Subordination and Coordination (Complex and Compound Sentences)
Complex Sentence
A complex sentence has two clauses. One clause is dependent or subordinate; the other clause is independent, that is to say, the independent clause is the complete sentence.
Examples:
While I was tanning in Hermosa Beach, I noticed the clouds were playing hide and seek.
Because I have a tendency to eat entire pizzas, inhaling them within seconds, I must avoid that fattening food.
Whenever I’m driving my car and I see people texting while driving, I stop my car on the side of the road.
I have to workout every day because I am addicted to exercise-induced dopamine.
I feel overcome with a combination of romantic melancholy and giddy excitement whenever there is a thunderstorm.
We use subordination to show cause and effect. To create subordinate clauses, we must use a subordinate conjunction:
The essential ingredient in a complex sentence is the subordinate conjunction:
after although as because before even if even though if in order that
once provided that rather than since so that than that though unless
until when whenever where whereas wherever whether while why
I workout too much. I have tenderness in my elbow.
Because I workout too much, I suffer tenderness in my elbow.
My elbow hurts. I’m working out.
Even though my elbow hurts, I’m working out.
We use coordination to show equal rank of ideas. To combine sentences with coordination we use FANBOYS (for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so)
The calculus class has been cancelled. We will have to do something else.
The calculus class has been cancelled, so we will have to do something else.
I want more pecan pie. They only have apple pie.
I want more pecan pie, but they only have apple pie.
Using FANBOYS creates compound sentences
Angelo loves to buy a new radio every week, but his wife doesn’t like it.
You have high cholesterol, so you have to take statins.
I am tempted to eat all the rocky road ice cream, yet I will force myself to nibble on carrots and celery.
I want to go to the Middle Eastern restaurant today, and I want to see a movie afterwards.
I really like the comfort of elastic-waist pants, but wearing them makes me feel like an old man.
Both subordination and coordination combine sentences into smoother, clearer sentences.
The following four sentences are made smoother and clearer with the help of subordination:
McMahon felt gluttonous. He inhaled five pizzas. He felt his waist press against his denim waistband in a cruel, unforgiving fashion. He felt an acute ache in his stomach.
Because McMahon felt gluttonous, he inhaled five pizzas upon which he felt his waist press against his denim waistband resulting in an acute stomachache.
Another Example
Joe ate too much heavily salted popcorn. The saltiness made him thirsty. He consumed several gallons of water before bedtime. He was up going to the bathroom all night. He got a bad night’s sleep. He performed terribly during his job interview.
Due to his foolish consumption of salted popcorn, Joe was so thirsty he drank several gallons of water before bedtime, which caused him to go to the bathroom all night, interfering with his night’s sleep and causing him to do terribly on his job interview.
Another Example
Bob dropped his peanut butter sandwich in the tiger’s enclosure. He leaned over the fence to reach for his sandwich. He fell over the fence. A tiger approached Bob. The zookeeper ran between the stupid zoo customer and the wild beast. The zookeeper tore his rotator cuff.
After Bob dropped his peanut butter sandwich in the tiger’s enclosure, he leaned over the fence to recover his sandwich and fell into the enclosure during which time he was approached by a hungry tiger, forcing the nearby zookeeper to run between Bob and wild beast. During the struggle, the zookeeper tore his rotator cuff.
Don’t Do Subordination Overkill
After Bob dropped his peanut butter sandwich in the tiger’s enclosure, he leaned over the fence to recover his sandwich and fell into the enclosure during which time he was approached by a hungry tiger forcing the nearby zookeeper to run between Bob and the wild beast in such a manner that the zookeeper tore his rotator cuff, which resulted in a prolonged disability leave and the loss of his job, a crisis that compelled the zookeeper to file a lawsuit against Bob for financial damages.
Man’s Search for Meaning Essay Assignment
There is a camp of thinking that is skeptical of the idea of meaning for the reason that meaning is so subjective, varying from person to person, that to discuss it as an essential life force therefore is absurd.
Provide support and refutation of Point 1
Secondly, the skeptic will argue that people don’t have any objective meaning. Rather, they pursue some illusion or other that gives them a sense of purpose—perhaps a false one—that gives them motivation. In other words, people motivate themselves by making up all sorts of incentives, but these incentives could be less about “meaning” and more about chimeras.
Provide support and refutation for Point 2.
A third point of skepticism is that there are people who find meaning in very disturbing ways, most notably by being brainwashed and manipulated such as a person who converts to a religious cult or perhaps to some extremist ideology.
Provide support and refutation for Part 3.
The skeptic’s fourth point of contention is that she will argue that we cannot choose meaning because we are not agents of free will; rather, we are agents beholden to forces we cannot control, namely, determinism, the philosophy that states our biology and environment affect our behavior and that “choices” are just an illusion. We say we “chose” to do something after the fact, but in truth, we were hard-wired to act in such a way.
Provide support and refutation for Point 4.
Addressing the skeptic’s points above, support, refute, or complicate Frankl’s argument that we are responsible to be Destiny Seekers and find our own meaning in order that we make the appropriate response to a life of suffering and that failure to find meaning will doom us to the hell of the “existential vacuum.”
Suggested Structure:
Introduction
Thesis
Paragraphs Address Each of the Skeptic’s Points
One or two paragraphs address the idea that meaning is too individual and subjective.
One or two paragraphs that address the idea that meaning is an illusion we use to motivate ourselves.
One or two paragraphs that address the idea that “meaning” or a found purpose can be the result of brainwashing and manipulation.
One or two paragraphs that address the idea that we don’t choose meaning; some of us may have a sense of meaning, but only because we are hard-wired to. In contrast, some of us are hardwired to NOT have a sense of meaning and be okay with that.
Two counterargument-refutation paragraphs that address your opponents’ views.
Important Note
If you're refuting the skeptics point by point, the counterargument section is not necessary because your WHOLE essay is a refutation.
Conclusion is a more emotional (pathos) restatement of your thesis.
Important Note: Successful essays will address specific points in Frankl’s book.
Choice 1: Support, refute, or complicate the assertion that Frankl Lite is a more compelling orientation than Full Potency Frankl. Use Toulmin or Rogerian model.
Frankl Lite
You lead a decent life.
You fulfill the 8 Essential Human Needs.
You live a comfortable life.
You live a balanced life as you meet your financial and family needs.
Full Potency Frankl
You begin with the premise that "all can be taken from you in a blink of an eye."
Basing your comforts on finances and material goods is a fool's errand.
Suffering is the key component of existence.
We must create the appropriate response to suffering, one that involves finding a Higher Purpose. Therefore, we are Destiny Seekers.
To find our destiny, we must give up comforts and sacrifice our selfish desires for a higher purpose.
Some refutations about searching for meaning:
People can be manipulated and brainwashed to believe in their "meaning."
Meaning is an illusion that we create to find motivation.
Because meaning is so subjective, varying from person to person, it's worthless to talk about it.
Frankl's discussion about meaning is just common sense. Had he not lived to tell such an amazing, courageous survival story, his points about meaning would be seen for what they are--obvious cliches.
For the above, use the Toulmin model.
Suggested Essay Structure for Toulmin Model
Introduction:
Paragraph 1: Define VFL (Viktor Frankl Lite) 100 words
Paragraph 2: Define FPF (Full Potency Frankl) 100 words
Thesis with a concession clause and an independent clause with 3 reasons that support your claim.
Four Body paragraphs that support your claim.
Rebuttal Section
Anticipate two objections to your claim and counterargue them.
Two paragraphs counterargue your opponents
Conclusion: Restatement of your thesis in powerful language
Choice 2: Support, refute, or complicate the assertion that unless we can sacrifice on the scale described in Peter Singer's essay "What Should a Billionaire Give--What Should You?" we cannot live a life of true meaning as defined by Viktor Frankl. Use the Toulmin essay model.
Choice 3: Support, refute, or complicate the assertion that the lifestyle described in Joseph Epstein's essay "The Perpetual Adolescent" is antithetical to the kind of meaning that Viktor Frankl defines in his book Man's Search for Meaning. Use the Toulmin essay model.
The Four Realms of Meaning Mountain
At the bottom of Meaning Mountain is the bottom-dwelling realm, the land of the sloths, miscreants, narcissists, predatory hedonists, fops, dandies, pathological liars, impostors, grifters, mountebanks, snake oil salesmen, and other members of the Moral Dissolution Club. No fair-minded or decent human aspires to exist in this loathsome realm.
Traveling north up Meaning Mountain, we arrive at the middle realm, the land most people aspire to. Middle Mountain, as it's often called, hosts the world's decent people who do their work, fulfill their responsibilities, remain faithful to their partner and seek a life of security and comfort according to society's social contract.
These individuals seek the 8 Essential Needs, which we will peruse below. The people are "nice" but they tend to be invisible and rarely achieve anything "groundshaking" pertaining to the progress of the planet. For them meaning takes a back seat to comfort and security. They don't "make waves"; they simply get cozy in their cave and put their life on auto-pilot. But they fall short of Frankl because they avoid tension and conflict (105).
Between the middle and the top realm are the creative producers, those who flourish in their passion. They may not pursue Frankl's edict of self-sacrifice, but they do not settle for the mediocrity that pervades the people just below them. Often these people change society with their scientific breakthroughs and innovations. Think Apple and Steve Jobs. More generally, think about comedians, entertainers, actors, writers, musicians, artists, etc. These people cannot bear living without the torment of a struggle to better their work and art. To quit working would be, for them, a death.
Climbing past the cumulus clouds and then the misty shroud, we are now at Realm Four, the peak of Meaning Mountain. We are now in the presence of a rarefied breed of people, those disciples of Full-Potency Frankl. These are brave souls who cast away comfort and comformity to pursue Frankl's edict to take their cross and give up their life for the sake of others, to embrace suffering, theirs and the world's, and to seek what Life demands of them. For the Full-Potency Frankl acolytes, comfort and security take a back seat to meaning, sacrifice, and public service. Most people who change the world for the better come from this hard-to-reach mountain peak.
Review of Life’s 8 Essential Needs
Whether or not we agree with Frankl’s argument that meaning is the answer to the existential vacuum depends on our definition of meaning.
For example, is meaning contained in Life’s 8 Essential Needs?
One. We must have a passion outside ourselves to free us of, among other things, self-centeredness and vanity
Two. Self-awareness or the Third Eye so we can make rational decisions
Three. Humility, so we can admit and learn from our mistakes
Four. A job that compatible with our personality and pays us enough money so we can buy stuff we want
Five. A mate or reproductive success
Six. A sense of belonging and a sense of connection to others
Seven. Enough time for recreation
Eight. We need a strong moral character that gives us integrity (since connection to others and long-term happiness is the result of a strong moral core). Some say this character is part of evolution and society cooperation.
The problem with the above, it could be argued, is that it’s “Frankl Lite,” contains universal wisdom and common sense but falls short of Frankl’s definition of meaning. Further, these comforts can be taken away.
Full Potency Frankl
“Frankl Full Potency” requires that meaning be based on self-sacrifice, that we lose our convenience, safety, and material pleasures for the sake of helping others. While most people are content with Frankl Lite, fewer, far fewer, aspire to Frankl Full Potency.
HomeTown Buffet is a sign of America's loss of meaning.
Gluttony is a sign of trying feebly to overcome the existential vacuum.
The ritual of gluttony is based on "feeding," not eating.
The ritual is based on ignorance of food, not knowledge.
Warrant: Eating at HomeTown Buffet is a sign of moral decay.
Eleven Tenets of Logotherapy (Meaning Therapy)
We do not go to therapy to pour our grief in a great purge to the therapist; rather, the therapist, the logotherapist, asks us disagreeable questions that turn our self-pity on its head and demand us to take responsibility for the crapulent quagmire of our loathsome existence. We are asked to “get off our butt” and find something useful to do with our lives.
We do not mire ourselves in our demon-haunted past, a recurring loop of failure and misery, but look toward a future possibility of meaning.
Frankl agrees that we are at our essence possessed by a will to live but this will is not for pleasure or power but for meaning.
We cannot search for meaning; rather, life questions us: What unique task must we perform based on our individual life circumstances?
We must live life as if we were saved from death and from the guilt of our past mistakes and living life a second time, this time around giving life all of our heart and integrity.
We must discover meaning in the world, not in our psyche.
We find meaning in three different ways: work or deeds; experience with something or encounter with someone; our attitude toward suffering
Suffering is an opportunity to turn “one’s predicament into human achievement” but only through a radical change of attitude.
Logotherapy transcends logic, especially as it pertains to the sense of meaningless suffering that we contemplate in the world. In this sense logotherapy is transcendent in the religious sense.
We must use paradoxical intention, exaggerating our fears, to distance ourselves from our fears and see the humor of our situation.
Determinism is only partly true. Indeed, we are limited by our hardwiring and environment but we have some limited free will at our disposal.
Major Differences between Psychotherapy and Logotherapy
1. While psychotherapy focuses on the frustrated sex drive as the basis of all conflict (Freud), logotherapy focuses on "the will to meaning," or the existential vacuum.
2. While psychotherapy focuses on unravelling the past to exorcise demons and resolve conflict, logotherapy focuses on finding meaning for the future.
3. While psychotherapy often ignores morality as a factor toward meaning and happiness, logotherapy integrates morality with the meaning quest.
4. While psychotherapy often focuses on deterministic factors that make our character, logotherapy emphasizes our responsibility for our actions regardless of our circumstances.
5. While psychotherapy emphasizes "self-actualization," logotherapy focuses on the ways in which we find meaning by becoming engaged with the world, by serving the world, and by taking focus off our self needs.
Principle of Logotherapy: Frankl says we find meaning in our future, not our past:
Don't Emphasize the Past; Emphasize a Better Future
In his chapter “Logotherapy in a Nutshell,” Viktor Frankl writes that a patient’s best path to healing and recovery does not result from immersing himself into his past demons but is based on finding a higher purpose for his future, namely, the meaning of his life.
A Therapist Cannot Hand You General Meaning on a Plate
But Frankl warns that the therapist should avoid generalities. Regarding the question “What is the meaning of life?” Frankl writes:
I doubt whether a doctor can answer this question in general terms. For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person’s life at a given moment. To put the question in general terms would be comparable to the question posed to a chess champion: “Tell me, Master, what is the best move in the world?” There simply is no such thing as the best or even a good move apart from a particular situation in a game and the particular personality of one’s opponent. The same holds for human existence. One should not search for an abstract meaning of life. Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out in a concrete assignment which demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated. Thus, everyone’s task is unique as is his specific opportunity to implement it.
You Have to See or Hear Meaning, an Epiphany
If an epiphany is required to find meaning, as I believe it is, then indeed epiphanies are very personal, individual experiences. As I heard comedian Patton Oswalt say in a recent radio interview, and I paraphrase, we cannot go out and seek our epiphanies; rather our epiphanies find us, catching us by surprise.
Likewise, Frankl writes that we do not go out and seek meaning. Rather, meaning seeks us. As Frankl explains:
As each situation in life represents a challenge to man and presents a problem for him to solve, the question of the meaning of life may actually be reversed. Ultimately, man must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible. Thus, logotherapy sees in responsibleness the very essence of human existence.
We Find Meaning During an Ironic Reversal
The essence to understanding meaning, then, is understanding that the meaning quest entails that the tables are turned, as it were; there is a reversal in which we begin making demands about what we want from life but if we’re paying attention, it is life, not us, that makes the demands.
According to Peter Kreeft’s analysis of meaning in his book Three Philosophies of Life, this reversal does indeed involve an epiphany or a revelation:
Viktor Frankl speaks of this experience of startling, sudden reversal of standpoint or perspective in the context of the concentration camps. He says in Man’s Search for Meaning that many of the prisoners learned to stop asking the question “What is the meaning of life?” and realized that life was asking them what their meaning was.
