiness by searching, not for happiness, but for meaning. According to academic scholar and journalist, Emily Smith:
“the pursuit of meaning is what makes human beings uniquely human. By putting aside our selfish interests to serve someone or something larger than ourselves –by devoting our lives to "giving" rather than "taking" -- we are not only expressing our fundamental humanity, but are also acknowledging that that there is more to the good life than the pursuit of simple happiness” (There’s More to Life Than Being Happy).
If we search for happiness, and not meaning, than we soon realize that happiness is an emotion that ultimately fades away, just as all emotions do; positive affect and feelings of pleasure are fleeting. The amount of time people report feeling good or bad correlates with happiness but not at all with meaning. Meaning, on the other hand, is enduring. Having negative things happen to us may decrease our happiness, but it increases the amount of meaning in our lives. However, if we have meaning in life, we are more satisfied. This concept is reiterated by Frankl, “If there is meaning in life at all, then there must be meaning in suffering” (Smith). By having discipline, we know that meaning is just as important as happiness. As stated previously, happiness is a fleeting emotion, if it fades, we are left with nothing; we are overcome by despair and the existential vacuum.
Although I argue that meaning, which consists of core and moral values, boundaries, and discipline, is the antidote to the existential vacuum, others disagree; others argue that “meaning” is just a term for finding a motivational tool to pull us out of our sense of emptiness. We all need to be motivated by something, but that something is not meaning; rather, that something is simply a motivational tool and nothing else. We all like to call our motivational tools “meaning” but we only do so to make ourselves feel better. No matter what we find that gives us a sense of purpose and motivation, it is merely a mirage that cannot stand up to the definition of meaning. While others may argue, against Frankl, that the meaning of life is a mirage, I do not agree. Without meaning we develop Noogenic Neurosis. This disorder is characterized by a failure to find meaning in life. Individuals suffering from noogenic neurosis feel that they have nothing to live for. They are unable to find any goal or direction in life. They suffer from a chronic inability to believe in the truth, significance, or usefulness of anything that they are currently engaged in or anything that they might contemplate doing in the future. Noogenic neurosis has been recognized as a common psychological problem in recent times. Some writers have described its clinical symptoms and commented on the fact that it is becoming increasingly more common among people seeking psychological help. For example, Dr. Lee Jung concludes that “meaninglessness inhibits the fullness of life and is, therefore, equivalent to illness” (Das). He estimated that approximately one third of his ill patients suffered from a lack of meaning or purpose in their lives rather than any identifiable psychiatric syndrome. There are many different cases that link both physical and mental illness to a meaningless life and the existential vacuum. Without core values, we have no identity, which can actually lead to “psychological disorders characterized by chronic feelings of emptiness, and various dissociative disorders marked by a disruption in identity” (Das). For Frankl, the root of human motivation necessary to pull ourselves out of a wasted life is a will to meaning. In Man’s Search for Meaning, the prisoners who lost all hope for a future and gave up on life succumbed to the life of a ‘Moslem,’ and eventually died. Without any motivation in life, the empty prisoners withered away. Frankl also noted that the prisoners who created personal meaning from this hellish experience were the ones most likely to survive. Viktor Frankl reached within himself for meaning to transcend the atrocious reality he could not escape; which is the reason why the heroic and inspiring Frankl survived the Holocaust. So it is evident that meaning is, in fact, the antidote for the existential vacuum.
Works Cited
Das, Ajit K. “Frankl and the Realm of Meaning.” Journal of Humanistic Education and
Department. June 1998, Vol. 36 Issue 4, pg199. EbscoHost. Web.
Frankl, Viktor E. Man's Search for Meaning. New York: Washington Square Press. 1959. Print.
Smith, Emily. “There’s More to Life Than Being Happy.” The Atlantic. 9 Jan 2013. Web.
Challenges of Teaching Man's Search for Meaning and Writing About It
I taught Frankl’s classic about 5 years ago in my college composition class. While the students liked the book, I wasn’t satisfied with the way I taught it, but I feel compelled to give it another try.
I find the challenges immense, not the least of which are the following:
One. How do you convince your students that a book set largely in a Nazi concentration camp and that argues we must accept suffering and death as part of the human condition is in fact a life-affirming book?
