Man's Search for Meaning: Lesson Two Revised

Frankl Lesson Two

Apply Critical Thinking to Man's Search for Meaning

Critical Thinking Defined (from Chapter 1 of From Critical Thinking to Argument by Sylvan Barnet and Hugo Bedau) 

One. What distinguishes critical thinking from plain thinking?

Critical thinking is not

Idle daydreaming

Half absorbing data nuggets and images on the Internet or some other screen

Selective data absorption based on our inclination to believe what we want to believe in order to flatter our self-image and sworn allegiance to this or that tribe.

We reinforce the above by only associating with people who agree with us. In modern day parlance, this is called the "echo chamber."

Any passive consumer experience

Critical thinking is

Searching for hidden assumptions and implicit ideas

Deconstructing common beliefs and assumptions

Questioning our best laid out thoughts (not just for our academic papers)

Rethinking our deepest beliefs

The word critical comes from the Greek word krinein, meaning to separate, to choose; we are in essence separating the wheat, the good stuff, from the chaff, the bad stuff.

Perhaps more importantly, critical thinking is not just being skeptical of our opponents’ ideas but our own ideas as well.

A critical thinker sees ideas as being more tentative than absolute. By tentative, those ideas are constantly being tested. Critical thinking, to borrow from a cliché, is more about the journey than the destination.

Critical thinking objects to clichés because they dull the mind. On the other hand, clichés sometimes speak a truth better than another method, so, dammit, we sometimes have to live with the cliché.

Two. How do we generate ideas for an essay?

We begin by not worrying about being critical. We brainstorm a huge list of ideas or use clustering and then when the list is complete, we undergo the process of evaluation.

Sample Topic for an Essay:

Parents Who Don’t Immunize Their Children: Brainstorm first things that come to mind:

1. Most parents who don’t immunize their children are educated and upper class.
2. They read on the Internet that immunizations lead to autism or other health problems.
3. They follow some “natural guru” who warns that vaccines aren’t organic and pose health risks.
4. They panic over anecdotal evidence that shows vaccines are dangerous.
5. They confuse correlation with causality.
6. Why are these parents always rich?
7. Are they narcissists?
8. Are they looking for simple answers for complex problems?
9. Would they not stand in line for the Ebola vaccine, if it existed?
10. These parents are endangering others by not getting the vaccine.

 

Thesis is a meaningful assertion that can be demonstrated with examples.

The thesis is the main purpose of your essay.

Your thesis with mapping components outlines the body paragraphs in your essay.

Thesis that is a claim of cause and effect: 

Parents who refuse to vaccinate their children tend to be narcissistic people of privilege who believe their sources of information are superior to “the mainstream media”; who are looking for simple explanations that might protect their children from autism; who are confusing correlation with causality; and who are benefiting from the very vaccinations they refuse to give their children.

Thesis that is a claim of argumentation:

Parents who refuse to vaccinate their children should be prosecuted by the law because they are endangering the public and they are relying on pseudo-intellectual science to base their decisions.

To test a thesis, we must always ask: “What might be objections to my claim?”

Prosecuting parents will only give those parents more reason to be paranoid that the government is conspiring against them.

There are less severe ways to get parents to comply with the need to vaccinate their children.

Three. What is the twofold activity of critical thinking? (11)

We rely on analysis and evaluation.

Analysis is finding parts of the problem and then separating them, trying to see how things fit together.

Evaluation is judging the merit of our claims and assumptions and the weight of the evidence in their favor.

Four. How do we prepare our minds so we have “Eureka” (I found it) moments and apply these moments to our writing?

The word eureka comes from the Greek heuristic, a method or process for discovering ideas. The principle posits that one thought triggers another.

Diverse and conflicting opinions in a classroom are a heuristic tool for generating thoughts.

Here’s an example:

One student says, “Fat people should pay a fat tax because they incur more medical costs than non-fat people.”

Another student says, “Wrong. Fat people die at a far younger age. It’s people who live past seventy, non-fat people, who put a bigger drain on medical costs. In fact, smokers and fat people, by dying young, save us money.”

Another heuristic method is breaking down the subject into classical topics:

Definition: What is it? Jealousy is a form of insanity in which a morally bankrupt person assumes his partner is as morally bankrupt as he is.