Instead of continuing to ask “Life, why are you doing this to me? I demand an answer!” they realized that life was questioning them and demanding an answer—an answer in deeds, not just words. They had to respond to this question, this challenge, by being responsible.
In Logotherapy meaning often comes to us in a radical change of path:
These “sudden reversals” often change our original path. For example, I adopted my dog Gretchen from Rover Rescue, founded and operated by Cathy Rubin who before she died of cancer at the age of fifty-four committed her life to saving unwanted and abused animals. Her original career was that of a clinical psychologist. She had her own practice and also did forensic work for the courts, but after the Northridge Earthquake of 1994 she volunteered to help families find their dogs lost after the quake. But as her obituary states in The Easy Reader, a local newspaper, she had her own “reversal” in which life demanded something from her:
A turning point occurred in 1994 when she volunteered at an animal shelter after the Northridge earthquake, helping reunite lost pets with their owners. After a few months, the kennel still seemed as crowded as when it had begun, and she began to wonder. “I asked the kennel supervisor why it was still so crowded, and they explained to me that the shelters in LA are always crowded,” she recalled. “I had this thought that the shelter would be emptied out and that would be it. I found out that back then they were putting to sleep, in L.A. County, about 250 dogs a day.” Rubin was never a bystander. She became involved with the shelters, and soon made a huge impact. Oakland, who met her as a fellow volunteer in the shelters, said Rubin galvanized people into action. She introduced mobile adoption fairs, taking the animals out in public to find prospective new homes.
Cathy Rubin’s decision to respond to this demand changed many lives, including mine. I remember when my wife and I adopted Gretchen, a scared Finish Spitz, nine years ago. No one wanted her because she was so petrified of people that when approached she’d squat and pee. Some adopters returned her after no longer being able to deal with Gretchen’s “squatting” and cowering. But my wife Carrie and I, at Cathy’s prodding, adopted Gretchen and made her a happy and healthy dog. I remember Carrie telling me how our marriage was different, for the better, after we started caring for Gretchen. We argued less about trivial things. We were closer. And the nurturing of Gretchen planted the seeds in me that I, someone who never wanted to have children, might have something in me that could make me a viable father.
Cathy Rubin’s “turning point” saved over a thousand dogs from being euthanized and she changed the lives of thousands of people, myself included, as well.
Another example of someone who reached a point when meaning found him is Jeff Henderson, a world-class chef and mentor to young “high-risk” people who have lived lives of drugs and gang-banging. Henderson teaches these young individuals how to hone their cooking skills so that can find viable employment outside a life of crime. Henderson, who writes about his transformation in his memoir Cooked: My Journey from the Streets to the Stove, is a former drug dealer who lived in denial about the pernicious effects his drug dealing had on society until he saw something in prison. An inmate swallowed a balloon with heroin inside and when the balloon burst inside his intestines, the other inmates impeded anyone from getting the man medical help and the man died. Henderson saw that drug addiction would make people give up all their scruples and allow something like that to happen. Seeing that he was accountable for his actions, he no longer saw himself as a victim and in prison he started to find ways to improve himself.
It was during this phase of his life that he fell in love with cooking and found that his cooking could win people over in a good way. His behavior helped him get out of prison after almost ten years and when he got out, he struggled to become, eventually, head chef at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. His mentorship was televised on the Food Network as The Chef Jeff Project. That’s how I found out about the book and soon after used it on my freshman composition syllabus. In my twenty-five years of teaching that class, no book has ever received so much praise from the students. Jeff Henderson didn’t so much choose his meaning, as Frankl writes. Meaning chose him.
Thesis in support of Frankl
Frankl is correct to argue that meaning is the cure for our emptiness. We see meaning is born from things we can control such as finding reasons behind suffering (death bed part of VF's book), establishing boundaries (moral and physical), finding faith in something to look forward to in the future, discipline (VF refers to how the hopeful save rations for later and the hopeless need instant gratification), exercising morality (VF's Moral Code is to sacrifice our comfort and convenience for the better of others. This is also part of societal reciprocity or self-interested altruism), and finally asserting a courageous, noble attitude in the face of the suffering (suffering, VF observes, is "inevitable").
Thesis That Refutes Frankl
Meaning as VF defines it is a fiction, a hoax, a charade, a chimera, a cruel fantasy devised by religious zealots. We see that in fact there can be no meaning when we honestly examine a lot of suffering in the world is meaningless. For example, some people are intractable slaves to the tedium of meaningless work; children are sold into all kinds of vile slavery; there are natural disasters, acts of gratuitous human cruelty against others.
There can be no meaning because there is no free will. We act in accordance with our hard-wiring.
We can find a better life, not through "meaning," but through the acquisition of the 8 Essential Human Needs.
Meaning in VF's book is too relative to even be a viable idea. Then what we're talking about is not finding "meaning," but finding our niche.
Defending Frankl
Reviewing Mapping Components for Causes Behind a Life of Meaning (At Least Relative Meaning; I'm Not Sure I Believe in Ultimate or Absolute Meaning)
1. Boundaries, including self-gratification and the quest for happiness; we need to balance this quest by searching, not for happiness, but for meaning. See "There's More to Life Than Being Happy," a good research source.
2. Core Values
3. Discipline (failure to have discipline, also called self-control, leads to despair)
4. Progression. Choosing Centrifugal over Centripetal Motion
5. Find a purpose, a higher goal, for your future. This is the essence of logotherapy. You have to move forward. You can't wallow in the mire of your past.
6. A radical turn-around happens when "meaning finds you" in a sort of epiphany.
All of the above cannot be achieved unless we develop metacognition, also called self-awareness, also called the Third Eye.
We must also have a moral foundation.
Reviewing a Definition of Meaning: It May be Relative, Not Absolute
I doubt meaning is a huge abstraction, the It that you spend you're whole life looking for. Rather, meaning is very specific and practical; it has application to your life.
For example, I've heard Colin Cowherd, ESPN radio host, say that success in life isn't about how we act; it's how we react. Logotherapy is a way of practicing ways to combat neurotic, self-destructive behavior such as overreacting to problems. In the latter case, the overreaction is always worse than the problem.
We all face struggles. We all face points in our lives where the wheels are about to fall off the wagon and we're going to spin out of control and fall off the cliff.
I had a class where too many students were showing up not reading the book and not even pretending to be interested in the class. They were texting and talking. Rather than panic, I kept my cool. I then gave a very controlled lecture on The Student from Hell and explain the consequences for being such a student. The next class was great, no problems.
After my wife and I had twins, about four months into it we had our worst fight ever. Words could have been said that you can never take back but before that happened my Third Eye told me to feign a stomach ache and run to the bathroom where I stayed for about an hour to let our emotions settle down.
In both cases, I averted disaster by the way I reacted. And learning how to do this as I mature in life gives me meaning.
Developing the Third Eye to Stop Overreacting and to Identify the Causes of Meaning
Another thing that gives me meaning is pride and self-confidence so that I deliver the goods even when I don't feel like it. As a student or teacher, it's our responsibility to bring passion to our product, be it essay or lecture, no matter how we feel. We do so out of pride and conviction. Our self-identity demands high quality and maintaining standards gives us meaning.
Another source of meaning is core values:
Learning that virtue is its own reward. If I find a wallet with $500 and credit cards in it, I'm going to call the owner and give back all of the contents. I will be glad the owner got his wallet back. I don't need a reward but in principle I'd want to see the owner's gesture of appreciation even though I don't want his money. If I become a scumbag and keep wallets, I violate my sense of identity and doing so compromises my sense of meaning.
Another thing that gives me identity is discipline. Keeping in some shape, as opposed to being a fat blob, maintains my sense of pride.
None of the above things are examples of Absolute Meaning; they are partial definitions of meaning only but they point me toward the right direction.
For Frankl, meaning is more than the examples I gave; For Frankl meaning is about changing our attitude toward suffering and death and in this regard I'm still a Work in Progress.
Based on VF's book, I've come to this definition of meaning:
Meaning is your work, your struggle, or your mission that brings out your highest character.
Your Essay Options for Your Next Typed Essay
Man’s Search for Meaning Essay Assignment
There is a camp of thinking that is skeptical of the idea of meaning for the reason that meaning is so subjective, varying from person to person, that to discuss it as an essential life force therefore is absurd. Secondly, the skeptic will argue that people don’t have any objective meaning. Rather, they pursue some illusion or other that gives them a sense of purpose—perhaps a false one—that gives them motivation. In other words, people motivate themselves by making up all sorts of incentives, but these incentives could be less about “meaning” and more about chimeras. A third point of skepticism is that there are people who find meaning in very disturbing ways, most notably by being brainwashed and manipulated such as a person who converts to a religious cult or perhaps to some extremist ideology. The skeptic’s fourth point of contention is that she will argue that we cannot choose meaning because we are not agents of free will; rather, we are agents beholden to forces we cannot control, namely, determinism, the philosophy that states our biology and environment affect our behavior and that “choices” are just an illusion. We say we “chose” to do something after the fact, but in truth, we were hard-wired to act in such a way.
Addressing the skeptic’s points above, support, refute, or complicate Frankl’s argument that we are responsible to be Destiny Seekers and find our own meaning in order that we make the appropriate response to a life of suffering and that failure to find meaning will doom us to the hell of the “existential vacuum.”
Suggested Structure:
Introduction
Thesis
Paragraphs Address Each of the Skeptic’s Points
One or two paragraphs address the idea that meaning is too individual and subjective.
One or two paragraphs that address the idea that meaning is an illusion we use to motivate ourselves.
One or two paragraphs that address the idea that “meaning” or a found purpose can be the result of brainwashing and manipulation.
One or two paragraphs that address the idea that we don’t choose meaning; some of us may have a sense of meaning, but only because we are hard-wired to. In contrast, some of us are hardwired to NOT have a sense of meaning and be okay with that.
Two counterargument-refutation paragraphs that address your opponents’ views.
Important Note
If you're refuting the skeptics point by point, the counterargument section is not necessary because your WHOLE essay is a refutation.
Conclusion is a more emotional (pathos) restatement of your thesis.
Second Important Note
Successful essays will address specific points in Frankl’s book. You can't just have a general discussion about meaning without providing context from VF's book.
Previous Essay Topics
Choice 1: Support, refute, or complicate the assertion that Frankl Lite is a more compelling orientation than Full Potency Frankl. Use Toulmin or Rogerian model.
Frankl Lite
You lead a decent life.
You fulfill the 8 Essential Human Needs.
You live a comfortable life.
You live a balanced life as you meet your financial and family needs.
Full Potency Frankl
You begin with the premise that "all can be taken from you in a blink of an eye."
Basing your comforts on finances and material goods is a fool's errand.
Suffering is the key component of existence.
We must create the appropriate response to suffering, one that involves finding a Higher Purpose. Therefore, we are Destiny Seekers.
To find our destiny, we must give up comforts and sacrifice our selfish desires for a higher purpose.
Some refutations about searching for meaning:
People can be manipulated and brainwashed to believe in their "meaning."
Meaning is an illusion that we create to find motivation.
Because meaning is so subjective, varying from person to person, it's worthless to talk about it.
Frankl's discussion about meaning is just common sense. Had he not lived to tell such an amazing, courageous survival story, his points about meaning would be seen for what they are--obvious cliches.
For the above, use the Toulmin model.
Suggested Essay Structure for Toulmin Model
Introduction:
Paragraph 1: Define VFL (Viktor Frankl Lite) 100 words
Paragraph 2: Define FPF (Full Potency Frankl) 100 words
Thesis with a concession clause and an independent clause with 3 reasons that support your claim.
Four Body paragraphs that support your claim.
Rebuttal Section
Anticipate two objections to your claim and counterargue them.
Two paragraphs counterargue your opponents
Conclusion: Restatement of your thesis in powerful language
Choice 2: Support, refute, or complicate the assertion that unless we can sacrifice on the scale described in Peter Singer's essay "What Should a Billionaire Give--What Should You?" we cannot live a life of true meaning as defined by Viktor Frankl. Use the Toulmin essay model.
Choice 3: Support, refute, or complicate the assertion that the lifestyle described in Joseph Epstein's essay "The Perpetual Adolescent" is antithetical to the kind of meaning that Viktor Frankl defines in his book Man's Search for Meaning. Use the Toulmin essay model.
Writing Effective Introduction Paragraphs for Your Essays
Weak Introductions to Avoid
One. Don’t use overused quotes:
“We have nothing to fear but fear itself.”
“My fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”
Since the Dawn of Man, people have sought love and happiness . . .
In today’s society, we see more and more people cocooning in their homes . . .
Man has always wondered why happiness and contentment are so elusive like trying to grasp a bar of sudsy, wet soap.
We have now arrived at a Societal Epoch where we no longer truly communicate with one another as we have embarked upon the full-time task of self-aggrandizement through the social media of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, et al.
In this modern world we face a new existential crisis with the advent of newfangled technologies rendering us razzle-dazzled with the overwhelming possibilities of digital splendor on one hand and painfully dislocated and lonely with our noses constantly rubbing our digital screens on the other.
Since Adam and Eve traipsed across the luxuriant Garden of Eden searching for the juicy, succulent Adriatic fig only to find it withered under the attack of mites, ants, and fruit flies, mankind has embarked upon the quest for the perfect pesticide.
Three. Never apologize to the reader:
Sorry for these half-baked chicken scratch thoughts. I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night and I didn’t have sufficient time to do the necessary research for the topic you assigned me.
I’m hardly an expert on this subject and I don’t know why anyone would take me seriously, but here it goes.
Forgive me but after over-indulging last night at HomeTown Buffet my brain has been rendered in a mindless fog and the ramblings of this essay prove to be rather incoherent.
Four. Don’t throw a thesis cream pie in your reader’s face.
In this essay I am going to prove to you why Americans will never buy those stupid automatic cars that don’t need a driver. The four supports that will support my thesis are ______________, ______________, _______________, and ________________.
Five. Don’t use a dictionary definition (standard procedure for a sixth grade essay but not college in which you should use more sophisticated methods such as extended definition or expert definitions):
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines metacognition as “awareness or analysis of one’s own learning or thinking process.”
General Principles of an Effective Introduction Paragraph
It piques your readers’ interest (often called a “hook”).
It is compelling.
It is timely.
It is relevant to the human condition and to your topic.
It transitions to your topic and/or thesis.
The Ten Types of Paragraph Introductions
One. Use a blunt statement of fact or insight that captures your readers’ attention:
Men who are jealous are cheaters.
We would assume that jealous men are obsessed with fidelity, but in fact the most salient feature of the jealous man is that he is more often than not cheating on his partner. His jealousy results from projecting his own infidelities on his partner. He says to himself, “I am a cheater and therefore so is she.” We see this sick mentality in the character Dan from Ha Jin’s “The Beauty.” Trapped in his jealousy, Dan embodies the pathological characteristics of learned helplessness evidenced by ___________, _______________, ________________, and _______________.
John Taylor Gatto opens his essay “Against School: How Public Education Cripples Our Kids, and Why” as thus:
I taught for thirty years in some of the worst schools in Manhattan, and in some of the best, and during that time I became an expert in boredom. Boredom was everywhere in the world, and if you asked the kids, as I often did, why they felt so bored, they always gave the same answers: They said the work was stupid, that it made no sense, that they already knew it. They said they wanted to be doing something real, not just sitting around. They said teachers didn’t seem to know much about their subjects and clearly weren’t interested in learning more. And the kids were right: Their teachers were every bit as bored as they were.