Two. How do you teach Frankl’s main principle, that we must assert our free will, we must cultivate our inner life, and we must cultivate a mature, brave attitude in the face of suffering and evil without resorting to clichés and homilies?
Three. How does a man, that’s me, who is mired in cynicism teach the life-affirming principles in Frankl’s book without revealing hypocrisy? To be fair to myself, I would guess less than 1% of the human race adheres to the principles articulated in Frankl's book.
I wonder if the book will actually affect my cynicism this time around. We shall see.
Four. I find myself agreeing with Frankl's argument: to be life affirming, to be courageous in the face of suffering, and to cultivate an inner life that withstands external pressures, but putting these principles into practice is another matter. In other words, how do you apply these principles to your own life?
Final Thoughts
My main focus will be to show my students how people who whine and see themselves as victims in the face of suffering actually make their condition worse, so that their reaction to suffering becomes in many cases worse than the suffering itself. Related to that principle, I’ll try to show how that attempts to avoid suffering, actually create more suffering and not the kind that builds character, but rather the kind that builds narcissism.
Extreme Conditions ("Anything Can Happen" Principle) Suggest We Cannot Rely on a Life of Comfort and Therefore Must Walk Away from Frankl Lite:
1. Having meaning, your irreplaceable role as another human being or even a work of intellect is uniquely dependent on you, prevents you from throwing your life away, from committing suicide. 101
2. On page 105, Frankl raises the third psychological state, after release from prison. At the mercy of sadists, the prisoners wonder how can life be so cruel? Worse than people was fate. How could fate be so cruel? 113. They witnessed the world’s two people, the decent and the indecent.
3. Depersonalization occurred. Everything felt unreal, like a dream. See 110
4. Some victims felt entitled to wreak havoc upon the world as payback. 113
5. Logotherapy is “disagreeable to hear” because the moral standard damns most of us. We are forbidden to engage in self-pity. 120.
6. Logotherapy emphasizes goal setting for the future, finding meaning for the future, not introspection and reflection.
7. Psychotherapy tends to reinforce the neurotic’s self-centeredness; in contrast, logotherapy is meaning therapy and meaning is never found in narcissism. 121
8. Logotherapy emphasizes the will to meaning, not the will to pleasure or the will to power. 121.
9. In the absence of meaning, you are afflicted with neuroses. 123.
10. We do not choose the meaning of life for ourselves to fill the vacuum; rather life imposes meaning on us and we must embrace it according to our unique situation. 131
11. Live as if you’re getting a second chance. 132
12. The meaning test in which you imagine your whole life on your death bed. 140.
13. He quotes Psalms where it is written that God preserves all your tears to make the point that suffering can be used to find meaning. 143
Argument That Says the Common Life Is a Life of Comfort and Therefore We Must Walk Away from Frankl Lite
Part One. Frankl Says the Common Life Is Without Meaning. How Can We Avoid the Common Life?
One. Most people live a life of fakery. In other words, for most people are frauds or charlatans. Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich opens its second chapter with the famous line: “Ivan Ilyich’s life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.” One of the novella’s themes is that most of us embrace the common, “ordinary” life and sad to say such a life is one of fraud and self-deception.
Two. A phony life is not perceived as an evil life because it is mainstream: The catastrophic fakery is not the product of evil people living on the fringe. Rather, it is the common lot of the mainstream who languish through a life of meaninglessness and charlatanism, clinging to this fake life as if it were the highest pursuit imaginable. And even worse, most people don’t even know they’re living this “proper,” that is, “horrible,” life. Reading the novella, we see over and over that Ivan Ilyich lived a “proper” and “correct” life and it is precisely this conformity to that which is “proper” and “correct” that perpetrates a fraud and the existential vacuum discussed in Man’s Search for Meaning.
Three. A definition of the “proper” life: It is a life that emphasizes power, vanity, and selfish ambition dressed up behind the flowery garments of middle-class niceties and proprieties. When we live the proper life, we give implicit encouragement to power-mongering, vanity, and selfish ambition by praising others for their “achievements” and “success” while putting up an affront of piety, claiming to admire the more noble virtues, loyalty, courage, sacrifice, humility, etc. But these latter qualities are only important to us as a show, not as real substance. For example, in the novella it is explained that when no one was looking Ivan Ilyich, a judge, was cruel and obnoxious to his underlings, but when his dealings with his subordinates were under the banner of “official business,” that is, those dealings would be seen and scrutinized by others, Ivan Ilyich’s behavior was “fair” and “decent.” We also read that he loved to withhold his power and authority, not out of humility, buy by showing others how remarkably restrained he was.