Comparison: What is it like or unlike? Compared to the risk of us dying from global warming, death from a terrorist attack is relatively miniscule.

Relationship: What caused it, and what will it cause? The chief cause of our shrinking brain and its concomitant reduced attention span is gadget screen time.

Testimony: What is said about it by experts? Social scientists explain that the United States’ mass incarceration of poor people actually increases the crime rate.

Another heuristic method is finding a controversial topic and writing a list of pros and cons.

Consider the topic, “Should I become a vegan?”

Here are some pros:

1. I’ll focus on eating healthier foods.
2. I won’t be eating as many foods potentially contaminated by E.coli  and Salmonella.
3. I won’t be contributing as much to the suffering of sentient creatures.
4. I won’t be contributing as much to greenhouse gasses.
5. I’ll be eating less cholesterol and saturated fats.

 

Cons

1. It’s debatable that a vegan diet is healthier than a Paleo (heavy meat eating) diet.
2. Relying on soy is bad for the body.
3. My body craves animal protein.
4. Being a vegan will ostracize me from my family and friends.

 

Using Dialectical Method to Sharpen Your Thesis

Entertain oppositional ideas. We call this the dialectical method or dialectical argument. 

For example, a student said to me after class, “You don’t really believe in this Frankl nonsense, do you? I mean, you’re like me, right? You’re a meaning atheist.”

“A meaning atheist?”

“Yeah, man, you don’t believe in meaning.”

“But Frankl found meaning and he devoted to helping others find it,” I said.

“Come on, man, he just did that to make himself feel better. I mean, what was he going to do, tell himself that all that suffering he went through was for nothing?”

This led me to sit down and come up with an anti-meaning thesis (I don’t necessarily believe it, but I find it fascinating):

While Viktor Frankl is clearly a noble, wise, intelligent, and sincere man, his treatise on the search for meaning holds no water when we distance ourselves emotionally from Frankl’s plight and study the idea of meaning objectively. Sparing our brain the intoxication and bias born of pity, piety, and our natural sympathy for Frankl, we can see that Frankl’s claim that we must find meaning is erroneous. His belief in meaning is not a claim of fact; it is a rationale, a survival coping mechanism, if you will, that he created in order that he might convince himself that there was some “sense” or “meaning” to his unspeakable suffering. Secondly, Frankl conveniently omits millions upon millions of cases of suffering that are clearly senseless such as starving children and children born from drug-addicted mothers and sectarian brutality that results in the agonizing deaths of the innocent. Third, the widespread devastation of natural disasters annihilates entire populations so quickly they do not have the privilege to step back for even one second and contemplate the “meaning” of what has just happened to them.

Opposition to the Above

Our Frankl detractor who exacts his Frankl refutation with such verve and self-rectitude is perhaps a bit too full of his own rhetorical certitude to see the logical fallacies of his claims. First, he admits that Frankl created a “coping mechanism” to address his suffering, and if our Frankl detractor read the book carefully he would understand that it is precisely these coping mechanisms, Frankl claims, that give us meaning. The detractor’s second assertion, that hunger and brutality often render suffering to be senseless, does not contradict Frankl’s argument. To the contrary, Frankl argues that it is precisely why we live in a world where suffering can visit us without warning or sense that we must while we can cultivate a courageous attitude toward our own inevitable suffering and death.   The Frankl detractor would have us believe that Frankl fails because he has failed to prevent senseless suffering from visiting Planet Earth when in fact Frankl is arguing that we must radically change who we are to meet the very challenges that result from such suffering.

So, McMahon, which argument do you believe in?

My reply: It depends on when you ask me. It depends on how I feel. My thoughts on Frankl are tentative, not absolute. And critical thinkers tend to be more tentative, not absolute, which is a sign of lazy, non-thinking.

 

Checklist for Critical Thinking (22)

My attitude toward critical thinking:

Does my thinking show imaginative open-mindedness and intellectual curiosity? Or do I exist in a circular, self-feeding, insular brain loop resulting in solipsism? The latter is also called living in the echo chamber.

Am I willing to honestly examine my assumptions?

Am I willing to entertain new ideas—both those that I encounter while reading and those that come to mind while writing?

Am I willing to approach a debatable topic by using dialectical argument, going back and forth between opposing views?