Boredom is the common condition of schoolteachers, and anyone who has spent time in a teacher’s lounge can vouch for the low energy, the whining, the dispirited attitudes, to be found there. When asked why they feel bored, the teachers tend to blame the kids, as you might expect. Who wouldn’t get bored teaching students who are rude and interested only in grades? If even that. Of course, teachers are themselves products of the same twelve-year compulsory school programs that so thoroughly bore their students, and as school personnel they are trapped inside structures even more rigid than those imposed upon the children. Who, then, is to blame?
Gatto goes on to argue in his thesis that school trains children to be servants for mediocre (at best) jobs when school should be teaching innovation, individuality, and leadership roles.
Two. Write a definition based on the principles of extended definition (term, class, distinguishing characteristics) or quote an expert in a field of study:
Metacognition is an essential asset to mature people characterized by their ability to value long-term gratification over short-term gratification, their ability to distance themselves from their passions when they’re in a heated emotional state, their ability to stand back and see the forest instead of the trees, and their ability to continuously make assessments of the effectiveness of their major life choices. In the fiction of John Cheever and James Lasdun, we encounter characters that are woefully lacking in metacognition evidenced by _____________, ______________, _____________, and _______________.
According to Alexander Batthanany, member of the Viktor Frankl Institute, logotherapy, which is the search for meaning, “is identified as the primary motivational force in human beings.” Batthanany further explains that logotherapy is “based on three philosophical and psychological concepts: Freedom of Will, Will to Meaning, and Meaning in Life.” Embracing the concepts of logotherapy is vastly more effective than conventional, Freud-based psychotherapy when we consider ________________, ______________, __________________, and ________________.
Three. Use an insightful quotation that has not, to your knowledge anyway, been overused:
George Bernard Shaw once said, “There are two great tragedies in life. The first is not getting what we want. The second is getting it.” Shaw’s insight speaks to the tantalizing chimera, that elusive quest we take for the Mythic She-Beast who becomes are life-altering obsession. As the characters in John Cheever and James Lasdun’s fiction show, the human relationship with the chimera is source of paradox. On one hand, having a chimera will kill us. On the other, not having a chimera will kill us. Cheever and Lasdun’s characters twist and torment under the paradoxical forces of their chimeras evidenced by _____________, _______________, ______________, and __________________.
Four. Use a startling fact to get your reader’s attention:
There are currently more African-American men in prison than there were slaves at the peak of slavery in the United States. We read this disturbing fact in Michelle Alexander’s magisterial The New Jim Crow, which convincingly argues that America’s prison complex is perpetuating the racism of slavery and Jim Crow in several insidious ways.
Five. Use an anecdote (personal or otherwise) to get your reader’s attention:
One afternoon I was napping under the covers when Lara walked into the room talking on the phone to her friend, Hannah. She didn’t know I was in the room, confusing the mound on the bed with a clump of pillows and blankets. I heard her whisper to Hannah, “I found another small package from eBay. He’s buying watches and not telling me.”
That’s when I thought about getting a post office box.
This could be the opening introduction for an essay topic about “economic infidelity.”
As we read in Stephen King’s essay “Write or Die”:
“Hardly a week after being sprung from detention hall, I was once more invited to step down to the principal’s office. I went with a sinking heart, wondering what new sh** I’d stepped in.”
Six. Use a piece of vivid description or a vivid illustration to get your reader’s attention:
My gym looks like an enchanting fitness dome, an extravaganza of taut, sweaty bodies adorned in fluorescent spandex tights contorting on space-age cardio machines, oil-slicked skin shrouded in a synthetic fog of dry ice colored by the dizzying splash of lavender disco lights. Tribal drum music plays loudly. Bottled water flows freely, as if from some Elysian spring, over burnished flesh. The communal purgation appeals to me. My fellow cardio junkies and I are so self-abandoned, free, and euphoric, liberated in our gym paradise. But right next to our workout heaven is a gastronomical inferno, one of those all-you-can-eat buffets, part of a chain, which is, to my lament, sprouting all over Los Angeles. I despise the buffet, a trough for people of less discriminating tastes who saunter in and out of the restaurant at all hours, entering the doors of the eatery without shame and blind to all the gastrointestinal and health-related horrors that await them. Many of the patrons cannot walk out of their cars to the buffet but have to limp or rely on canes, walkers, wheelchairs, and other ambulatory aids, for it seems a high percentage of the customers are afflicted with obesity, diabetes, arthritis, gout, hypothalamic lesions, elephantiasis, varicose veins and fleshy tumors. Struggling and wheezing as they navigate across the vast parking lot that leads to their gluttonous sanctuary, they seem to worship the very source of their disease.
In front of the buffet is a sign of rules and conduct. One of the rules urges people to stand in the buffet line in an orderly fashion and to be patient because there is plenty of food for everyone. Another rule is that children are not to be left unattended and running freely around the buffet area. My favorite rule is that no hands, tongues, or other body parts are allowed to touch the food. Tongs and other utensils are to be used at all times. The rules give you an idea of the kind of people who eat there. These are people I want to avoid.
But as I walk to the gym from my car, which shares a parking lot with the buffet patrons, I cannot avoid the nauseating smell of stale grease oozing from the buffet’s rear dumpster, army green and stained with splotches and a seaweed-like crust of yellow and brown grime.
Often I see cooks and dishwashers, their bodies covered with soot, coming out of the back kitchen door to throw refuse into the dumpster, a smoldering receptacle with hot fumes of bacteria and flies. Hunchbacked and knobby, the poor employees are old, weary men with sallow, rheumy eyes and cuts and bruises all over their bodies. I imagine them being tortured deep within the bowels of the fiery kitchen on some Medieval rack. They emerge into the blinding sunshine like moles, their eyes squinting, with their plastic garbage bags twice the size of their bodies slung over their shoulders, and then I look into their sad eyes—eyes that seem to beg for my help and mercy. And just when I am about to give them words of hope and consolation or urge them to flee for their lives, it seems they disappear back into the restaurant as if beckoned by some invisible tyrant.
The above could be an introduction to an argument about people who are 400 pounds or higher being required to pay for three airline tickets because they take up three seats.
Seven. Summarize both sides of a debate.
American is torn by the national healthcare debate. One camp says it’s a crime that 25,000 Americans die unnecessarily each year from treatable disease and that, modeling a health system from other developed countries, is a moral imperative. However, there is another camp that fears that adopting some version of universal healthcare is tantamount to stepping into the direction of socialism.
Eight. State a misperception, fallacy, or error that your essay will refute.
Americans against universal or national healthcare are quick to say that such a system is “socialist,” “communist,” and “un-American,” but a close look at their rhetoric shows that it is high on knee-jerk, mindless paroxysms and short on reality. Contrary to the enemies of national healthcare, I will show that providing universal coverage is very American and compatible with the American brand of capitalism.
Nine. Make a general statement about your topic.
From Sherry Turkle’s essay “How Computers Change the Way We Think”:
The tools we use to think change the ways in which we think. The invention of written language brought about a radical shift in how we process, organize, store, and transmit representations of the world. Although writing remains our primary information technology, today when we think about the impact of technology on our habits of mind, we think primarily of the computer.
Ten. Pose a question your essay will try to answer:
Why are diet books more and more popular, yet Americans are getting more and more fat?
Why is psychotherapy becoming more and more popular, yet Americans are getting more and more crazy?
Why are the people of Qatar the richest people in the world, yet score at the bottom of all Happiness Index metrics?
Why are courses in the Humanities more essential to your wellbeing that you might think?
What is the difference between thinking and critical thinking?
According to the 1C Grading rubric, the A thesis is clear, poses contradictions, qualifications, and limits.
In contrast, a B thesis, while clear, is less ambitious and absent contradictions, qualifications, and limits.
An effective way to elevate a B thesis is to begin with a dependent clause, which you respond to in the independent clause.
Thesis Examples Starting with Dependent Clause
While heinous criminals stir our feelings for retribution, translating that retribution into the death penalty creates so many problems, humanitarian, legal, and democratic, that we are well served, except in the most extreme circumstances, to abolish that barbaric policy.
Despite the lavish praise for HBO's The Sopranos, the show is sodden with cliches, stereotypes, and mindless violence that impede it from rising to the level of "transcendent" TV that it is so often called.
Frankl’s Major Claims
Claim One. We suffer from the existential vacuum, the sense that we’re wasting our life and a vexing boredom that causes us to “act out” in misguided attempts at filling the vacuum with hedonism, consumerism, addiction, and other forms of self-destruction.
Is this true for everyone? I'm thinking of my cousin. He's too busy living to fall into the vacuum.
Claim Two. No matter how extreme our circumstances we can choose the attitude toward our inevitable suffering. We can either be courageous and magnanimous in the way we treat the world’s suffering, and our own, or we can be sniveling whiners wasting our life potential as we shackle ourselves with malcontented complaints, victimization, and narcissistic self-pity. Part of the way we deal with suffering is practicing “the art of living” and part of this art is developing a sense of humor, which helps defuse suffering ( 44).
Frankl develops this point on page 65 in which he claims man has a vestige of freedom even under extreme distress and that his preserving his spiritual freedom can be affirmed by both experience and principle.
Frankl emphasizes the point of free will again on page 66 in which he claims we should not submit to those powers that would rob us of our freedom and make us a “plaything of circumstance.” The prisoner became hero or animal based on an “inner decision,” not external circumstances.
Again Frankl emphasizes his point by saying our spiritual freedom, AKA free will, cannot be taken away and that this freedom, to choose a courageous attitude in the face of suffering, is the source of meaning and purpose. We see these remarks on page 67, what I call The Thesis Page.
On the Thesis Page, Frankl makes it clear that the attitude we choose is a binary one: Either we choose courage and dignity, or we choose to become self-centered beasts, “animals.” There is no in-between for Frankl. We don’t need to suffer the extreme of a concentration camp to prove ourselves. He writes we are all fated to a circumstance that tests us, that gives us opportunity to “achieve something” through our own suffering.
Claim Three. Without hope for a better future, for a meaningful task that we can help blossom, we fall into a provisional existence of despair and all of the pathologies connected to the aforementioned existential vacuum.
Claim Four. When we are stripped of everything to the point that we have nothing to live for but our own survival, languishing in utter desolation, we can nourish ourselves on the contemplation of love and find transcendence and fulfillment (37). VF writes that “love is as strong as death” and writes about the “intensification of the inner life” (39).
Claim Five. Knowing we are going to die, we are responsible for “making sense of our death,” for making our life meaningful in such a way that death can not make a mockery of the life we lived (49).
Claim Six. We must fight and struggle against those forces in the world that would strip us of our individuality, our sense of personal responsibility, and our sense of dignity. Otherwise, as we read on page 50, we will join the mindless masses and “descend to a level of animal life” that results in nihilism and despair, a life without meaning. Also see pages 62 and 63 in which he talks about the prisoners feeling degraded.
Claim Seven. We must be loyal to the values that define our highest self, we read on page 55 in which VF has an opportunity to escape the camp but doesn’t so he can remain and serve his comrades; otherwise, our choice of convenience and self-serving short-term gratification will strip our life of meaning. Also see page 58.
Claim Eight. While meaning can come from creativity and “passive enjoyment of life,” the only real meaning must come from suffering. The attitude and behavior we cultivate in the face of suffering and death determines whether or not we have meaning (67).
Claim Nine. A sense of helplessness and hopelessness is one of the greatest forces that takes away a human’s ability to “take hold of a strong inner life” that leads to moral integrity and protects one from descending into a selfish animal and the sense that life is not serious and without consequence (70, 72); therefore, we must take responsibility to find a “future goal” that will sustain us (71), a goal that gives us meaning and purpose. This purpose helps us “rise above the situation” as we see on page 73 in which VF envisions giving a lecture about the psychology of the concentration camp.
Claim Ten. Another dangerous force that strips us of meaning is fear. And this fear is delusional, all in our head, and this fear causes us to live a “mediocre and half-hearted” life. As we read on page 72 in which Frankl quotes Bismarck: “Life is like being at the dentist. You always think that the worst is still to come, and yet it is over already.” Sounds like these words could be applied to someone with generalized anxiety disorder.
Claim Eleven. In order to transform from Mediocre Fearful Man to Worthy Man, we must undergo a radical attitude change so that we no longer ask what life can give us but what life expects from us. See page 77. This Life Expectation varies from individual to individual and we are responsible for finding it. Some situations require that we act in the face of crisis. Other situations require that we “accept our fate and bear our cross with courage and dignity.”
Introduction: Refutation and Defense Thesis of Frankl
Thesis That Refutes Viktor Frankl's Message That We Must Be Worthy of Our Suffering by Living with Purpose and Meaning
Viktor Frankl is a great person, an amazing person, and a saint, but his message that we must embrace "meaning" as a cure for the existential vacuum does not hold up to close scrutiny. For one, meaning, by Frankl's own admission, is subjective, varying from one person to another based on individual circumstances. This condition makes "meaning" impossible to define since "meaning" could be many things. A misguided soul chasing money or some other foolish chimera could be his "meaning." A despot chasing his fascist utopia or some other dangerous ideology, like Pol Pot or Hitler, could be a form of "meaning." My second objection to Frankl's idea of meaning is that Frankl's definition is too unattainable. Yes, Frankl lived a remarkable, extraordinary life, but the rarity of his heroism evidences how nearly impossible such a heroic form of meaning can be obtained. In other words, Frankl's "meaning" is not universal; it's unique to his pre-conditioned saintly existence, one he did not choose, and proves elusive to most of us. Finally, the idea of meaning, if it is to be discussed at all, should not be such an elevated, heroic term. Meaning, if it exists, is a matter of common sense. We derive meaning, as Freud said, from love and work. We find a job we like and we form connected bonds with our family, friends, and community. We treat others the way we would like to be treated. We avoid doing to others the things we don't want done to us. That's common sense. We don't need to read a book about some heroic definition of meaning to reach such a conclusion. Therefore, I must conclude that while I admire Viktor Frankl as a remarkable human being, I reject his "call to meaning," and I accuse McMahon of being a fake who assigns meaningless books, the very charges I read about while scanning the reviews on Rate My Professor.
Another Refutation Thesis
Viktor Frankl is a hero who lived what he preached by risking comfort and personal safety to give aid to his comrades during the horrific imprisonment in various concentration camps. His message that we must “bear our cross” and gladly endure suffering in order to meet life’s demands on us is both a message of hope and personal threat. For after all, popular culture teaches us that a life of pleasure and comfort is the highest good. A life of embracing suffering to serve others is a saintly life and sounds good on paper, but who wants to live it? And who can? Viktor Frankl, for sure, proved to be capable and willing to live out his spiritual message, but he is a minority, a rare specimen, who fulfilled his mission statement to endure suffering with nobility and courage in order to meet the demands his individual life situation imposed on him.
The question that faces us with Frankl’s inspirational book is this: Is Frankl’s message, that we are responsible to find meaning in the face of suffering, universally applicable or is it a highly specialized message confined to the pious and the religious who have disavowed material pleasures and comforts in order to live a life of meaningful altruism?
I intend to argue that while Frankl’s message is a noble one worthy of our applause and admiration, that in fact we do not need to find “meaning” to be fulfilled or saved from the “existential vacuum”; that life in fact is a mixture of relative meaning with grotesque, sometimes cruel absurdities that make a lot of suffering senseless and that the “existential vacuum” is an inevitable part of life; that depressives and nihilists who cannot adopt the “positive attitude” toward suffering and death Frankl describes (in spite of their most valiant efforts) can still be worthy people contributing to society; finally, I want to argue that I partly agree with Frankl: Yes, we should find a purpose and niche in life that will give us relative meaning. We just shouldn’t expect to find “Meaning” with a capital M. Rather, our life will become more bearable with some kind of purpose, meaningful work, and meaningful connections with others.