Four. The “ordinary” life, then, is one in which we want to be perceived as good, just, and generous even though we could care less if we our character is really worthy of being those things. Again, we can look at Pascal’s observation of this hypocrisy to better see the ordinary life of fraud and self-deception:
We are not satisfied with the life we have in ourselves and our own being. We want to lead an imaginary life in the eyes of others, and so we try to make an impression. We strive constantly to embellish and preserve our imaginary being, and neglect the real one. And if we are calm, or generous, or loyal, we are anxious to have it known so that we can attach these virtues to our other existence; we prefer to detach them from our real self so as to unite them with the other. We would cheerfully be cowards if that would acquire us a reputation for bravery. How clear a sign of the nullity of our own being that we are not satisfied with the one without the other and often exchange for the other!
Pascal’s description is of the ordinary human condition. And indeed it is a terrible one in part because such a morally bankrupts life is perceived as normal when it is lived by the majority and as such is “ordinary.”
Five. According to Frankl, conforming to this immoral and meaningless way of life creates the existential vacuum. This imitation is not instinct but a learned behavior. As Frankl explains:
At the beginning of human history, man lost some of the basic animal instincts in which an animal’s behavior is imbedded and by which it is secured. Such security, like Paradise, is closed to man forever; man has to make choices. In addition this, however, man has suffered another loss in his more recent development inasmuch as the traditions which buttressed his behavior are now rapidly diminishing. No instinct tells him what he has to do, and no tradition tells him what he ought to do; sometimes he does not even know what he wishes to do. Instead, he either wishes to do what other people do (conformism) or he does what other people wish him to do (totalitarianism).
In the case of Ivan Ilyich, he entire “proper” life was a conformity to a life he did not really want. It was an idea of a life that had been presented to him as a way of winning the approval of others and he did not realize he despised this life he had chosen until he was dying away in a home where he was held in contempt by his own family for imposing the rude inconvenience of becoming fatally ill. It is only as he endures a terrible, slow death and as he sees his own grave that he begins to ask himself, “What if my whole life had been wrong?” It’s sad that he does not ask this question until lying on his death bed.
Six. Like Ivan Ilyich, we are too distracted by all his diversions. As philosopher Thomas V. Morris would tell us, we don’t face life’s important questions until death is knocking on his door. Morris explains this procrastination in Making Sense of It All: Pascal and the Meaning of Life: “How many of us would think about going to a gas station only after the car stalled for lack of gas? And yet too many of us never stop to reflect on what is needful for a good life until is too late.” All the diversions Ivan Ilyich relied on to stave away the question that his whole life was a lie are explained as a universal problem by Morris in this way: “Our lives are empty. We cannot face the vacuum. So we fill our lives up with junk, with trash, with refuse.” Explaining what the philosopher Pascal really meant when he explained what we fill our hearts with, Morris says it more bluntly: We fill our hearts with “crap.” Our lives of diversion and deception, the life that caused Ivan Ilyich to ask himself if his whole life had been wrong only when he was faced with his own mortality, made realize that his life was complete bullshit.
Seven. Mutual deception becomes the common life, a life of BS: When we reach the point, like Ivan Ilyich, that our lives are full of crap, we tend toward nihilism, the belief that there is no meaning. The danger of bullshit and its resulting nihilism has been explained in Professor of Philosophy Harry G. Frankfurt’s terse essay, published as a book, On Bullshit. In defining the term, Frankfurt relies in part on Max Black’s book The Prevalence of Humbug in which Black writes that humbug is “deceptive misrepresentation, short of lying, especially by pretentious word or deed, of somebody’s own thoughts, feelings, or attitudes.” This definition of humbug, which can be applied to bullshit, is a precise summary of Ivan Ilyich’s life, one of “deceptive misrepresentation,” to others and himself. Moreover, Ilyich’s life was one rife with pretentiousness and ornamentation, a façade, a deception, or, if we want to cut to the bone, complete bullshit. Not until he was dying, horribly alone without any love from his own family and “friends,” does he contemplate that his whole life was built on a sham.