Am I willing to exert myself—for instance, to do research—to acquire information and to evaluate evidence?

My skills to develop critical thinking

Can I summarize an argument accurately?

Can I evaluate assumptions, evidence, and inferences?

Can I present my ideas effectively—for instance, by organizing and by writing in a manner appropriate to my imagined audience?

Another Exercise in Opposing Views for Critical Thinking

Example of an essay that acknowledges opposing views: Harlan Coben’s “The Undercover Parent” (24)

 

NOT long ago, friends of mine confessed over dinner that they had put spyware on their 15-year-old son’s computer so they could monitor all he did online. At first I was repelled at this invasion of privacy. Now, after doing a fair amount of research, I get it.

Make no mistake: If you put spyware on your computer, you have the ability to log every keystroke your child makes and thus a good portion of his or her private world. That’s what spyware is — at least the parental monitoring kind. You don’t have to be an expert to put it on your computer. You just download the software from a vendor and you will receive reports — weekly, daily, whatever — showing you everything your child is doing on the machine.

Scary. But a good idea. Most parents won’t even consider it.

Maybe it’s the word: spyware. It brings up associations of Dick Cheney sitting in a dark room, rubbing his hands together and reading your most private thoughts. But this isn’t the government we are talking about — this is your family. It’s a mistake to confuse the two. Loving parents are doing the surveillance here, not faceless bureaucrats. And most parents already monitor their children, watching over their home environment, their school.

Today’s overprotective parents fight their kids’ battles on the playground, berate coaches about playing time and fill out college applications — yet when it comes to chatting with pedophiles or watching beheadings or gambling away their entire life savings, then...then their children deserve independence?

Some will say that you should simply trust your child, that if he is old enough to go on the Internet he is old enough to know the dangers. Trust is one thing, but surrendering parental responsibility to a machine that allows the entire world access to your home borders on negligence.

Some will say that it’s better just to use parental blocks that deny access to risky sites. I have found that they don’t work. Children know how to get around them. But more than that — and this is where it gets tough — I want to know what’s being said in e-mail and instant messages and in chat rooms.

There are two reasons for this. First, we’ve all read about the young boy unknowingly conversing with a pedophile or the girl who was cyberbullied to the point where she committed suicide. Would a watchful eye have helped? We rely in the real world on teachers and parents to guard against bullies — do we just dismiss bullying on the Internet and all it entails because we are entering difficult ethical ground?

Second, everything your child types can already be seen by the world — teachers, potential employers, friends, neighbors, future dates. Shouldn’t he learn now that the Internet is not a haven of privacy?

One of the most popular arguments against spyware is the claim that you are reading your teenager’s every thought, that in today’s world, a computer is the little key-locked diary of the past. But posting thoughts on the Internet isn’t the same thing as hiding them under your mattress. Maybe you should buy your children one of those little key-locked diaries so that they too can understand the difference.

Am I suggesting eavesdropping on every conversation? No. With new technology comes new responsibility. That works both ways. There is a fine line between being responsibly protective and irresponsibly nosy. You shouldn’t monitor to find out if your daughter’s friend has a crush on Kevin next door or that Mrs. Peterson gives too much homework or what schoolmate snubbed your son. You are there to start conversations and to be a safety net. To borrow from the national intelligence lexicon — and yes, that’s uncomfortable — you’re listening for dangerous chatter.

Will your teenagers find other ways of communicating to their friends when they realize you may be watching? Yes. But text messages and cellphones don’t offer the anonymity and danger of the Internet. They are usually one-on-one with someone you know. It is far easier for a predator to troll chat rooms and MySpace and Facebook.

There will be tough calls. If your 16-year-old son, for example, is visiting hardcore pornography sites, what do you do? When I was 16, we looked at Playboy centerfolds and read Penthouse Forum. You may argue that’s not the same thing, that Internet pornography makes that stuff seem about as harmful as “SpongeBob.”

And you’re probably right. But in my day, that’s all you could get. If something more graphic had been out there, we probably would have gone for it. Interest in those, um, topics is natural. So start a dialogue based on that knowledge. You should have that talk anyway, but now you can have it with some kind of context.