Thesis That Defends Frankl
The above attempt to dismiss Frankl's message of meaning suffers various misunderstandings and misinterpretations, which me must address. First, the misguided writer fails to grasp what Frankl means when he says meaning varies from one person to the next. Frankl is not promoting moral relativism and some mushy subjectivism; rather, Frankl is arguing that meaning comes to us in many ways and must pass the test of being morally good and making us flourish. Secondly, the misguided writer argues that Frankl's remarkable life creates a standard of meaning that is too high for most of us to obtain. The misguided writer sadly wants us to capitulate to moral mediocrity or worse while Frankl gives us the uncompromising truth about meaning, that is it tough to obtain and requires courage and nobility. Finally, the misguided writer wants to reduce meaning to "common sense," arguing that we find meaning in our connections to our job, our family, our friends, and our community. However, these connections can not even exist unless we are able to endure life's main condition, suffering. Only someone with the fortitude (strength to endure in the face of suffering) described by Frankl can achieve the connections and bonds that are so blithely described by our misguided writer. Therefore, we would be in grave error to surrender to this misguided writer's dismissal of Frankl and his capitulation to a form of moral mediocrity. Let us, therefore, embrace Frankl's message regardless of its difficulties, for to embark on a journey toward meaning as described by Frankl is well worth the rewards and our failure to take on this journey will result in our spiritual death.
Another Thesis That Supports the Argument That Meaning Is Legit for Curing Us of the Existential Argument Could be Based on the Following:
Meaning does exist and is the result of the following:
1. Boundaries: the opposite of concupiscence and reckless nihilism
2. Core Values: they produce our identity; if you shot me for a million dollars and "got away with it," you'd be unhappy because killing violates your core values and as such you violate your identity and "who you are." Who you are, your identity, gives you a sense of meaning.
3. Discipline: it's a muscle that gets stronger.
4. Progression. Choosing Centrifugal over Centripetal Motion
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 four compelling ways. First, we see that when we have boundaries, we veer toward meaning; when we don't, collapse under the weight of moral dissolution and self-degradation. Second, 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. Third, we find that discpline empowers us so that when we learn discipline we are more happy and when we are undisciplined we often face the abyss of despair. Fourth, we have a universal hunger for centrifugal motion, moving outward toward a positive transformation. In contrast, we shudder with despair and anxiety at the prospect of living a centripetal existence, one defined by impotence and stagnation.
In-class activity: Break down the refutation and defense thesis into their parts and decide which one superior.
Part One. Is All Meaning Equal?
One. We’re all looking for meaning to transform us radically. It is universal that we hunger for change. But consider consumerism and the case of someone who buys an expensive overcoat:
In the famous, other-worldly short story by Nikolai Gogol, “The Overcoat,” the main character, Akaky Akakievich, a lonely anti-social clerk whose eccentricities and social inappropriateness suggest a severe case of Asperger syndrome, lives a life of self-imposed isolation. He has no friends, no love, no interaction with the community. He spends all his time copying documents to a degree of pathological obsession so severe that he takes work home and uses his tedious copying as form of refuge and solace. Living in destitution, he walks the cold windy streets of St. Petersburg in a coat so frail and tattered that his tailor cannot mend it. It must be replaced with a new overcoat that is beyond Akaky’s meager budget. But the devilish tailor persuades Akaky to see beyond his limitations and start saving for a new overcoat. In the process of saving and sacrificing for the overcoat, the nebbish Akaky finds meaning and undergoes cataclysmic psychological change, transforming from a depressed nobody to a self-confident being. His newfound bearing becomes like one who has successfully graduated from one of Viktor Frankl’s logotherapy sessions. We read:
From that time forth his existence seemed to become, in some way, fuller, as if he were married, or as if some other man lived in him, as if, in fact, he were not alone, and some pleasant friend had consented to travel along life's path with him, the friend being no other than the cloak, with thick wadding and a strong lining incapable of wearing out. He became more lively, and even his character grew firmer, like that of a man who has made up his mind, and set himself a goal. From his face and gait, doubt and indecision, all hesitating and wavering traits disappeared of themselves. Fire gleamed in his eyes, and occasionally the boldest and most daring ideas flitted through his mind. . . .
In other words, Akaky’s commitment to an ideal higher than himself makes him reborn and he lives a life full of meaning. Or does he? Without oversimplifying the symbolic meaning of the overcoat, which contains layers of contradictory meanings, on one level the overcoat does represent a man’s identity connecting with a consumer product and in the process his personality transforming from the power of that product, however imaginary that power may be. This of course is the essence of so many advertisements, which promise dramatic self-transformation. Indeed, Akaky is transformed, but has he really found meaning? And if he has, is his meaning as legitimate as the selfish billionaire who, inspired by some sort of Dickensian nightmare complete with chilling ghosts from past, present, and future, and wakes up resolved to become a philanthropist?
Two. Dangerous Ideologies Give Evil People “Meaning”
And what about the “meaning” found by the unflattering portraits of those zealous idealists in Eric Hoffer’s classic The True Believer? Therein Hoffer analyzes the types of people who find meaning in extreme political and religious programs. These are the losers and misfits of society, mediocrities straining for relevance; shrill fanatics with nothing to lose so they jump on some bandwagon or other promising revolution and massive societal change. Some of these fanatics are more dangerous than others. For example, some resort to suicide bombings in the name of their faith and some commit torture, massacres and outright genocide such as the Nazis and the Khmer Rhouge, to name a couple. Some joined these groups of coercion, but others did so with the sincere belief that they had found a worthy ideal that gave them meaning, even those who in the name of their God burned the innocent at the stake because they believed these poor souls were witches. Have killers, setting the innocent aflame, found meaning and if so is their meaning equal to everyone else’s?
Three. In Addition to Different Qualities of Meaning, Good to Bad, There Are Also Degrees of Meaning
Clearly, people are driven by all sorts of insane chimeras and delusions that they may interpret for themselves as constituting meaning. Also, there is probably some sort of a Meaning Scale.
Meaning As Common Sense
I imagine there are many healthy-minded people who find sufficient meaning raising their families and do so with a modicum of a good attitude. They may have never sunk to the depths of despair and may have never struggled with existential issues, yet their lives are admirable and, yes, their lives are full of meaning. But is this meaning as high on the scale as other, more dramatic types of meaning? It seems when we discuss people who have found meaning, the kind that inspires books and films, there must be a certain character arc: The individual descends into evil, crime, despair or indescribable suffering of some sort and finds redemption and transcendence. It’s these more dramatic, more extreme character arcs that appeal to us and it is these people we place higher on the Meaning Scale.
Four. For Frankl there is an absolute moral code.
We see an absolute code of morality and of meaning in Viktor Frankl’s book. For one, he uses an absolute moral basis to divide the world’s two “races”: The decent and the indecent. A “meaning” based on one human’s cruelty toward another is no meaning at all. Therefore, Frankl isn’t arguing that any absolute meaning is acceptable. Cleary, the kind of “meaning” that Akaky experiences after saving for his overcoat is not the kind of meaning Viktor Frankl described. Nor is the “meaning” the followers of Pol Pot, Jim Jones, and Hitler find.
To have true meaning, we must flourish
Frankl is arguing that there is a specific criterion for meaning that conforms to human flourishing, the kind he experienced and the kind that he saw in others in the camps.
To flourish means to blossom, to reach one’s potential, to live the good life. But while he would agree that humans should flourish, he would not be dogmatic about how get change our lives in order that we flourish.
Five. Frankl does not impose a One Size Fits All definition of meaning
Teaching Mean’s Search for Meaning does not give us an absolute meaning. Frankl writes that “the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour.” He also argues that in his particular type of therapy, logotherapy, it is up to the patient to decide whether he should interpret his life task as being responsible to society or to his own conscience.”
Six. Finding our own meaning will inevitably result in intellectual warfare
And he goes on to write that “Logotherapy is neither teaching nor preaching.” The logotherapist must help the patient find the truth from within himself. As a result of people finding their own meaning, there will be different, contrary meanings. Living according to one’s convictions will lead to, at the very least, intellectual warfare. Yes, perhaps most of us can agree that we should flourish as human beings, that flourishing is essential to finding meaning. But how we get there is another matter. We will find that not all meaning is equal. There is huge disagreement as to how to arrive at a life of meaning.
Seven. Different paths to meaning lead to different prescriptions
But how we get there is another matter. We will find that not all meaning is equal. There is huge disagreement as to how to arrive at a life of meaning. There are religious writers, such as Peter Kreeft and others, who will prescribe one method and there are nonreligious writes, or I should say anti-religious writers, like Sam Harris and others who will prescribe another, contrary method to finding meaning.
To complicate the matter of meaning, Frankl says that we don’t choose meaning; it’s the other way around: Meaning chooses us. One could argue that Peter Kreeft was “called” to write his books in defense of the God of his faith, but one could also argue that Sam Harris was called to save people from the dangers of religion. And then there is Bart Ehrman, a former Christian who had a long, arduous “deconversion,” and now feels called to write books about his deconversion and why it matters. And then there is Cat Stevens, raised by a Greek Orthodox father and a Swedish Lutheran mother, who converted to Islam. The doctrine behind his meaning conflicts with Peter Kreeft’s, Sam Harris’ and Bart Ehrman’s and on and on we could go.
You Must Find Meaning Inside Yourself Or Perish
Man’s Search for Meaning, therefore, does not prescribe moral absolutes or dogmas. It encourages to find the truth from within ourselves and to have the courage of our convictions, our sense of purpose, our sense of belonging, and our sense of goodness. You must reproduce these convictions within yourself or perish.
Part Two. Why Can’t Meaning be Served to Us on a Silver Platter?
One. Kafka’s famous quote. When I was nineteen perusing several Franz Kafka books at my university library I came across this quote: “Truth is what every man needs in order to live, but can obtain or purchase from no one. Each man must reproduce it for himself from within, otherwise he must perish. Life without truth is not possible. Truth is perhaps life itself.” Manly years later I’d read something attributed to Jesus in the a newly found Gospel quoted in Elaine Pagels’ Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas: "If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you."
Two.Meaning cannot be delivered to us in a package neatly wrapped with a bow on top.
We are not according to Frankl to search for meaning in the abstract. Nor are we to derive meaning and “moral exhortation” from a master, a guru, or a therapist, or some other authority figure who dictates what is best for us. The dangers of looking for meaning outside ourselves are several, not the least of which we too often abnegate responsibility for our own decisions and never mature as a result; we find that embracing doctrines may make sense to us intellectually but not give us the power to change; and that if the authority later changes and contradicts his or her doctrine, the very one we came to embrace, we will be left feeling betrayed and lost and find ourselves looking for some other guru to take the responsibility of finding meaning for us.
Three. Frankl and logotherapy: Being Responsible for Our Meaning Is Part of Finding Meaning. We Can't Be Spoon-Fed
He argues that we must understand for ourselves what our responsibilities are. In the realm of therapy, specifically logotherapy, Frankl writes:
Logotherapy tries to make the patient fully aware of his own responsibleness; therefore, it must leave to him the option for what, to what, or to whom he understands himself to be responsible. That is why a logotherapist is the least tempted of all psychotherapists to impose value judgments on his patients, for he will never permit the patient to pass to the doctor the responsibility of judging.
Four. No one can rescue us but ourselves: This principle that the patient must find his own meaning, that he is responsible for defining his own meaning and his ensuing behavior is the central argument of psychotherapist Sheldon B. Kopp’s If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him! As he explains the dynamics between the patient, the “pilgrim,” and the therapist, the “guru,” he warns that the patient’s first instinct is to be a child and let the therapist, acting as a parent, take control of the patient’s problems and that if the therapist were to do this he would be perpetuating the patient’s core problem, of never maturing, of never developing, of never emerging from his childhood fantasy of being rescued. As Kopp writes:
And so, it is not astonishing that, though the patient enters therapy insisting that he wants to change, more often than not, what he really wants is to remain the same and to get the therapist to make him feel better. His goal is to become a more effective neurotic, so that he may have what he wants without risking getting into anything new. He prefers the security of known misery to the misery of unfamiliar territory.
The patient appears resistant, then, to taking responsibility for his own life, for his own actions, for seeking his own change, even if change is ostensibly why he is in therapy. His real motives, however, are to remain a child and throw the responsibility of decision making on the therapist. As Kopp continues: “Given this all too human failing, the beginning pilgrim-patient may approach the therapist like a small child going to a good parent whom he insists must take care of him. It is as if he comes to the office saying, ‘My world is broken, and you have to fix it.’” Moreover, the patient wishes to be saved by an Absolute Truth packaged neatly and easy to understand in all its parts. As Kopp writes: “The seeker comes in hope of finding something definite, something permanent, something unchanging upon which to depend. He is offered instead the reflection that life is just what it seems to be, a changing, ambiguous, ephemeral mixed bag. It may often be discouraging, but it is ultimately worth it, because that’s all there is.” From Kopp’s perspective, we are not rescued by any definite truths that may be handed to us and even if such truths were explained to us they would not rescue us from our problems. Nor would they give us the power to change.
Example of a Thesis Regarding Absolute and Relative Meaning
While I love and admire VF's heroism, I reject his argument for absolute meaning in favor of relative meaning. First, absolute meaning is not realistic and may trap us into the either/or fallacy of meaning (my life is absolute meaning or it is nothing). It's better to approach meaning from a realistic point of view, not an ideological one. A realistic point of view says it's okay to not have meaning sometimes. It's okay to suffer the existential vacuum here and there. Life is not a constant rich, meaty steak sandwich of meaning every second of our life. That's unrealistic.
Second, we can build our moral and intellectual character toward achieving Life's 8 Essential Needs in a way that creates relative meaning, which is to say, that our life of values and personal growth is more meaningful than a life of moral dissolution. In this regard, we agree with Frankl, at least to some degree.
Third, we need not be meaning absolutists to hunger for Mystery, Enchantment, and More as evidenced by our creative and artistic pursuits. Being creative is not the same as being an ideological moral absolutist.
Fourth, we can devote our lives to some meaningful pursuits yet still experience despair, self-doubt and the exisential vacuum as part of the natural human condition. The human condition, as I state in my first point, is not always full of meaning. It's often absurd and pointless and it's okay, even natural, at times to feel that way.
Counter-Thesis That Defends Frankl:
The above writer does not embrace Frankl's definition of meaning because, through Frankl's own words, it's a life that only a tiny remnant will choose. In other words, Frankl is teaching us what the great religions have told us for centuries: That the path to hell is wide and that the path to heaven is narrow. Frankl has given us a narrow path based on self-sacrifice, not comfort and convenience.
Secondly, Frankl never proposes an absolute meaning as the writer erroneously states. Rather, Frankl argues that meaning varies from one individual to another based on particular circumstances.
Third, the argument that creativity will lead to meaning ignores the fact that our creative pursuits do not guarantee the development of our humanity.
How to Transition into Your Thesis: An Example
We love Viktor Frankl, the eloquent spokesperson for meaning. How could we not love him? He is after all a hero who risked his comfort, convenience, safety, and even his life to serve the needs of the suffering during the Holocaust. He is a saint, in fact, a rare human being worthy of our utmost love and admiration. However, his ideologically-based assertion that meaning is absolute and the cure for the existential vacuum contains certain weaknesses and fallacies that we need to address.