Eight. The common condition: We desire things because others desire them, not because we do. Ivan Ilyich has fallen into the trap of lusting over things, not for their own sake, but because he perceives they are desired by others. A job position that he wants is increased in desire when he sees that others want it and when the job is denied him he becomes bitter and obsessed, childishly so. Upon losing the promotion, he goes into a sullen rage and the narrator explains “that what was for him the greatest and most cruel injustice appeared to others a quite ordinary occurrence.” Feeling victimized, Ivan Ilyich languishes in a condition of “ennui,” chronic depression and boredom with life. Throughout his adult life, his mood oscillates between elation and self-pity depending on his fortune. This is the way most of us are and this is the common life.
Nine. One of the dangers of the “ordinary” and “terrible” life: Cynics see these lives as the true human condition and as such the cynic embraces a life that rejects the possibility of meaning, that is, a life of nihilism.
Ten. To reject the ordinary life and to pursue meaning, are we pursuing religion? In other words, is Man’s Search for Meaning a religion?
Part Two. Is Man’s Search for Meaning a Religion?
One. We crave meaning over power. This is a religious idea, some say. The rabbi Harold S. Kushner writes in the 2006 edition Foreword that Man’s Search for Meaning is indeed a profoundly religious book. It’s a book, he writes, that has the power to change lives. It’s a book that demands we find a higher purpose. It’s a book, he writes, that dismisses Freud’s insistence that life is primarily the drive for pleasure and equally dismisses Alfred Adler’s theory that life is foremost a quest for power. These sensual and vain things must take the back seat to First Things, and one such thing is the search for meaning.
Two. Another argument in Man’s Search for Meaning that many might consider religious is Frankl’s rejection of determinism and the responsibility we have toward our own free will. For Frankl and many religious writers, the doctrine of determinism, that we are the product of environmental and biological forces we cannot control, contributes to a degraded image of humanity and as such it lowers expectations and diminishes the human spirit. As Frankl writes about the dangers of “pan-determinism”:
By that I mean the view of man which disregards his capacity to take a stand toward any conditions whatsoever. Man is not fully conditioned and determined but rather determines himself whether he gives in to conditions or stands up to them. In other words, man is ultimately self-determining. Man does not simply exist but always decides what his existence will be, what he will become in the next moment.
Man’s decision to shape who he becomes makes him accountable and this, according to Christian apologist and Catholic writer Peter Kreeft, is an idea rooted in his faith, an idea that uplifts humankind. Yes, we are accountable for our actions, Kreeft writes, and this accountability and this judgment of us a sinners renders a higher view of man than saying we are helpless pawns to determinism and have no accountability for our actions.
Three. Peter Kreeft, a Christian, and Viktor Frankl, a Jew, also share another important idea about meaning that has a strongly religious component: We cannot find meaning until we have been stripped to our bare existence. Frankl observed prisoners, and himself, finding their strongest spiritual reservoirs when subject to the most excruciating conditions in the concentration camps. Being stripped of everything, according to Frankl and Kreeft, makes us find life’s Higher Purpose.
Four. Another idea about meaning that Frankl and Kreeft share is that meaning requires radical self-transformation and this transformation requires a suffering that we must embrace. Frankl argues we must change so that we become worthy of our suffering.
Five. Frankl believes in the soul, a religious idea. Can Viktor Frankl’s view of the soul, which can either flourish and blossom or whither and decay, be discussed only in religious terms? For Frankl, the matter of the soul is a very real thing. He saw spiritual death in the eyes of too many captives in the camps. His concern for the soul goes far beyond theories and abstractions. He call us urgently to “save” our souls by making the right choices. For many, including Rabbi Kushner, Frankl’s message is a religious one. Kushner writes in the Foreword that we must use our freedom to find meaning. Otherwise, we will succumb to spiritual death. Kushner writes: “I have known successful businessmen who, upon retirement, lost all zest for life. Their work had given their lives meaning. Often it was the only thing that had given their lives meaning and, without, they spend day after day sitting at home, depressed, ‘with nothing to do.’”