Parenting has never been for the faint of heart. One friend of mine, using spyware to monitor his college-bound, straight-A daughter, found out that not only was she using drugs but she was sleeping with her dealer. He wisely took a deep breath before confronting her. Then he decided to come clean, to let her know how he had found out, to speak with her about the dangers inherent in her behavior. He’d had these conversations before, of course, but this time he had context. She listened. There was no anger. Things seem better now.

Our knee-jerk reaction as freedom-loving Americans is to be suspicious of anything that hints at invasion of privacy. That’s a good and noble thing. But it’s not an absolute, particularly in the face of the new and evolving challenges presented by the Internet. And particularly when it comes to our children.

Do you tell your children that the spyware is on the computer? I side with yes, but it might be enough to show them this article, have a discussion about your concerns and let them know the possibility is there.

Harlan Coben is the author of the forthcoming novel Hold Tight.

 

Harlan Coben Acknowledges Opposing Views (From Critical Thinking to Argument 24)

In paragraph 1, his gut reaction was to reject his friend’s use of spyware on his children’s computers.

In paragraphs 2 and 3, Coben concedes that it is scary to contemplate the ability to invade your child’s privacy with spyware, but he says it’s worth it.

In paragraph 4, he concedes that this is scary totalitarian tactic that “reeks of Dick Cheney” but he counters by writing we’re not government; we’re parents.

In paragraph 5, he makes a comparison argument: “parents fight their kids’ battles on the playground, berate coaches about playing time and fill out college applications—yet when it comes to chatting with pedophiles or watching beheadings . . . then their children deserve independence?”

In paragraph 6, he addresses the rebuttal that we should “just trust” our children, but he rejects this notion because we’re not talking about trust; we’re talking about neglect: “surrendering parental responsibility to a machine that allows the entire world access to your home borders on negligence.”

In paragraph 7, he counters the claim that parental blocks, not spyware, should be used by saying that he tried parental blocks, and they do not work. For example, they do not work with cyber-bullying or cyber-pedophiles.

In paragraph 9, he makes the rebuttal that the Internet already violates privacy; children should learn that the Internet is “not a haven of privacy.”

In paragraph 10, Coben rejects the comparison of private thoughts kept in a diary with Internet activities.

In paragraph 11, Coben distinguishes the notion of “being responsibly protective and irresponsibly nosy.”

In paragraph 12, Coben shows that texting on a phone is less dangerous than the Internet because the latter is more porous, allowing thousands of predators into the child’s world.

Coben concedes in paragraph 13, that there will be tough choices. At what point does a child’s curiosity for porn cross the line?

Coben concludes by saying freedom and privacy are not absolutes; they are relative terms that have to be addressed in a radically different way in our Internet age.

Letter of Rebuttal

In “The Undercover Parent” (Op-Ed, March 16), the novelist Harlan Coben writes that putting spyware on a child’s computer is a “good idea.”

As a mother and advice columnist for girls, I disagree. For most families, spyware is not only unnecessary, but it also sends the unfortunate message, “I don’t trust you.”

Mr. Coben said a friend of his “using spyware to monitor his college-bound, straight-A daughter, found out that not only was she using drugs but she was sleeping with her dealer.” He confronted her about her behavior. “She listened. There was no anger. Things seem better now.”

Huh?! No anger? No tears or shouting or slammed doors? C’mon. If only raising teenagers were that simple.

Parenting is both a job and a joy. It does not require spyware, but it does require love, respect, time, trust, money and being as available as possible 24/7. Luck helps, too.

Carol Weston
New York, March 16, 2008

Checklist for Evaluation Letters of Response (or any rebuttal for that matter)

What assumptions does the letter-writer make? Do you share those assumptions?

What is the writer’s claim?

In what ways does the writer consider the audience?

What evidence, if any, does the writer offer to support the claim?

Is there anything about the style of the letter—the distinctive use of language, the tone—that makes the letter especially engaging or especially annoying?

A Checklist for Examing Assumptions

What assumptions does the writer's argument presuppose?

Are these assumptions explicit or implicit?

Are these assumptions important to the author's argument or only incidental?

Does the author give any evidence of being aware of the hidden assumptions in her argument?

Would a critic be likely to share these assumptions, or are they exactly what a critic would challenge?

What sort of evidence would be relevant to supporting or rejecting these assumptions?

Am I willing to grant the author's assumptions? Would most readers gran them? If not, why not?