First of all, life cannot be one big meaty steak sandwich of meaning, filling us to the brim so that we never experience the existential vacuum. Frankl is presenting us with a dangerous either/or fallacy, what could also be called the mistake of All or Nothing. In fact, meaning is not an all or nothing affair. Life at times is senseless, absurd and meaningless and it is dangerous for us to feel guilty when we don't interpret every significant event of suffering as an occasion for meaning. But we are not entirely without meaning. Some periods of our lives will be more meaningful than others, especially as we mature and achieve greater and greater wisdom.
Second, we can reject VF's assertion that meaning is absolute and ultimate without discarding our morality. In fact, from a purely practical point of view, it is easier to be a moral and decent human being than it is to be a scoundrel and a libertine. Therefore, embracing morality is in our self-interest and gives us relative meaning. We may not have absolute meaning in the sense that VF writes about, but we can have relative meaning and for most of us relative meaning is more realistic goal than absolute meaning.
Third, while I reject that meaning is absolute and a reliable cure for the existential vacuum, I opine that we can pursue relative meaning by striving for Life's 8 Essentials, which I will elaborate on in my essay. Finally, for those who hunger for More, for the Beyond, for Mystery, for Divine Beauty, I have the answer and it is not rooted in the quest for absolute meaning or its related religious dogmas. We pursue the Beyond through the arts, through creativity, and through philosophy, which explores life's painful questions and is never so vain as to think the answers we receive will be neatly packaged and reassuringly absolute.
Part One. Cynic's Argument Against Meaning: Determinism Triumphs over Free Will
The George Carlin Factor: Hardly a day ever passes in which I do not hear a biting quote that the brilliant king of cynicism George Carlin once said during a performance: “When you’re born, you get a ticket to the freak show. When you’re born in America, you get a front-row seat.” What is Carlin telling us? He’s telling us that we’re a doomed species and the best we can do is laugh at our inevitable destruction. When I look at the human race, I often find myself agreeing with Carlin’s cynical pronouncements and the conclusions he draws from them. But at the same time I find myself drawn to Viktor Frankl’s very uncynical Man’s Search for Meaning, which chronicles his survival in the Nazi concentration camps and his observations of the ways we exalt or degrade our humanity in the face of abject cruelty, suffering and evil.
Rodney Dangerfield Factor. When I was in my early twenties, I read a newspaper interview with the comedian Rodney Dangerfield who said you can’t really change who you are. “You never really change. You’re born a certain way and that’s it.” I remember immediately agreeing with him. We are creatures molded at birth and we cannot escape who we are fundamentally. So what’s it matter if we read Man’s Search for Meaning or not? Why do we give a damn about our choices when the end result of who we are is going to be the same?
Sturgeon's Law, which states that 95% of everything in life is crap.
Counterargument
The Viktor Frankl Factor: Frankl bore witness to some of the most abjectly cruel freak shows on earth. He almost died many times in the camps, he suffered the loss of loved ones, including his father, his mother, his brother, and his wife, and he experienced the constant humiliations at the hands of sadistic brutes, “insults” that he described as hurting him worse than the physical pain, yet for all his suffering he would not give the Nazis and his other oppressors the victory of making him evil in their image. Even as other inmates surrendered all their scruples and morals, living like animals so that they might survive in the camps, Frankl believed in preserving his moral code and he was steadfast in his compassion for the victims of evil. Tapping on an inner strength that became more and more prominent during his captivity, he aided others, using his training as a psychiatrist to help people gain their bodily strength and spirit so that they may live to see the outside of those camps and, more importantly, so that they might strengthen their humanity through a life of purpose and meaning.
The Nietzsche Factor: Free will is possible but only if we have a purpose. He says, “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.” Finding meaning and purpose in the midst of life’s cruelty and evil is what Frankl calls “Tragic Optimism.”
Free Will Is Limited and Finite: The free will/determinism debate on both sides is grievously in error, constituting an either/or fallacy: Both positions appear to be entrenched in the absolute idea, wrongly, of free will or determinism. But in fact there are only degrees of free will and determinism and we tend to progress from one pole to the other. We can see this spectrum in the realm of morality. Many years ago I saw a TV program about a corrupt police officer, interviewed from prison, who explained how easy it eventually became for him to steal money during drug busts. He said at first the stealing stung his conscience and he had ulcers and bouts of anxieties from his corrupt behavior. To show the growing effects of his criminal acts on his soul during the interview, he grabbed a sheet of crisp paper and crumpled it. He explained that doing wrong in the beginning was like crumpling the paper. There was a violence to the harsh crushing noise of the action, but after dozens upon dozens of times the paper became tissue thin and the action did not grate on him anymore. It seems in the beginning he had more free will to not steal but as he surrendered to his cravings for easy money, he numbed his conscience and lost more and more willpower, eventually becoming a slave to his own thievery. Thus he traveled from having an abundance of free will to a scarcity of it, until he was at the mercy of determinism. A similar case can be made for an adulterer. He may at first be pained by guilt for his infidelity, maybe even the fourth and fifth time. But after dozens, perhaps hundreds of times, he becomes numb, calloused, and debauched, and thus he loses his free will.
Enjoying self-discipline is a form of free will: We can journey from determinism to free will, going from a weaker to a stronger state. Take the man whose doctor just told him he needs to lose fifty pounds or he may soon die of a stroke or a heart attack. The overweight man knows he cannot resist his junk food temptations but that he can control his environment, so he learns how to keep his kitchen full of healthy foods and he learns how to prepare them in a way that makes him enjoy his nutritious meals. Thus, he misses his favorite junk foods less. As he loses weight and feels better, he feels motivated to stick to his new program. He was once mired in the self-loathing and the malaise of compulsive junk food eating, but he has taken control of his life in a way that makes him feel better about himself. He has in effect journeyed from determinism to free will. Another reason to agree with Frankl’s principle that we are responsible for our actions is that most parents believe in disciplining their children. To discipline someone means to teach someone, a child or a novice, how to behave in a way that produces positive results, which in turn become the reward for motivating good behavior. If you teach a child how to make her bed and how to enjoy the advantages of keeping a clean, well organized room, you have given her a lesson on how to impose her will over chaos to her favor. As she matures, she internalizes these teachings, preferring a clean, organized room to a messy, chaotic one, and she has what is called self-discipline.
Free-will is more difficult to choose than stagnation: Sometimes we don’t take action, not because we cannot, but because we will not. The reasons for not taking action are fairly compelling. Doing what it takes to get out of a bad situation can often entail immense suffering. I had a student, for example, who came here from Japan. She lived with her American boyfriend in a nice Beverly Hills apartment and she confided with me that she no longer loved him as a woman loves a man but as a mother loves a child. She wanted to move out, but it was difficult to do so in mid-semester and to most likely live in a less desirable place. And worse, she did not have the heart to crush him with the truth about her feelings for him. But do so she did. She suffered a lot upfront, as it were, but saved herself, and the man she had been living with, a lot more grief they would have afflicted them had she dragged the relationship out. I admire her courage. The pain to make such a move reminds me of a TV show I watched as a child,Adam 12. In one episode, paramedics were called to save a man who was being crushed by a fallen telephone pole. The victim of the accident was smiling with relief as the pole weighed on his ribs and said, “It’s funny, it doesn’t hurt that much.” But one of the paramedics had bad news: While the pain wasn’t so bad now, he explained, it would become unbearable when the fire department crew lifted the pole off his ribs. Whenever we need to unshackle ourselves from a bad situation or a self-destructive habit, the pain is as overwhelming as having a telephone pole being lifted off our ribs. In the long-run we’re better off, of course, but the immediate pain is so unbearable that many of us choose to stay right where we are. As we slowly die under whatever it is that is crushing us, we lose more and more of our free will until our condition becomes inevitable.
Part Two. What Is Frankl’s Ultimatum?
Be worthy of your suffering. In the news, we read of a man in Albany, New York, who was arrested for throwing a Molotov cocktail inside a Taco Bell drive-through window. His reason? He was enraged earlier that there wasn't enough meat in his chalupa. As imperfect as my life is, my life has relatively speaking more meaning than Mr. Chalupa Man.
One. Ultimatum: Either we must be worthy of our suffering, or we will despise our lives. For Frankl, there is no inbetween: Either our hearts are courageous, giving, and compassionate, or they are cowardly, bitter, and pessimistic. The purpose in life is to journey from the latter to the former.
Two. Example in the book: Throughout Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl urges us over and over to be worthy of our suffering. He writes about a man in the camps who eventually saw his life as a sacrifice so that his loved ones could live and knowing that his death would benefit others, his death and suffering gave him meaning. In another example, Frankl talks to a rabbi who is overcome with bitterness and self-pity over the death of his children who died in the concentration camps. Frankl discovers that the rabbi’s real grief is that he feels his life lacks virtue, the kind that he knew would bring his children to heaven, would make him unworthy of meeting them in the afterlife. And that was the meaning Frankl helped the rabbi find: to devote his life to being worthy of someday joining his children in heaven.
Three. 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.
Four. To be worthy of our suffering, we must see ourselves as being needed in the world, not as primarily consumers of pleasure.
Ninety-nine percent of the human race does not want to embrace suffering in the service to the world, but as Frankl writes: “The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity—even under the most difficult circumstances—to add a deeper meaning to his life. It may remain brave, dignified and unselfish. Or in the bitter fight for self-preservation he may forget his human dignity and become no more than an animal.”
Five. Choosing the courageous life, one that makes us worthy of our suffering, is rare:
Frankl has no illusions about the difficulty of choosing a meaningful, brave, dignified, unselfish life over a shameful, undignified one.
Most prisoners in the concentration camps took the wide road to hell, surrendering to base self-preservation and apathy while only a small percentage traveled the narrow road to heaven and found meaning. As Frankl writes:
It is true that only a few people are capable of reaching such high moral standards. Of the prisoners only a few kept their full inner liberty and obtained those values which their suffering afforded, but even one such example is sufficient proof that man’s inner strength may raise him above his outward fate. Such men are not only in concentration camps. Everywhere man is confronted with fate, with the chance of achieving something through his own suffering.
Frankl makes his ultimatum clear. We can choose a life of empty despair or one of meaning and most choose the former. It is the choice, we can safely infer, of the masses the hordes who distract themselves with bread and circus.
Part Three. The Bare Existence Vs. the Common Life
In the book's opening narrative, Frankl shows people being stripped of everything, their possessions and identity, and being forced to find out who they really are.
Steps Toward a Bare Existence
Selection process ( based on who's healthy and who's not) in the concentration camps pits human vs. human. Everyone is competing against everyone else to live. There is only one god for many and that god is death and the only thing to say to death is "Not today." People did all they could, no matter how ruthless, to say to death, "Not today, Death."
Morals become irrelevant: "The best of us did not return."
There are 3 phases in the camps.
The first is shock. How can this really be happening? This is surreal. This is a nightmare from which I must wake up. In this state, there is the "delusion of reprieve." We believe we will be rescued and that the evil will stop.
In the state of shock, we cling to our former selves, or try to, and we go into denial over what is happening to us.
Gradually, we see that our attempts are feeble, ridiculous even, and we are "overcome by a grim sense of humor. We knew that we had nothing to lose except our ridiculously naked lives."
It's like being told the world is going to end on Saturday and saying, "It can't end Saturday because my eBay auction isn't over until Sunday."
As we accept our crazy condition, we develop a cold curiosity as if we were studying a horror movie from afar.
None of these reactions are abnormal. In fact, an abnormal reaction to an abnormal event is NORMAL.
In the second phase, the prisoner becomes hardened and numb to suffering, his own, and others'. He develops a condition known as apathy. He no longer cares about anything. He "surrounds himself in a necessary protective shell."
The third reaction occurs after release from the camps. Frankl call is "depersonalization."
People become disaffected, emotionally withdrawn. Some become angry at the world and say, "Look what the world has done to me. It's my right to return the favor. I shall exact revenge on the world." From thereon, Frankl started his life afresh.
Other "moral deformities" included bitterness and disillusionment.
Many become bitter because people from their old world could not imagine their hell and assumed everyone suffered the same hell. Their townspeople's failure of imagination and empathy sent many of the freed prisoners into seething bitterness.
Disillusionment was with the universe or with fate itself, that we lived in a world in which senseless suffering without limits could be allowed. This could make many reject the idea of a God.
For Frankl, his faith in God intensified.
Frankl is stripped of everything, stripped to a naked existence. After he is freed he wanders in the wilderness, and he calls out to God from his "narrow prison." And God answers him from the "freedom of space."
Can we believe in God in such an aftermath? Whether we can or not, one thing for sure: Being stripped to our naked existence, we lose our facade, our pretensions. Either we become primitives, animals, survivalists, throwing morals out the window, or, like Frankl, we become our Higher Selves, courageous, meaning-filled souls.
Most of us are not stripped to our bare existence. Most of us lead the common life.
The Common Life, a Life Without Meaning: Characteristics
One. Coveting others' achievements and possessions. The result of this coveting is that we're never happy with what we have and we resent with great envy the idea that others enjoy life's niceties more than we do.
Adorning ourselves with pretentiousness and fakery. We want to project a pleasing image to others to convince them that we are happy even though we are not. In fact we are miserable and lonely, yet we continue to project a facade that tells a different story about us. This story or facade is what we obsess over while we distract ourselves from the hell within us.
Self-esteem inflation and other forms of self-deception. There is a huge gap between our inflated self-image and the rather pedestrian talents and competence. Studies show a few people full of anxiety and doubt have the highest talent and competence, not the inflated self-esteemers.
Fondness for BS over the truth. Most people BS so much they don't even have a model of being real and honest so they don't even know how to be real.
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
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.
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.
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.
Frankl's message is that we can no longer be children being rescued by others' definitions of meaning.
Vary Your Sentences with Subordination and Coordination
We use subordination to show cause and effect.
To create subordinate clauses, we must use a subordinate conjunction:
The essential ingredient in a complex sentence is the subordinate conjunction:
after although as because before even if even though if in order that
once provided that rather than since so that than that though unless
until when whenever where whereas wherever whether while why
I workout too much. I have tenderness in my elbow.
Because I workout too much, I suffer tenderness in my elbow.
My elbow hurts. I’m working out.
Even though my elbow hurts, I’m working out.
We use coordination to show equal rank of ideas. To combine sentences with coordination we use FANBOYS (for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so)
The calculus class has been cancelled. We will have to do something else.
The calculus class has been cancelled, so we will have to do something else.
I want more pecan pie. They only have apple pie.
I want more pecan pie, but they only have apple pie.
Both subordination and coordination combine sentences into smoother, clearer sentences.
The following four sentences are made smoother and clearer with the help of subordination:
McMahon felt gluttonous. He inhaled five pizzas. He felt his waist press against his denim waistband in a cruel, unforgiving fashion. He felt an acute ache in his stomach.
Because McMahon felt gluttonous, he inhaled five pizzas upon which he felt his waist press against his denim waistband resulting in an acute stomachache.
Another Example
Joe ate too much heavily salted popcorn. The saltiness made him thirsty. He consumed several gallons of water before bedtime. He was up going to the bathroom all night. He got a bad night’s sleep. He performed terribly during his job interview.
Due to his foolish consumption of salted popcorn, Joe was so thirty he drank several gallons of water before bedtime, which caused him to go to the bathroom all night, interfering with his night’s sleep and causing him to do terribly on his job interview.
Another Example
Bob dropped his peanut butter sandwich in the tiger’s enclosure. He leaned over the fence to reach for his sandwich. He fell over the fence. A tiger approached Bob. The zookeeper ran between the stupid zoo customer and the wild beast. The zookeeper tore his rotator cuff.
After Bob dropped his peanut butter sandwich in the tiger’s enclosure, he leaned over the fence to recover his sandwich and fell into the enclosure during which time he was approached by a hungry tiger, forcing the nearby zookeeper to run between Bob and wild beast. During the struggle, the zookeeper tore his rotator cuff.