Six. The sick soul must be healed by meaning. Kushner writes that Frankl’s doctrine of logotherapy cures the soul “by leading it to find meaning in life.” As a process, logotherapy isn’t necessarily religious. But the context of logotherapy, one that Kushner and others would argue, is very religious because it concerns the sickness of the soul, the concern chiefly of theologians and the clergy, and adhering to the moral absolutes that determine the soul’s development or retardation. We might say a soul without meaning is trapped in ennui, existential boredom, or worse, acedia, the spiritual enervation, listlessness, and torpor resulting from an absence of purpose. A soul without a purpose is a soul in a vacuum and in this empty state the soul, the theologians inform us, grabs on to misguided forms of happiness: consumerism, sensuality, power-mongering, etc., when in fact what the soul really craves, we are told, is God.
Seven. Frankl uses meaning therapy or logotherapy: Unlike psychotherapy, logotherapy does not emphasize introspection, regression, and retrospection; instead, as Frankl states in his chapter “Logotherapy in a Nutshell,” logotherapy is a “meaning-centered psychotherapy” that focuses on what the patient can do in the future to find meaning as a cure for the sickness of his soul. Frankl explains that the Greek Logos translates into “meaning” and that logotherapy is the quest to find meaning.
Frankl cannot emphasize this enough: “Man’s search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life and not a ‘secondary rationalization’ of instinctual drives.”
Eight. But meaning is not all the same. Frankl goes on to write that for every person meaning is “unique and specific” and can only be fulfilled by that person alone. The ideals and values generated from meaning are so vital to each person that they represent the most urgent principle of that person’s life. To argue that we and we alone must define what meaning is for ourselves strikes me as more humanistic than religious since we are not reading dogma to finding meaning; rather, we are searching for meaning based on our individual circumstances. For example, I am a community college instructor and I have certain opportunities for helping people, such as helping students transfer to universities, that a plumber or carpenter may not have while people who work for those professions may have opportunities that I don’t have. Meaning is dependent on our specific opportunities and skills. If you want to define religion as a moral imperative to find meaning—whatever that meaning may be—then Frankl is professing a sort of religion. But logotherapy and Frankl’s general philosophy that you must find meaning—without dictating what that meaning should be—doesn’t on the surface seem tied to this or that organized religion. However, I will argue later that there are, at the very least, implicit moral absolutes he presents that provide a criteria for judging the value of one’s meaning and these absolutes have much in common with religion.
Nine. Without meaning, we distract ourselves with acts of self-destruction: Of course, the world’s religions are concerned with the same crisis Frankl addresses: the crisis of the human condition that results from a lack of meaning. When meaning is frustrated, the person suffers “existential frustration,” which results in all forms of neuroses and extreme forms of behavior. Without meaning, we meander into all sorts of self-destructive projects and obsessions. I think this is the real meaning of the French philosopher Blaise Pascal’s famous aphorism: “All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit quiet in a room alone.” Pascal is looking at man’s restlessness in the face of existential frustration and this restlessness causes man to act in ways that result in his unhappiness. He strays from his room and gets into all sorts of mischief because he is bored and desperate to find something to fill the vacuum.
Ten. Examples of self-destruction in the absence of meaning: For example, we’ve all heard of couples who fight over trifling things because they are bored and are looking for some drama to fill their superficial existence. Or put another way, experiencing the existential emptiness from a life without meaning compels people to dig themselves in a deep hole so that they can find “meaning”—which in truth is a distraction—from the process of escaping their chasm. One of my favorite opening lines from a novel articulates this self-destructive tendency. I am talking about Jim Harrison’s novella The Beast God Forgot to Invent in which the narrator begins by saying, “The danger of civilization, of course, is that you will piss away your life on nonsense.” I have a student who wrote an essay about his friend engaged in such a squandered life. This friend spends over twelve hours a day on a famous shoe website that allows you to chat with other fanatics of this shoe brand. The friend in question has a shoe collection worth tens of thousands of dollars, a fine showcase for people who values such things, but this person is in his early thirties, marginally employed, and still living with his parents. It would appear to me that his life could be characterized by existential frustration that compels him to “piss his life away on nonsense.” Such nonsense is in abundance. I’ve heard of people on the social networking website facebook confess to feeling jealous that their “facebook friends” have accumulated more friends than they have. It is rather self-evident that this accumulation of “friends” creates the appearance of popularity and meaningful connection when in truth these facebook members may be rather deluded on these points.