Assumptions in Carol Weston's letter:

One. She assumes that proclaiming herself to be a mother and an advice columnist for girls gives her credibility and superior moral standing. Some might say, her opening phrase sounds cliched and pompous.

Two. She assumes that spyware means "I don't trust you." That assumption could be in error. The parent could be saying, "I don't trust predators."

Three. She assumes that because the parent used spyware to catch his daughter using drugs and sleeping with the drug dealer that the discovery is somehow compromised because it hurt the daughter's feelings. This assumption is erroneous. The girl's welfare, not her feelings about getting caught or invasion of privacy, are the priority.

Four. When she lectures Coben by writing, "Parenting is both a job and a joy," she is implicitly saying that Coben is ignorant of the hard work and joys of parenting. In fact, she has proven neither. Again, she comes across as a pompous, ignorant scold.

Five. When she lectures Coben by saying parening requires "love, respect, time, trust," she again implies that Coben is abnegating his parental responsibilities by using spyware. To the contrary, Coben has made the case that Internet predators make spyware another tool parents must use in their toolbox to protect their children. Carol Weston's letter is not only wrong; it's insufferable. 

 

For Effective Critical Thinking, We Must Know the Main Ideas of the Text

Frankl’s Central Argument in 3 Sentences

One. No matter the circumstances, we all have the free will and therefore the responsibility to choose a dignified, meaningful life in the face of even the worst suffering.

Two. Failure to create a meaningful life for ourselves will result in the existential vacuum or unbearable emptiness.

Three. Without meaning we will try to fill the gnawing void with misguided distractions that will destroy us.

Some might conclude that Frankl's world is binary or either/or: Either we connect to life with meaning or we fail to find meaning and suffer the despair and regret of disconnection.

Others might conclude that meaning, contrary to Frankl, exists on a sliding scale or is relative and that this nuanced view of meaning eludes Frankl's strident message.

 There are 3 points of view regarding Frankl’s message

1. Kool-Aid Drinkers or Cheerleaders: We embrace his message without having a specific understanding of it, so all we can do is recycle feel-good clichés and hackneyed truisms about living a meaningful life. People who become cheerleaders for a cause without rigorous questioning are called many things: true believers, homers, Kool-Aid Drinkers, clones, ditto-heads. Such people tend to be mediocrities or ciphers, nonentities, who wish to hide their vapid personalities by losing themselves in a cause that is larger and more glorious than they will ever be on their own.
2. Cynics or Nihilists: We dismiss the idea of meaning as a fool’s illusion, a societal construction. There is no meaning. We do what makes us happy, what makes us tick, what gets us out of bed in the morning. There is no moral absolute, just doing things relative to our happiness. Many cynics will simply see life as a cruel joke from which we must insulate ourselves with brain-numbing distractions and cheap thrills. Many nihilists will devote their lives to pleasure, hedonism, and egotism because there is no meaning. Some people argue that a lot of nihilists know there is meaning but deny it to justify a lazy, irresponsible, head-in-the-sand life. 
3. Open-Minded Skeptic: With a specific understanding of Frankl’s terms, the OMS may, or may not, accept some of Frankl’s message with certain conditions or caveats. This latter point of view is, in my opinion, the most reasonable and sophisticated for reasons we will now look at:

Evaluating Frankl’s Message Without Being His Cheerleader or a Cynic

The problem isn’t the message. Man's Search for Meaning contains a great message, indisputable in many ways. The problem is threefold:

The Problem of Specificity and Definition

Specificity: dealing with specific notions of meaning, free will, responsibility, to name a few. Without specifics, we’re simply rehashing feel-good clichés. As a result, the level of writing is fifth grade instead of college. We must avoid writing like fifth graders.

When dealing with terms like meaning, free will, responsibility, and other grandiose abstractions, we achieve specificity in several ways. Here are a few:

One. Be skeptical of clichés, overused terms and phrases like “think outside the box,” which is, ironically, so “inside the box.” 

 

Here’s an example of the term meaning being reduced to a cliché:  A man says, “My family is my meaning. Taking care of them, providing for them, that is my meaning. So don’t talk to me about meaning.”