Don’t Do Subordination Overkill
After Bob dropped his peanut butter sandwich in the tiger’s enclosure, he leaned over the fence to recover his sandwich and fell into the enclosure during which time he was approached by a hungry tiger forcing the nearby zookeeper to run between Bob and the wild beast in such a manner that the zookeeper tore his rotator cuff, which resulted in a prolonged disability leave and the loss of his job, a crisis that compelled the zookeeper to file a lawsuit against Bob for financial damages.
Correct the faulty parallelism by rewriting the sentences below.
One. Parenting toddlers is difficult for many reasons, not the least of which is that toddlers contradict everything you ask them to do; they have giant mood swings, and all-night tantrums.
Two. You should avoid all-you-can-eat buffets: They encourage gluttony; they feature fatty, over-salted foods and high sugar content.
Three. I prefer kettlebell training at home than the gym because of the increased privacy, the absence of loud “gym” music, and I’m able to concentrate more.
Four. To write a successful research paper you must adhere to the exact MLA format, employ a variety of paragraph transitions, and writing an intellectually rigorous thesis.
Five. The difficulty of adhering to the MLA format is that the rules are frequently being updated, the sheer abundance of rules you have to follow, and to integrate your research into your essay.
Six. You should avoid watching “reality shows” on TV because they encourage a depraved form of voyeurism; they distract you from your own problems, and their brain-dumbing effects.
Seven. I’m still fat even though I’ve tried the low-carb diet, the Paleo diet, the Rock-in-the-Mouth diet, and fasting every other day.
Eight. To write a successful thesis, you must have a compelling topic, a sophisticated take on that topic, and developing a thesis that elevates the reader’s consciousness to a higher level.
Nine. Getting enough sleep, exercising daily, and the importance of a positive attitude are essential for academic success.
Ten. My children never react to my calm commands or when I beg them to do things.
Essay based on Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl: Argumentation, Refutation
Choice 1: Support, refute, or complicate the assertion that Frankl Lite is a more compelling orientation than Full Potency Frankl. Use Toulmin model. The essay should be 1,000 words with a Works Cited page of no fewer than three sources.
Choice 2: Support, refute, or complicate the assertion that the lifestyle described in Joseph Epstein's essay "The Perpetual Adolescent" is antithetical to the kind of meaning that Viktor Frankl defines in his book Man's Search for Meaning. Use the Toulmin essay model.
Choice 3: Support, refute, or complicate the assertion that logotherapy is vastly superior than traditional psychotherapy for achieving the kind of meaning Frankl defines in his book Man's Search for Meaning.
In a 1,000-word essay (4 pages), address the following in an argumentative essay:
Option One
Develop a thesis that argues for "Frankl Lite" or "Full Potency Frankl" in a 4-page essay. Include no fewer than 3 research sources for your Works Cited page.
Most of us don't pursue meaning in the full sense that requires ideals and sacrifice to a higher cause. Rather, we pursue Frankl Lite:
You don't need "meaning" so much as you need the basic human needs:
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 narcissism.
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.
Frankl says we need meaning; otherwise, we will languish in the "existential vacuum."
What is the "existential vacuum"?
It's a wasted life and the sick feeling of emptiness that comes from knowing deep down you're living a wasted life. If you're spending more than 5 minutes a day on Facebook playing stupid games like Bubble Shooter, Trollface Launch, or Whack Your Boss, you're most definitely wasting your life and therefore languishing inside the existential vacuum.
It's the anxiety you suffer when in the back of your mind you know you're wasting your life and that life is passing you by.
A wasted life is mindless reptition of the same mistakes over and over again. And this is the definition of insanity.
Some couples break up and re-unite for ten years until they finally get married to get a divorce.
Americans typically go on 10 diets in a lifetime and get fatter every time but this failure doesn't stop them from going on a new diet.
A wasted life is dedicated to materialism, a form of egotism.
A wasted life is dedicated to superficial distractions.
Maybe I shouldn't teach this book. Not all the time, but sometimes I enjoy the existential vacuum.
Louis C.K. says he has chosen the existential vacuum over meaning:
"I drive an expensive car. I could sell it, by a cheap car, and use the leftover money to feed the poor, but I don't."
Some would argue only people whose lives are rich in meaning and who totally believe in Frankl's book are qualified to teach it.
But I disagree. Sometimes a cynical, highly-flawed person makes a better teacher than the upright true believe because the cynic makes you see both sides of meaning, the cynic's disbelief and the acolyte's belief. An acolyte is a follower of a doctrine.
Full Potency Frankl Means We Overcome Fear
Examing the Role of Fear as an Obstacle to Meaning
A rich and mighty Persian once walked in his garden with one of his servants. The servant cried that he had just encountered Death, who had threatened him. He begged his master to give him his fastest horse so that he could make haste and flee to Teheran, which he could reach that same evening. The master consented and the servant galloped off on the horse. On returning to his house the master himself met Death, and questioned him, “Why did you terrify and threaten my servant?” “I did not threaten him; I only showed surprise in still finding him here when I planned to meet him tonight in Teheran,” said Death.
What does the parable say?
Awareness of death and the challenge of death make us panic. Death is scary in its own right, but so are its implications: As Tolstoy said, "Death demands that we change our life in such a way that death cannot strip the meaning of it." That demand overwhelms many people. The limitations imposed by death also overwhelm many people.
Overwhelmed, many run from death. And it is the running from death that is, paradoxically, the running TO death.
Ways to Improve Your Logical Thinking
Study the Templates of Argumentation
While Frankl’s arguments for meaning are convincing, they fail to consider . . .
While Frankl’s supports make convincing arguments, they must also consider . . .
These arguments, rather than being convincing, instead prove . . .
While these authors agree with Frankl on point X, in my opinion . . .
Although it is often true that . . .
While I concede that my opponents make a compelling case for point X, their main argument collapses underneath a barrage of . . .
While I see many good points in my opponent’s essay, I am underwhelmed by his . . .
While my opponent makes some cogent points regarding A, B, and C, his overall argument fails to convince when we consider X, Y, and Z.
My opponent makes many provocative and intriguing points. However, his arguments must be dismissed as fallacious when we take into account W, X, Y, and Z.
While the author’s points first appear glib and fatuous, a closer look at his polemic reveals a convincing argument that . . .
Example of a Concession Followed by a Refutation by a Frankl-Detractor
Viktor Frankl is a highly intelligent, sympathetic figure whose meditations on meaning and adopting a heroic attitude toward our suffering have resonated with millions of people all over the world. However, once you strip away the sympathetic surroundings of the book—Frankl surviving in a concentration camp and his helping of those who were fighting for their lives—the book’s value is negligible evidenced by the book’s many weaknesses.
For one, the message that we should adopt a positive attitude life, rather than a negative one, is little more than a self-evident truism, almost a statement of fact, and hardly deserves to be venerated as some special insight into the human condition.
Secondly, Frankl’s assertion that we all must choose our own meaning is yet another cliché tantamount to the platitude that we should follow our bliss.
Finally, the notion that we either live a life of meaning that makes us worthy of our suffering or we live a life of emptiness that inevitably will afflict us with a life of despair and regrets is contention that is both over-simplistic and fallacious, as it takes a page from any compendium of logical fallacies, namely, the either-or fallacy.
In fact, we do not live in such an either-or world. Our sense of meaning, or our lack of it, is constantly shifting and relative, so that it would be more valuable to talk about a continuously shifting meaning spectrum. The absolutes contained in Frankl’s dogmatic work fail to address that complexity of the human condition, yet Frankl gets a pass because he is such a justifiably adored figure.
The Writer’s Rhetoric (how he presents his argument)
He begins by agreeing that Frankl is a sympathetic and intelligent figure (para. 1)
His thesis ends paragraph 1: However, once you strip away the sympathetic surroundings of the book—Frankl surviving in a concentration camp and his helping of those who were fighting for their lives—the book’s value is negligible evidenced by the book’s many weaknesses.
In paragraph 2, the writer shows the three main supports for his claim:
Support One: For one, the message that we should adopt a positive attitude life, rather than a negative one, is little more than a self-evident truism, almost a statement of fact, and hardly deserves to be venerated as some special insight into the human condition.
Support Two: Secondly, Frankl’s assertion that we all must choose our own meaning is yet another cliché tantamount to the platitude that we should follow our bliss.
Support Three: Finally, the notion that we either live a life of meaning that makes us worthy of our suffering or we live a life of emptiness that inevitably will afflict us with a life of despair and regrets is contention that is both over-simplistic and fallacious, as it takes a page from any compendium of logical fallacies, namely, the either-or fallacy.
The writer reinforces his final piece of evidence by elaborating on his final support that Frankl’s “either you have meaning or don’t view” is over-simplistic:
In fact, we do not live in such an either-or world. Our sense of meaning, or our lack of it, is constantly shifting and relative, so that it would be more valuable to talk about a continuously shifting meaning spectrum. The absolutes contained in Frankl’s dogmatic work fail to address that complexity of the human condition, yet Frankl gets a pass because he is such a justifiably adored figure.
Gathering Our Data to Refute Frankl’s Opponentin a Refutation Response
Frankl’s opponent who confidently asserts that Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning is an overrated affair sodden with cheap clichés, truisms, and glittering generalities appears to be so infatuated with his own rhetoric and Frankl-bashing that he fails to see that his argumentation stumbles at the gates, crashing with a myriad of logical fallacies and other egregious writing errors, including Straw Man, over-simplification, and, perhaps worst of all, gross misinterpretations of Frankl’s key points.
Our Frankl-detractor’s first assertion immediately raises our eyebrows: “For one, the message that we should adopt a positive attitude toward life, rather than a negative one, is little more than a self-evident truism, almost a statement of fact, and hardly deserves to be venerated as some special insight into the human condition.” Our detractor has failed to accurately summarize Frankl’s claim. Contrary to the “positive thinking” made popular by business guru Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, Frankl is talking less about “positive thinking” and more about the courage to find meaning, not in consumerism, popularity, or material success, but in embracing suffering and trying to address the needs that the suffering of the world demands us. It appears our Frankl-detractor either has not Frankl’s book or has purposely misread Frankl’s work in order to be the chest-thumping contrarian.
Equally flagrant and insufferable in its inaccuracy is our Frankl-detractor’s contention that “Frankl’s assertion that we all must choose our own meaning is yet another cliché tantamount to the platitude that we should follow our bliss.” Had our Detractor read Frankl’s book with a modicum of focus and understanding, he would know that Frankl claims we all must find meaning for ourselves; however, meaning is not a nebulously defined notion disconnected by a strong moral code. To the contrary, the principles of logotherapy—that we must act more than think, that we must find what life demands of us based on our talents and circumstances, to name a couple—is very specific. It is further the result of Frankl’s hard-fought wisdom that he acquired while enduring the concentration camps and the empirical evidence he gathered while helping patients in his practice of logotherapy.
Our Detractor’s final criticism is that Frankl is guilty of over-simplification by creating a binary world of those Who Have Meaning and those Who Don’t Have Meaning. This, too, is a gross misinterpretation of Frankl’s radical meaning tool, logotherapy, which is based on the idea that all of us are responsible for addressing our suffering as a gateway to meaning and all of us our responsible for embarking upon this Meaning Quest. Frankl has never stated that one is either in a complete state of meaning or in a complete state of non-meaning. That is the Detractor’s red herring and non sequitur that fails to address a clear understanding of logotherapy, which, if utilized accurately and correctly, is an enormous help in our search for meaning and speaks cogently to the human condition. Our Detractor, sadly, is so caught up in his bloated rhetoric and contrarianism that he has failed to see the benefits of Frankl’s wisdom.
Your Essays Becoming More Sophisticated, Elevated, and “Critical” When You Specifically Address Opposition
Victor Frankl is the author of one of the most concise personal narratives of the holocaust of the Nazi concentration camps. Frankl, who survived no less than four camps personally, uses his profound analytic mind to explore the behavior and nature of human beings. Rejecting the Freudian premise of existentialism, Frankl develops a new way of viewing humanity in the psychoanalytic discipline. As both a psychologist and neurologist, Frankl's physiological and psychological findings are synthesized into his new psychoanalytic technique called "logotherapy."
In contrast to the existentialist foundations of Freud, Frankl establishes the belief that there is meaning in the universe, especially for mankind. Man’s Search for Meaning articulates that it is this search for meaning that becomes the primary question for all:
The greatest task for any person is to find meaning in his or her life. Frankl saw three possible sources for meaning: in work (doing something significant), in love (caring for another person), and in courage during difficult times. [1]
While staying away from religious archetypes to present his theory, the core of logotherapeutic beliefs are constructed with such care that they can sit squarely on top of the foundation of either Jewish or Christian orthodoxy (or perhaps any religious context in which God is viewed as good).
Man's Search For Meaning is one of the most profound modern works I have read. Perhaps Frankl's most significant concept presented therein is his thorough and profound treatment of human suffering. Frankl does not dismiss suffering as meaningless (unlike existentialism), but places it within a triad of human experience that he says brings meaning: doing significant work, caring for others, and enduring suffering. He contends that without human thought and activity based on one or more of those three, a person will lose meaning in life and destruction (either external or internal) is sure to follow.
According to logotherapy, we can discover this meaning in life in three different ways: (1) by creating a work or doing a deed; (2) by experiencing something or encountering someone; and (3) by the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering. [2]
and
In some way, suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice [3]
The key for Frankl's thesis is the rooting of human expectation in the future, not the present. Meaning comes, he contends, by placing hopes in spiritual or earthly goals. Failing to do so will cause discouragement and loss meaning, spiraling people into trying to scratch out meaning in temporal pleasure of the day, which will eventually lead to abandonment of hope and self-destruction.
Logotherapy focuses rather on the future, that is to say, on the meanings to be fulfilled by the patient in his future. (Logotherapy, indeed, is a meaning-centered psychotherapy.)[4]
This book starts off being our hosted view into the unfathomable world of concentration camps in Nazi Germany, and the psycho-analytical understandings that Frankl comes to. But the more you read, the more you are drawn into Frankl's so thoroughly rendered understanding of suffering that the book becomes a way for us to enter into the story by Frankl's genius. Very few books come close to the profundity of human experience and, therefore, understanding that is present in this book. I can't imagine that it isn't one of the greatest writings in the last century.
Life changing!
Major Points of Kim Anthony Gentes’ essay:
Frankl’s contention that there is meaning and that our drive for meaning is our most powerful drive is in direct opposition to the world’s most influential psychoanalyst of the time, Sigmund Freud, who believed in a philosophy called existentialism, the idea that there is no meaning, that we can barely understand each other, and that we are lost in a tangle of unconscious drives that define us more than the assertion of our “free will.” For Freud, the best we could do is undergo intense analysis, discuss our past, and try to unravel the mysteries of our unconscious so we could manage our behavior better.
To support Gentes, we might say that Frankl was not teaching a cliché when he spoke of the way we embrace suffering, that in fact Frankl’s opponent has over-simplified Frankl’s message and failed to point out that Frankl’s claim, that we could find meaning through the way we approached our suffering, was a debatable and radical claim, especially in the context of Freud’s popularity.
We could elaborate on our contention that Frankl is not resorting to cheap clichés and aphorisms by pointing out that Frankl’s thesis, suffering is a source of deeper purpose, meaning, and inner peace, goes against the cultural mores of Frankl’s time: That consumer experience is the great source of pleasure and that we should avoid “stress” in order to maximize our happiness. Frankl is not saying the safe thing; he is saying the radical thing. Therefore, his claim is radical and rooted in the truth of empirical evidence.