Eleven. Even though Frankl is a Jew and not a Christian, his therapy, called logotherapy, shares the life of sacrifice with Christianity. Another trait that logotherapy shares with religion, or at least Christianity, is that Frankl says “we must bear our cross,” meaning that we must embrace challenge and suffering to pursue our ideals and values. Pursuing a life of challenge, and the stress that comes with it, is in conflict with a lot of feel-good psychotherapy that promises tranquility and a stress-free existence. In contrast, logotherapy sees conflict and stress as natural components of a meaningful, fulfilled life; therefore, the patient doesn’t seek to be “blissed-out”; rather, the patient seeks fulfillment through meaning and he embraces that all the conflict that meaning creates for him. The strength to navigate through conflict and suffering comes from the lucidity of one’s life purpose. As Frankl quotes the Nietzsche, “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” If we don’t have a higher ideal, one that takes us out of our self-centeredness, Frankl says our souls are doomed to atrophy.
Twelve. We need a higher purpose to engage in conflict, which is the essence of life: Frankl gives a specific example from his own life of a purpose that kept him his drive for survival sharp while he suffered in the concentration camps. He wanted to survive so he could rewrite a manuscript that had been confiscated by the Nazis. He writes that his mental health, and that for all of us, is dependent on “the tension between what one has already achieved and what one still ought to accomplish, or the gap between what one is and what one should become.” We need struggle and conflict in our lives, Frankl argues. We need to fight for a “worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.” Otherwise, we must face the restlessness and despair resulting from the “existential vacuum.”
Without meaning, Frankl points out, man is fated to try to blend in with society, becoming a conformist, or be obedient to an authority and suffer the lack of development that comes from living in the shadow of totalitarianism. More often than not, the existential vacuum results in boredom and it is in boredom where we get into trouble, devising all sorts of self-destructive schemes to fill the vacuum.
Thirteen. We don’t choose meaning; meaning chooses us. So how do we fill this vacuum with meaning? Frankl argues that we cannot come up with a general definition of meaning: “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.” He warns us not to turn meaning into an abstraction. Rather, he writes: “Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out a concrete assignment which demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, as is his specific opportunity to implement it.”
Frankl emphasizes his point further by explaining that we are not even in a position to ask what meaning for our lives is. Meaning is a calling. As he writes: “Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of us 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 life.”
So it is our responsibility to find out what life demands of us to find meaning whether we are religious or not. And it is our responsibility to define our own specific meaning depending on our own set of circumstances.
In summary, Man’s Search for Meaning is not a proselytizing book about believing in God or embracing one of the world’s religions. However, it shares a lot of the same concerns as religion: The book is intended to make us change our lives, to find a higher purpose, to reject pleasure and power as the primary motivations of life, to acknowledge the strengthening or the withering of the soul, to be cautious of misguided forms of happiness, to be leery of the imaginary happy self we project to others and ourselves, to bear our own cross, to embrace a life of challenge and conflict, and of course to find our own meaning based on our individual circumstances in which only we can decide our meaning’s legitimacy.
Defining our own meaning in this manner doesn’t sound religiously prescriptive to me, but if everyone is defining their own meaning, what if some forms of meaning seem superior to others and what if some forms of meaning seem very inferior and even dangerous? In other words, is all meaning equal and in the context of Man’s Search for Meaning how do we measure the quality of someone’s chosen meaning?
McMahon Grammar Lesson: Comma Rules (based in part by Diana Hacker’s Rules for Writers)
Commas are designed to help writers avoid confusing sentences and to clarify the logic of their sentences.
If you cook Jeff will clean the dishes. (Will you cook Jeff?)
While we were eating a rattlesnake approached us. (Were we eating a rattlesnake?)
Comma Rule 1: Use a comma before a coordinating conjunction (FANBOYS) joining two independent clauses.
Rattlesnakes are high in protein, but I’d rather eat a peanut butter sandwich.