This is a cliché that doesn’t mean anything. In fact, this man may work his butt off for his wife and children to the point that his life is one thing: MAMMAP—make as much money as possible. There’s good reason to make lots of money. It’s helpful, but it doesn’t define meaning. In fact, this man may be teaching his family that money is the elixir for all of life’s woes, thus afflicting his family with materialism and greed. In fact, this man may be addicted to work even as he becomes more and more emotionally disconnected from his family.

Here’s another example.

Someone says, “My faith in God gives me meaning.” That’s very possible, since in fact Frankl’s faith in God helped him find meaning in the concentration camps, but too many people engage in religious ritual and carry religious beliefs out of unquestioned habit. Meaning cannot be achieved by repetitious, unexamined behavior. Such behavior is mindless and being mindless cannot forge a path to meaning.

Here’s another example.

I derive meaning from my job, my career. We would be wise to gain meaning from our career, but too often our job title gives us a certain status and identity that becomes a mask.

Take away our job and often we lose our identity; there’s no meaningful core behind the title, just an emptiness. You hear about professional athletes all the time who retire from their sport and then live a life of moral dissolution, becoming drug addicts and alcoholics. You hear of people retiring from any job and going into a depression. A lot of people die shortly after retirement.

So we must be cautious of equating our job with meaning.

Two. Turn away from the absolute and move toward the relative by positioning the term on a scale. In other words, see the gray or nuance of a definition. Don’t use the term meaning in terms of black and white such as your life either has meaning or it has no meaning. Rather, consider the idea of meaning moving up and down a scale. 

We get into trouble when we talk about meaning as in Absolute Ultimate Meaning. Now we’ve turned meaning into this elusive Holy Grail, Elixir, or Chimera, a cure-all mirage.

Rather, we should look at meaning as relative on a scale. Instead of saying our life has meaning or does not meaning, we can say we are tending toward meaning or tending away from meaning.

Examples of People Trending Away From Or Toward Meaning

A forty-five-year-old man, living with his mother, who sits in his pajamas all day while surfing the Internet and eating Hot Pockets is probably tending away from meaning. 

A woman who has devoted her life to rescuing dogs from cruel puppy mills is probably tending toward meaning. She’s probably trending toward meaning.

A wealthy doctor languishes in his unfurnished house two years after his wife left him, taking all the furniture with her. He’s probably low on the Meaning Scale, that is to say, he is trending away from meaning in his narcissistic self-pity.

Any kind of addictive behavior in which one is seeking oblivion and numbness and disengagement from others is probably tending away from meaning.   

Three. To strengthen your definition, put your term in a context or circumstance. 

Example:

Meaning: From Sloth to Creativity

When Tennessee Williams the playwright became famous, he gave up writing, holed himself up in a hotel suite and ordered room service, champagne, and prostitutes until about six months into his debauchery he realized he was going crazy. He left the hotel, went to Mexico, and wrote his masterpiece A Streetcar Named Desire. For him, meaning was about struggle, hard work, and vocation. He discovered an important truth about meaning: The creative energy inside him to fulfill his artistic gifts had to be used; otherwise it would turn inward and kill him with self-destructive behavior. This is a truth Frankl witnessed in the concentration camps.

Not all suffering leads to meaning

It’s difficult to imagine meaning existing at all in some circumstances. For example, a student came to my office to tell me she didn’t believe in meaning. This is an 18-year-old whose boyfriend drives a BMW M3. She explained that a starving 3-year-old girl in Ethiopia watching her family die of starvation and disease and knows she has just a few months left to live has no meaning. I think we can say that such a person finds little relevance in a discussion about meaning.

While there are no absolute definitions of meaning, or non-meaning, there are extreme circumstances that make us even wonder if meaning exists for everyone.

Four. Use negation, what the term is NOT. Abstractions like meaning, love, fulfillment, etc., can be effectively understood when we examine their negation, fallacies, and misguided definitions.

Examples of Negation:

Meaning is not talking about it. 

Why? Because with few exceptions, meaning is not talking about it. As we learned from the people of Thailand, if we live a rich life, we don’t think or talk too much. We’re too busy living. My cousin in Studio City seems like this. He’s a man with little thought or talk about meaning who lives a very full life.