We could further support Gentes’ and refute Frankl’s opponent by observing that Frankl’s opponent misreads Frankl’s definition of meaning as being different to all people and therefore having a meaningless definition of meaning. To the contrary, Frankl, while allowing individuals to find meaning for themselves, is very specific for laying out the logotherapy-driven path to finding meaning.
McMahon's Sample of an Intro That Frames the Debate and a Thesis Paragraph That Uses a Refutation Structure
We’ve been asked to argue if there is this thing in life called “meaning” and if this meaning is the cure for the terrifying emptiness, the “existential vacuum,” that haunts us when our lives are empty of meaning. Viktor Frankl tackles this question in his timeless classic Man’s Search for Meaning and while his book’s theme is difficult to comprehend and while there are many flaws in arguments that defend meaning, Frankl’s argument that meaning must be embraced to be saved from the despair of the “existential vacuum” is compelling. One effective way to examine the compelling nature of Frankl’s argument is to study intelligent attempts to dismiss the existence of meaning and argue that Frankl’s book addresses those refutations. The most compelling reasons to not believe in meaning are that meaning is relative to the point that to discuss it as a definitive, absolute, “one size fits all” entity is an absurdity; that while some lives, like Frankl’s, are rich in meaning, they don’t choose their meaningful life; rather it is the result of hard-wiring and upbringing so that the idea of “choosing” meaning is to some degree an absurdity; that the chaos, evil and senseless suffering that dominate the world evidence there is no meaning, only absurdity; that a meaningful life is not about meaning per se but, with the risk of relying on semantics, more about attitude and character, so that to argue for meaning misses the point: we should argue about our moral development and attitude and even these things can’t be entirely chosen.
The above refutations against meaning are compelling, but as I will show, Frankl’s masterful book addresses each point and makes a convincing case that there are two kinds of lives we must choose: one that is full of emptiness and despair; the other that is full of meaning and contentment.
The Problem with Meaning Is That the Word Is "Loaded" and We Dismiss All Meaning When We See False Meaning
Examples of False Meaning
People who are delusional and commit acts of evil in the name of an ideology that gives them "meaning" like the white American settlers who wanted to be free from European tyranny but then relied on slavery to fuel their economy under the justification of white supremacy.
People who are vain posers and feel they have "meaning" when they post Facebook photos of themselves "helping the poor" for a weekend.
People who are eager to talk and write about their "meaningful" doctrines but don't live what they speak and are odious hypocrites.
People who find "meaning" supporting their family when in fact they wake up every morning and kiss the giant butt of Blind Ambition. They're superficial.
What Is Real Meaning?
Moral results
Transformative (learned helplessness and self-pity transform into courage and self-reliance, for example)
Redemptive (similar to above)
Meaning must be lived, not spoken
But do we all achieve "Power Meaning" like Frankl or relative meaning through the acquistion of the 8 Basic Human Needs?
Meaning Is a Learned Behavior and Meaning Comes from Moral Character Development
We are not born with meaning. We are born blank, a tabula rasa.
We need to learn boundaries to find meaning. A film about boundaries and the lack thereof is Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory starring Gene Wilder. We see in both the film and VF's book that without boundaries we become animals:
August Gloop
Veruca Salt
MF
Stallion
Either we learn and emulate the common life of hedonic pleasures, vanity, and envy, or we learn and emulate the life of moral character, which consists of the following:
1. respect
2. integrity
3. dignity
4. honesty
5. caritas, charity and compassion for others
6. sacrifice
7. fortitude
8. listening for meaning, asking what life demands of us
9. wisdom: being wise enough to see the emptiness and danger of hedonic or hedonistic quests and reject the common life of vanity, envy, and hedonism.
When we have character, our lives are more meaningful, but is "more meaningful" the same as "meaning"?
Example of a Thesis Regarding Absolute and Relative Meaning
While I love and admire VF's heroism, I reject his argument for absolute meaning in favor of relative meaning. First, absolute meaning is not realistic and may trap us into the either/or fallacy of meaning (my life is absolute meaning or it is nothing). It's better to approach meaning from a realistic point of view, not an ideological one. A realistic point of view says it's okay to not have meaning sometimes. It's okay to suffer the existential vacuum here and there. Life is not a constant rich, meaty steak sandwich of meaning every second of our life. That's unrealistic.
Second, we can build our moral and intellectual character toward achieving Life's 8 Essential Needs in a way that creates relative meaning, which is to say, that our life of values and personal growth is more meaningful than a life of moral dissolution. In this regard, we agree with Frankl, at least to some degree.
Third, we need not be meaning absolutists to hunger for Mystery, Enchantment, and More as evidenced by our creative and artistic pursuits. Being creative is not the same as being an ideological moral absolutist.
Fourth, we can devote our lives to some meaningful pursuits yet still experience despair, self-doubt and the exisential vacuum as part of the natural human condition. The human condition, as I state in my first point, is not always full of meaning. It's often absurd and pointless and it's okay, even natural, at times to feel that way.
Counter-Thesis That Defends Frankl:
The above writer does not embrace Frankl's definition of meaning because, through Frankl's own words, it's a life that only a tiny remnant will choose. In other words, Frankl is teaching us what the great religions have told us for centuries: That the path to hell is wide and that the path to heaven is narrow. Frankl has given us a narrow path based on self-sacrifice, not comfort and convenience.
Secondly, Frankl never proposes an absolute meaning as the writer erroneously states. Rather, Frankl argues that meaning varies from one individual to another based on particular circumstances.
Third, the argument that creativity will lead to meaning ignores the fact that our creative pursuits do not guarantee the development of our humanity.
How to Transition into Your Thesis: An Example
We love Viktor Frankl, the eloquent spokesperson for meaning. How could we not love him? He is after all a hero who risked his comfort, convenience, safety, and even his life to serve the needs of the suffering during the Holocaust. He is a saint, in fact, a rare human being worthy of our utmost love and admiration. However, his ideologically-based assertion that meaning is absolute and the cure for the existential vacuum contains certain weaknesses and fallacies that we need to address.
First of all, life cannot be one big meaty steak sandwich of meaning, filling us to the brim so that we never experience the existential vacuum. Frankl is presenting us with a dangerous either/or fallacy, what could also be called the mistake of All or Nothing. In fact, meaning is not an all or nothing affair. Life at times is senseless, absurd and meaningless and it is dangerous for us to feel guilty when we don't interpret every significant event of suffering as an occasion for meaning. But we are not entirely without meaning. Some periods of our lives will be more meaningful than others, especially as we mature and achieve greater and greater wisdom.
Second, we can reject VF's assertion that meaning is absolute and ultimate without discarding our morality. In fact, from a purely practical point of view, it is easier to be a moral and decent human being than it is to be a scoundrel and a libertine. Therefore, embracing morality is in our self-interest and gives us relative meaning. We may not have absolute meaning in the sense that VF writes about, but we can have relative meaning and for most of us relative meaning is more realistic goal than absolute meaning.
Third, while I reject that meaning is absolute and a reliable cure for the existential vacuum, I opine that we can pursue relative meaning by striving for Life's 8 Essentials, which I will elaborate on in my essay. Finally, for those who hunger for More, for the Beyond, for Mystery, for Divine Beauty, I have the answer and it is not rooted in the quest for absolute meaning or its related religious dogmas. We pursue the Beyond through the arts, through creativity, and through philosophy, which explores life's painful questions and is never so vain as to think the answers we receive will be neatly packaged and reassuringly absolute.
Part One. Cynic's Argument Against Meaning: Determinism Triumphs over Free Will
The George Carlin Factor: Hardly a day ever passes in which I do not hear a biting quote that the brilliant king of cynicism George Carlin once said during a performance: “When you’re born, you get a ticket to the freak show. When you’re born in America, you get a front-row seat.” What is Carlin telling us? He’s telling us that we’re a doomed species and the best we can do is laugh at our inevitable destruction. When I look at the human race, I often find myself agreeing with Carlin’s cynical pronouncements and the conclusions he draws from them. But at the same time I find myself drawn to Viktor Frankl’s very uncynical Man’s Search for Meaning, which chronicles his survival in the Nazi concentration camps and his observations of the ways we exalt or degrade our humanity in the face of abject cruelty, suffering and evil.
Rodney Dangerfield Factor. When I was in my early twenties, I read a newspaper interview with the comedian Rodney Dangerfield who said you can’t really change who you are. “You never really change. You’re born a certain way and that’s it.” I remember immediately agreeing with him. We are creatures molded at birth and we cannot escape who we are fundamentally. So what’s it matter if we read Man’s Search for Meaning or not? Why do we give a damn about our choices when the end result of who we are is going to be the same?
Sturgeon's Law, which states that 95% of everything in life is crap.
Counterargument
The Viktor Frankl Factor: Frankl bore witness to some of the most abjectly cruel freak shows on earth. He almost died many times in the camps, he suffered the loss of loved ones, including his father, his mother, his brother, and his wife, and he experienced the constant humiliations at the hands of sadistic brutes, “insults” that he described as hurting him worse than the physical pain, yet for all his suffering he would not give the Nazis and his other oppressors the victory of making him evil in their image. Even as other inmates surrendered all their scruples and morals, living like animals so that they might survive in the camps, Frankl believed in preserving his moral code and he was steadfast in his compassion for the victims of evil. Tapping on an inner strength that became more and more prominent during his captivity, he aided others, using his training as a psychiatrist to help people gain their bodily strength and spirit so that they may live to see the outside of those camps and, more importantly, so that they might strengthen their humanity through a life of purpose and meaning.
The Nietzsche Factor: Free will is possible but only if we have a purpose. He says, “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.” Finding meaning and purpose in the midst of life’s cruelty and evil is what Frankl calls “Tragic Optimism.”
Free Will Is Limited and Finite: The free will/determinism debate on both sides is grievously in error, constituting an either/or fallacy: Both positions appear to be entrenched in the absolute idea, wrongly, of free will or determinism. But in fact there are only degrees of free will and determinism and we tend to progress from one pole to the other. We can see this spectrum in the realm of morality. Many years ago I saw a TV program about a corrupt police officer, interviewed from prison, who explained how easy it eventually became for him to steal money during drug busts. He said at first the stealing stung his conscience and he had ulcers and bouts of anxieties from his corrupt behavior. To show the growing effects of his criminal acts on his soul during the interview, he grabbed a sheet of crisp paper and crumpled it. He explained that doing wrong in the beginning was like crumpling the paper. There was a violence to the harsh crushing noise of the action, but after dozens upon dozens of times the paper became tissue thin and the action did not grate on him anymore. It seems in the beginning he had more free will to not steal but as he surrendered to his cravings for easy money, he numbed his conscience and lost more and more willpower, eventually becoming a slave to his own thievery. Thus he traveled from having an abundance of free will to a scarcity of it, until he was at the mercy of determinism. A similar case can be made for an adulterer. He may at first be pained by guilt for his infidelity, maybe even the fourth and fifth time. But after dozens, perhaps hundreds of times, he becomes numb, calloused, and debauched, and thus he loses his free will.
Enjoying self-discipline is a form of free will: We can journey from determinism to free will, going from a weaker to a stronger state. Take the man whose doctor just told him he needs to lose fifty pounds or he may soon die of a stroke or a heart attack. The overweight man knows he cannot resist his junk food temptations but that he can control his environment, so he learns how to keep his kitchen full of healthy foods and he learns how to prepare them in a way that makes him enjoy his nutritious meals. Thus, he misses his favorite junk foods less. As he loses weight and feels better, he feels motivated to stick to his new program. He was once mired in the self-loathing and the malaise of compulsive junk food eating, but he has taken control of his life in a way that makes him feel better about himself. He has in effect journeyed from determinism to free will. Another reason to agree with Frankl’s principle that we are responsible for our actions is that most parents believe in disciplining their children. To discipline someone means to teach someone, a child or a novice, how to behave in a way that produces positive results, which in turn become the reward for motivating good behavior. If you teach a child how to make her bed and how to enjoy the advantages of keeping a clean, well organized room, you have given her a lesson on how to impose her will over chaos to her favor. As she matures, she internalizes these teachings, preferring a clean, organized room to a messy, chaotic one, and she has what is called self-discipline.
Free-will is more difficult to choose than stagnation: Sometimes we don’t take action, not because we cannot, but because we will not. The reasons for not taking action are fairly compelling. Doing what it takes to get out of a bad situation can often entail immense suffering. I had a student, for example, who came here from Japan. She lived with her American boyfriend in a nice Beverly Hills apartment and she confided with me that she no longer loved him as a woman loves a man but as a mother loves a child. She wanted to move out, but it was difficult to do so in mid-semester and to most likely live in a less desirable place. And worse, she did not have the heart to crush him with the truth about her feelings for him. But do so she did. She suffered a lot upfront, as it were, but saved herself, and the man she had been living with, a lot more grief they would have afflicted them had she dragged the relationship out. I admire her courage. The pain to make such a move reminds me of a TV show I watched as a child,Adam 12. In one episode, paramedics were called to save a man who was being crushed by a fallen telephone pole. The victim of the accident was smiling with relief as the pole weighed on his ribs and said, “It’s funny, it doesn’t hurt that much.” But one of the paramedics had bad news: While the pain wasn’t so bad now, he explained, it would become unbearable when the fire department crew lifted the pole off his ribs. Whenever we need to unshackle ourselves from a bad situation or a self-destructive habit, the pain is as overwhelming as having a telephone pole being lifted off our ribs. In the long-run we’re better off, of course, but the immediate pain is so unbearable that many of us choose to stay right where we are. As we slowly die under whatever it is that is crushing us, we lose more and more of our free will until our condition becomes inevitable.
Part Two. What Is Frankl’s Ultimatum?
Be worthy of your suffering. In the news, we read of a man in Albany, New York, who was arrested for throwing a Molotov cocktail inside a Taco Bell drive-through window. His reason? He was enraged earlier that there wasn't enough meat in his chalupa. As imperfect as my life is, my life has relatively speaking more meaning than Mr. Chalupa Man.
One. Ultimatum: Either we must be worthy of our suffering, or we will despise our lives. For Frankl, there is no inbetween: Either our hearts are courageous, giving, and compassionate, or they are cowardly, bitter, and pessimistic. The purpose in life is to journey from the latter to the former.
Two. Example in the book: Throughout Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl urges us over and over to be worthy of our suffering. He writes about a man in the camps who eventually saw his life as a sacrifice so that his loved ones could live and knowing that his death would benefit others, his death and suffering gave him meaning. In another example, Frankl talks to a rabbi who is overcome with bitterness and self-pity over the death of his children who died in the concentration camps. Frankl discovers that the rabbi’s real grief is that he feels his life lacks virtue, the kind that he knew would bring his children to heaven, would make him unworthy of meeting them in the afterlife. And that was the meaning Frankl helped the rabbi find: to devote his life to being worthy of someday joining his children in heaven.
Three. 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.
Four. To be worthy of our suffering, we must see ourselves as being needed in the world, not as primarily consumers of pleasure.
Ninety-nine percent of the human race does not want to embrace suffering in the service to the world, but as Frankl writes: “The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity—even under the most difficult circumstances—to add a deeper meaning to his life. It may remain brave, dignified and unselfish. Or in the bitter fight for self-preservation he may forget his human dignity and become no more than an animal.”
Five. Choosing the courageous life, one that makes us worthy of our suffering, is rare:
Frankl has no illusions about the difficulty of choosing a meaningful, brave, dignified, unselfish life over a shameful, undignified one.
Most prisoners in the concentration camps took the wide road to hell, surrendering to base self-preservation and apathy while only a small percentage traveled the narrow road to heaven and found meaning. As Frankl writes:
It is true that only a few people are capable of reaching such high moral standards. Of the prisoners only a few kept their full inner liberty and obtained those values which their suffering afforded, but even one such example is sufficient proof that man’s inner strength may raise him above his outward fate. Such men are not only in concentration camps. Everywhere man is confronted with fate, with the chance of achieving something through his own suffering.