Rattlesnakes are dangerous, and the desert species are even more so.
We are a proud people, for our ancestors passed down these famous delicacies over a period of five thousand years.
The exception to rule 1 is when the two independent clauses are short:
The plane took off and we were on our way.
Comma Rule 2: Use a comma after an introductory clause or phrase.
When Jeff Henderson was in prison, he developed an appetite for reading.
In the nearby room, the TV is blaring full blast.
Tanning in the hot Hermosa Beach sun for over two hours, I realized I had better call it a day.
The exception is when the short adverb clause or phrase is short and doesn’t create the possibility of a misreading:
In no time we were at 2,800 feet.
Comma Rule 3: Use a comma between all items in a series.
Jeff Henderson found redemption through hard work, self-reinvention, and social altruism.
Finding his passion, mastering his craft, and giving back to the community were all part of Jeff Henderson’s self-reinvention.
Comma Rule 4: Use a comma between coordinate adjectives not joined with “and.” Do not use a comma between cumulative adjectives.
The adjectives below are called coordinate because they modify the noun separately:
Jeff Henderson is a passionate, articulate, wise speaker.
The adjectives above are coordinate because they can be joined with “and.” Jeff Henderson is passionate and articulate and wise.
Adjectives that do not modify the noun separately are cumulative.
Three large gray shapes moved slowly toward us.
Chocolate fudge peanut butter swirl coconut cake is divine.
Comma Rule 5: Use commas to set off nonrestrictive (nonessential) elements.
Restrictive or essential information doesn’t have a comma:
For school the students need notebooks that are college-ruled.
Jeff’s cat that just had kittens became very aggressive.
Nonrestrictive:
For school the students need college-ruled notebooks, which are on sale at the bookstore.
Jeff Henderson’s mansion, which is located in Las Vegas, has a state-of-the-art kitchen.
My youngest sister, who plays left wing on the soccer team, now lives at The Sands, a beach house near Los Angeles.
Comma Rule 6: Use commas to set off transitional and parenthetical expressions, absolute phrases, and elements expressing contrast. (For the most part, we’re referring to conjunctive adverbs such as however, as a matter of fact, in contrast, in other words, etc.)
As a matter of fact, Jeff Henderson found life after prison even more difficult than life in prison.
Jeff Henderson struggled in prison. However, his life after prison proved even more excruciating.
Life after prison for Henderson was a constant grind; kitchen sabotage from hateful co-workers, for example, was commonplace.
Jeff Henderson, as far as we know, climbed the restaurant ladder without the help of special connections.
Jeff Henderson served 500 dishes a night, give or take a dozen.
Jeff Henderson appearing outside his restaurant for the first time in a week, we were able to get a good photograph of him.
After climbing the restaurant ladder, Jeff Henderson sought spiritual, not material, success.
Comma Rule 7: Use commas to set off nouns of direct address, the words yes and no, and mild interjections.
“Mom, please pass me the potato chips.”
“Will you please pass the potato chips, Mom?”
Yes, Jeff Henderson was a man who needed to give back to his community to feel fulfilled.
Jeff Henderson’s book was a compelling read, wasn’t it?
Well, I for one read Henderson’s book over a period of two days.
Comma Rule 8: Use commas with expressions such as he said and other signal phrases to set off direct quotations.
Naturalist Arthur Cleveland Brent remarked, “In part the peregrine declined unnoticed because it is not adorable.”
“Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies,” wrote Friedrich Nietzsche.
Comma Rule 9: Use commas with dates, addresses, titles, and numbers.
On August 14, 2014, the second summer session will have come to an end.
However, we have an exception to the date rule if the date is inverted or if only the month and year are given.
The second summer session ends on 14 August 2014.
August 2014 is the first month of the Fall Semester.
John Lennon was born in Liverpool, England, in 1940.
Please send the package to Greg Tarvin at 708 Spring Street, Washington, IL 61571.
Sandra Belinsky, MD, has been appointed to the board.
3,500 100,000, 5,000,000
Comma Rule 10: Use a comma to prevent confusion.
To err is human; to forgive, divine. (Writer omitted verb is)
All of the crises Jeff Henderson feared might happen, happened.
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