However, Viktor Frankl was forced to think about meaning when he saw people lose or gain their humanity in the concentration camps. Under these extreme circumstances, he felt compelled to meditate on the effects of meaning, or its absence, in people’s lives. In other words, he’s earned the right to talk about meaning. 

Indeed, meaning is often not talking about meaning. Meaning is living life in a way that gives us hope for a better future and purpose. 

Meaning is not happiness and success.

Happiness and success can be taken from us at any time. As Frankl tells us, meaning is having the moral character to embrace suffering with courage.

In his book Frankl explains what meaning is NOT:

Meaning is not a panacea handed to you on a silver platter that instantly changes your life.

Meaning is not something your therapist can give you.

Meaning is not ONE THING that everyone finds.

Meaning is not something everyone is going to agree upon. The God of your religion that gives you meaning might very well be at war with the God of someone else’s religion.

Overview: The Thirteen Tenets (Principles) from Man’s Search for Meaning

Before we examine disingenuous and sincere nihilism, we should first look at nihilism’s opposite, the belief in meaning as laid out by Viktor Frankl, of which there are thirteen major tenets:

 

1. The human condition is suffering and the only viable response to suffering is to find meaning. We must therefore acknowledge that there is a purpose in life, greater than the purpose we find in creative work and passive enjoyment, which “admits of but one possibility of high moral behavior: namely, in man’s attitude to his existence, an existence restricted by external forces.” It is imperative that we are motivated first and foremost by this higher purpose. Without a purpose, our life drags on day after day in a tiring monotony that we try to fill with consumerism, addictions, texting friends, etc.
2. “Man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind, even in such terrible conditions of psychic and physical stress” as was endured in the concentration camps. Acknowledging this freedom, we must defy being a “plaything of circumstance” and thus we must understand that “there is a danger inherent in the teaching of man’s ‘nothingbutness,’ the theory that man is nothing but the result of biological, psychological and sociological conditions, or the product of heredity and environment. Such a view of man makes a neurotic believe what he is prone to believe anyway, namely, that he is the pawn and victim of outer influences or inner circumstances.” We are neither pawn nor victim. Rather, we possess an inner freedom that cannot be lost no matter how extreme the circumstances. This inner freedom allows us to be worthy of our suffering. And being worthy of our suffering is the ultimatum life presents us: Either be worthy of our suffering, or not. 
3. Life presents us with the moral imperative to treat our life as something of significance and consequence and the converse is also true: We must not despise our lives and treat our lives as if they were of no consequence at all. As Frankl writes: “And there were always choices to make. Every day, every hour, offered the opportunity make a decision, a decision which determined whether you would or would not submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, your inner freedom: which determined whether or not you would become the plaything of circumstance, renouncing freedom and dignity to become molded into the form of the typical inmate.”
4. There are moral absolutes in this world evidenced in part by Frankl dividing the world into two races of people, decent and indecent.
5. We have to do more than imagine a life of meaning; we must actually live it. Frankl writes: “Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.” We are additionally accountable for the responsibilities life demands of us.
6. We must embrace suffering, the finiteness of life, and death to maximize and complete our life. “Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete.”
7. We must radically alter our attitude by changing our orientation from “What do I expect from life?” to “What does life expect from me?” This question brings up our number one responsibility in life, to embrace meaning when it knocks on our door. We don’t choose meaning; meaning chooses us.
8. There is no One Size Fits All Meaning. Every person’s meaning is specific to his or her circumstances.
9. We must confront the emotions that seem so overwhelming; otherwise those emotions will devour us. Quoting from Spinoza, Frankl writes: “Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it.” It’s another way of saying that when we confront our demons, they often lose their power over us.
10. We must not abuse and squander freedom by imitating our oppressors. For example, if our boss abuses us, we should not later in life abuse our workers when we ascend to positions of high authority.
11. Meaning cannot be found within ourselves; it must be found in the world. As Frankl writes: “By declaring that man is responsible and must actualize the potential meaning of his life, I wish to stress that the true meaning of life is to be discovered in the world rather than within man or his own psyche, as though it were a closed system. I have termed this constitutive characteristic “the self-transcendence of human existence.” It denotes the fact that being human always points, and is directed, to something, or someone, other than oneself—be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter. The more one forgets himself—by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love—the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself. What is called self-actualization is not an attainable aim at all, for the simple reason that the more one would strive for it, the more he would miss it. In other words, self-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence.”
12. No matter how despicable and worthless our lives have been, we are called to redeem ourselves by living out the essential rule of logotherapy: “Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!”
13. Only a few people are capable of reaching great spiritual heights but the difficulty and small percentage of people who do reach such great heights does not abnegate our responsibility for pursuing a life of higher meaning.

Writing Against Frankl's Argument That We Must Find Meaning to Escape the Despair of the Existential Vacuum

McMahon's Doubts about Meaning:

We Can Have Life's 8 Human Needs Without Having Absolute Meaning and Therefore Argue for Frankl Lite:

When I ask myself if there is meaning, I begin with fundamental human needs. They aren't meaning as described by Frankl, but most of us can be happy with them. They include the following:

One. We need to believe in something larger than ourselves so we don't become crushed by the weight of our inclination for self-centeredness and narcisissism.

We can't believe in just anything. There's a huge caveat or condition: This "thing" we believe in should be good, conducive to our maturity and dignity and the dignity and respect of others.We can't, for example, believe in killing others to achieve some political goal motivated by a lust for power. Then we are monsters like Pol Pot and Stalin and Hitler.

If this thing is good, it doesn't necessarily create meaning. For example, if we develop an interest in martial arts, math, chess, bicycling, swimming, etc., all these things are good and help us get the focus of our self, but they aren't the Holy Grail of Meaning.

Two. We need self-awareness, AKA the Third Eye or metacognition so that we can make more intelligent and moral choices rather than being dragged down by the reptilian, primitive, irrational part of our brain. But this too falls short of meaning.

Three. We need humility to learn from our mistakes so we can become stronger and wiser. Again, humility is great, but not the same as meaning.

Four. We need a good job that uses our skills and makes us feel needed and pays us so we can buy stuff we want and feel secure and comfortable. This is good, too, but it isn't meaning.

Five. We need reproductive success. This means finding a mate whom we find desirable and attractive and a complement to our existence. This is great, but it isn't meaning.

Six. We need a sense of belonging and meaningful friendships. This too is great, but it is not meaning.

Seven. We need free time to play and enjoy recreation as a counterbalance to our hard work. Again, this is a need, but it isn't meaning.

Eight. We need moral character, the kind that compels us to have respect for others and ourselves and to have a reverence for life. In fact, we don't find meaning outside of ourselves. Meaning is born from our moral character.

We can have all these 8 things and achieve a certain satisfaction in our growth, maturity, and success and still not have meaning or at least not the heroic kind evidenced by Viktor Frankl in his book.

As a result, we can have the 8 Essential Things and go through life happy enough without having meaning. Our life is full enough based on our moral growth, our work, our love life, our friendships, and our human connections that we don't seek any meaning beyond this.

However, some of us can attain the 8 Essential Things and still suffer, to some degree or other, the existential vacuum, the sense of emptiness and restlessness that "life is good but there must be something More."There is a sense of the Beyond, of Mystery, and Enchantment.

Some people seek this More in religion.

Others seek this More in creativity, such as writing or the arts.

Others seek this More with drugs, LSD, mushrooms, marijuana, etc.

Others say there is no More, that we are biological creatures who can be reduced to sexual and survival instincts.

Viktor Frankl says there is meaning in terms of our moral position, which is that we must fight to help others at the expense of our own safety and convenience. This is a morality rooted at the heart of his religion.

His religion states that we must fight to help others at the expense of our safety and convenience; otherwise, we will become self-preservational animals, losing our souls to our most primitive urges. The consequence of not following the moral dictate described by Frankl in his book is that we will suffer moral dissolution and the existential vacuum.

The challenge is that throughout human history something like less than 1 percent of the human race have chosen to live as heroically as Viktor Frankl.

Most of us pacify ourselves sufficiently with the 8 Essential Things but fall short of Meaning as described by Viktor Frankl. For Frankl, meaning is an absolute. For most people meaning is relative to the 8 Essential Things.  

What's the biggest weakness of Frankl Lite?

None of the basic needs, except moral character, are reliable. Frankl, who underwent the torture and humiliation of a concentration camp, has a message: Everything can be taken from you.

However, the kind of meaning Frankl develops in himself, the very kind of meaning he defines in his book, cannot be taken away.