Frankl makes his ultimatum clear. We can choose a life of empty despair or one of meaning and most choose the former. It is the choice, we can safely infer, of the masses the hordes who distract themselves with bread and circus.
Part Three. The Bare Existence Vs. the Common Life
In the book's opening narrative, Frankl shows people being stripped of everything, their possessions and identity, and being forced to find out who they really are.
Steps Toward a Bare Existence
Selection process ( based on who's healthy and who's not) in the concentration camps pits human vs. human. Everyone is competing against everyone else to live. There is only one god for many and that god is death and the only thing to say to death is "Not today." People did all they could, no matter how ruthless, to say to death, "Not today, Death."
Morals become irrelevant: "The best of us did not return."
There are 3 phases in the camps.
The first is shock. How can this really be happening? This is surreal. This is a nightmare from which I must wake up. In this state, there is the "delusion of reprieve." We believe we will be rescued and that the evil will stop.
In the state of shock, we cling to our former selves, or try to, and we go into denial over what is happening to us.
Gradually, we see that our attempts are feeble, ridiculous even, and we are "overcome by a grim sense of humor. We knew that we had nothing to lose except our ridiculously naked lives."
It's like being told the world is going to end on Saturday and saying, "It can't end Saturday because my eBay auction isn't over until Sunday."
As we accept our crazy condition, we develop a cold curiosity as if we were studying a horror movie from afar.
None of these reactions are abnormal. In fact, an abnormal reaction to an abnormal event is NORMAL.
In the second phase, the prisoner becomes hardened and numb to suffering, his own, and others'. He develops a condition known as apathy. He no longer cares about anything. He "surrounds himself in a necessary protective shell."
The third reaction occurs after release from the camps. Frankl call is "depersonalization."
People become disaffected, emotionally withdrawn. Some become angry at the world and say, "Look what the world has done to me. It's my right to return the favor. I shall exact revenge on the world." From thereon, Frankl started his life afresh.
Other "moral deformities" included bitterness and disillusionment.
Many become bitter because people from their old world could not imagine their hell and assumed everyone suffered the same hell. Their townspeople's failure of imagination and empathy sent many of the freed prisoners into seething bitterness.
Disillusionment was with the universe or with fate itself, that we lived in a world in which senseless suffering without limits could be allowed. This could make many reject the idea of a God.
For Frankl, his faith in God intensified.
Frankl is stripped of everything, stripped to a naked existence. After he is freed he wanders in the wilderness, and he calls out to God from his "narrow prison." And God answers him from the "freedom of space."
Can we believe in God in such an aftermath? Whether we can or not, one thing for sure: Being stripped to our naked existence, we lose our facade, our pretensions. Either we become primitives, animals, survivalists, throwing morals out the window, or, like Frankl, we become our Higher Selves, courageous, meaning-filled souls.
Most of us are not stripped to our bare existence. Most of us lead the common life.
The Common Life, a Life Without Meaning: Characteristics
One. Coveting others' achievements and possessions. The result of this coveting is that we're never happy with what we have and we resent with great envy the idea that others enjoy life's niceties more than we do.
Adorning ourselves with pretentiousness and fakery. We want to project a pleasing image to others to convince them that we are happy even though we are not. In fact we are miserable and lonely, yet we continue to project a facade that tells a different story about us. This story or facade is what we obsess over while we distract ourselves from the hell within us.
Self-esteem inflation and other forms of self-deception. There is a huge gap between our inflated self-image and the rather pedestrian talents and competence. Studies show a few people full of anxiety and doubt have the highest talent and competence, not the inflated self-esteemers.
Fondness for BS over the truth. Most people BS so much they don't even have a model of being real and honest so they don't even know how to be real.
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
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.
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.
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:
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.
“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.
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.”
There are moral absolutes in this world evidenced in part by Frankl dividing the world into two races of people, decent and indecent.
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.
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.”
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.
There is no One Size Fits All Meaning. Every person’s meaning is specific to his or her circumstances.
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.
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.
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.”
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!”
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.
Do a background check of the author to see if he or she has a hidden agenda or any other kind of background information that speaks to the author’s credibility.
Check the place of publication to see what kind of agenda, if any, the publishing house has. Know how esteemed the publishing house is among peers of the subject you’re reading about.
Learn how to find the thesis. In other words, know what the author’s purpose, explicit or implicit, is.
Annotate more than underline. Your memory will be better served, according to research, by annotating than underlining. You can scribble your own code in the margins as long as you can understand your writing when you come back to it later. Annotating is a way of starting a dialogue about the reading and writing process. It is a form of pre-writing. Forms of annotation that I use are “yes,” (great point) “no,” (wrong, illogical, BS) and “?” (confusing). When I find the thesis, I’ll also write that in the margins. Or I’ll write down an essay or book title that the passage reminds me of. Or maybe even an idea for a story or a novel.
When faced with a difficult text, you will have to slow down and use the principles of summarizing and paraphrasing. With summary, you concisely identify the main points in one or two sentences. With paraphrase, you re-word the text in your own words.
When reading an argument, see if the writer addresses possible objections to his or her argument. Ask yourself, of all the objections, did the writer choose the most compelling ones? The more compelling the objections addressed, the more rigorous and credible the author’s writing.
A full-bodied red wine compliments the Pasta Pomodoro.
Compliment is a to say something nice about someone. "You look nice in that pumpkin polo shirt. Very nice pumpkin accents."
Complement is to complete or match well with something. "This full-bodied red wine complements the spaghetti."
The BMW salesman excepted my counteroffer of 55K for the sports sedan.
The word should be accepted.
Kryptonite effects Superman in such a way that he loses his powers.
Effect is a noun. Affect is a verb, so it should be the following:
Kryptonite affects Superman in a such a way that he loses his powers.
Confusing their and there
There superpowers were compromised by the Gamma rays.
We need to use the possessive plural pronoun their.
Two. Missing comma after an introductory phrase or clause
Terrified of slimy foods, Robert hid behind the restaurant’s dumpster.
In spite of my aversion to rollercoasters, I attended the carnival with my family.
Three. Incomplete documentation
Noted dietician and nutritionist Mike Manderlin observes that, “Dieting is a mental illness.”
It should read:
Noted dietician and nutritionist Mike Manderlin observes that, “Dieting is a mental illness” (277).
Four. Vague Pronoun Reference
Focusing on the pecs during your Monday-Wednesday-Friday workouts is a way of giving you more time to work on your quads and glutes and specializing on the way they’re used in different exercises.
Before Jennifer screamed at Brittany, she came to the conclusion that she was justified in stealing her boyfriend.
Five. Spelling (including homonyms, words that have same spelling but different meanings)
No one came forward to bare witness to the crime.
No one came forward to bear witness to the crime.
Every where we went, we saw fast food restaurants.
Everywhere we went, we saw fast food restaurants.
Love is a disease. It’s sickness derives from its power to intoxicate and create capricious, short-term infatuation.
Its sickness derives from its power to intoxicate and create capricious, short-term infatuation.
Six. Mechanical error with a quotation
In his best-selling book Love Is a Virus from Outer Space, noted psychologist Michael M. Manderlin asserts that, “Falling in love is a form of madness for which there is no cure”.
In his best selling book Love Is a Virus from Outer Space, noted psychologist Michael M. Manderlin asserts that, “Falling in love is a form of madness for which there is no cure.”
In his best selling book Love Is a Virus from Outer Space, noted psychologist Michael M. Manderlin asserts that, “Falling in love is a form of madness for which there is no cure” (18).
“It forever stuns me that people make life decisions based on something as fickle and capricious as love”, Michael Manderlin writes (22).
“It forever stuns me that people make life decisions based on something as fickle and capricious as love,” Michael Manderlin writes (22).
Seven. Unnecessary comma
I need to workout when at home, and while taking vacations.
You do however use a comma if the comma is between two independent clauses:
I need to workout at home, and when I go on vacations, I bring my yoga mat to hotels.
I need to workout every day, because I’m addicted to the exercise-induced dopamine.
You do however use a comma after a dependent clause beginning with because:
Because I’m addicted to exercise-induced dopamine, I need to workout everyday.
Peaches, that are green, taste hideous.
The above is an example of an independent clause with a essential information or restrictive information. Not all peaches taste hideous, only green ones. The meaning of the entire sentence needs the dependent clause so there are no commas.
However, if the clause is additional information, the clause is called nonessential or nonrestrictive, and we do use commas:
Peaches, which are on sale at Whole Foods, are my favorite fruit.
Eight. Unnecessary or missing capitalization
Some Traditional Chinese Medicines containing Ephedraremain legal.
We only use capital letters for proper nouns, proper adjectives, first words of sentences, important words in titles, along with certain words indicating directions and family relationships.
Nine. Missing word
The site foreman discriminated women and promoted men with less experience.
The site foreman discriminated against women and promoted men with less experience.
Chris’ behavior becomes bizarre that his family asks for help.
Chris’ behavior becomes so bizarre that his family asks for help.
Ten. Faulty sentence structure
The information which high school athletes are presented with mainly includes information on what credits needed to graduate and thinking about the college which athletes are trying to play for, and apply.
A sentence that starts out with one kind of structure and then changes to another kind can confuse readers. Make sure that each sentence contains a subject and a verb, that subjects and predicates make sense together, and that comparisons have clear meanings. When you join elements (such as subjects or verb phrases) with a coordinating conjunction, make sure that the elements have parallel structures.
The reason I prefer yoga at home to the gym is because I prefer privacy.
I prefer yoga at home to the gym because of privacy.
11. Missing Comma with a Nonrestrictive Element
Marina who was the president of the club was the first to speak.
The clause who was the president of the club does not affect the basic meaning of the sentence: Marina was the first to speak.
A nonrestrictive element gives information not essential to the basic meaning of the sentence. Use commas to set off a nonrestrictive element.
12. Unnecessary Shift in Verb Tense
Priya was watching the great blue heron. Then she slips and falls into the swamp.
Verbs that shift from one tense to another with no clear reason can confuse readers.
13. Missing Comma in a Compound Sentence
Meredith waited for Samir and her sister grew impatient.
Without the comma, a reader may think at first that Meredith waited for both Samir and her sister.
A compound sentence consists of two or more parts that could each stand alone as a sentence. When the parts are joined by a coordinating conjunction, use a comma before the conjunction to indicate a pause between the two thoughts.
14. Unnecessary or Missing Apostrophe (including its/it's)
Overambitious parents can be very harmful to a childs well-being.
The car is lying on it's side in the ditch. Its a white 2004 Passat.
To make a noun possessive, add either an apostrophe and an s (Ed's book) or an apostrophe alone (the boys' gym). Do not use an apostrophe in the possessive pronouns ours, yours, and hers. Useits to mean belong to it; use it's only when you mean it is or it has.
15. Fused (run-on) sentence
Klee's paintings seem simple, they are very sophisticated.
She doubted the value of medication she decided to try it once.
A fused sentence (also called a run-on) joins clauses that could each stand alone as a sentence with no punctuation or words to link them. Fused sentences must be either divided into separate sentences or joined by adding words or punctuation.
16. Comma Splice
I was strongly attracted to her, she was beautiful and funny.
We hated the meat loaf, the cafeteria served it every Friday.
A comma splice occurs when only a comma separates clauses that could each stand alone as a sentence. To correct a comma splice, you can insert a semicolon or period, connect the clauses with a word such as and or because, or restructure the sentence.
17. Lack of pronoun/antecedent agreement
Every student must provide their own uniform.
Pronouns must agree with their antecedents in gender (male or female) and in number (singular or plural). Many indefinite pronouns, such as everyone and each, are always singular. When a singular antecedent can refer to a man or woman, either rewrite the sentence to make the antecedent plural or to eliminate the pronoun, or use his or her, he or she, and so on. When antecedents are joined by or or nor, the pronoun must agree with the closer antecedent. A collection noun such as team can be either singular or plural, depending on whether the members are seen as a group or individuals.
18. Poorly Integrated Quotation
A 1970s study of what makes food appetizing "Once it became apparent that the steak was actually blue and the fries were green, some people became ill" (Schlosser 565).
Corrected
In a 1970s study about what makes food appetizing, we read, "Once it became apparent that the steak was actually blue and the fries were green, some people became ill" (Schlosser 565).
"Dumpster diving has serious drawbacks as a way of life" (Eighner 383). Finding edible food is especially tricky.
Corrected
"Dumpster diving has serious drawbacks as a way of life," we read in Eighner's book (383). One of the drawbacks is that finding food can be especially difficult.
Quotations should fit smoothly into the surrounding sentence structure. They should be linked clearly to the writing around them (usually with a signal phrase) rather than dropped abruptly into the writing.
19. Missing or Unnecessary Hyphen
This paper looks at fictional and real life examples.
A compound adjective modifying a noun that follows it requires a hyphen.
The buyers want to fix-up the house and resell it.
A two-word verb should not be hyphenated. A compound adjective that appears before a noun needs a hyphen. However, be careful not to hyphenate two-word verbs or word groups that serve as subject complements.
20. Sentence Fragment
No subject
Marie Antoinette spent huge sums of money on herself and her favorites. And helped to bring on the French Revolution.
No complete verb
The aluminum boat sitting on its trailer.
Beginning with a subordinating word
We returned to the drugstore. Where we waited for our buddies.
A sentence fragment is part of a sentence that is written as if it were a complete sentence. Reading your draft out loud, backwards, sentence by sentence, will help you spot sentence fragments.
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.
For Effective Critical Thinking, We Must Know the Main Ideas of the Text
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:
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.
“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.
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.”
There are moral absolutes in this world evidenced in part by Frankl dividing the world into two races of people, decent and indecent.
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.
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.”
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.
There is no One Size Fits All Meaning. Every person’s meaning is specific to his or her circumstances.
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.
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.
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.”
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!”
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Common Thread That Runs Through Most of the Stories: When Coping Mechanisms Sour
The characters' coping mechanisms go askew and become maladapative to the point that they give birth to the Demon Homunculus, an alter ego that creates more problems than it solves.
One of my favorite themes is the coping mechanisms people develop to address a crisis, and how these coping mechanisms go out of control and become more of a poison that begins to consume their creators.
One. "The Other Woman" by Sherwood Anderson. Explore the theme of Modernism. One of the themes of modernism is that we are so self-centered (solipsistic) that we don't know ourselves (what makes us tick) or know others. Some modernist thought asserts we can know nothing. Such a belief is equivalent to nihilism.
Two. "You're Ugly, Too" by Lorrie Moore: intellectual pride, cynicism, "the grotesque," misfit, belonging, professional women, consumerism, 3 Traps, settling.
Three. "Greenleaf" by Flannery O'Connor: intellectual pride, envy, scapegoating, "the grotesque," spiritual blindness, Point of No Return, grace, faith, having your __ handed to you on a stick as a presrequisite for personal transformation.
Four. "Where I'm Calling From" by Raymond Carver: The nature of Purgatory, recovery, addiction, habit, disease, having your _____ handed to you on a stick as a prerequisite for personal transformation, the battle between pride and humility.
Five. "The Country Husband" by John Cheever: The Man-Child, perpetual adolescence, private desire vs. public duty, obligation vs. pleasure, suburban conformity, keeping appearances, and ennui, death and consumerism.
Six. "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" by Joyce Carol Oates: popular culture, perpetual adolescence, Eros and Nihilism, freedom without boundaries, the Age of Aquarius, consumerism and the Chanel No.5 Moment as a form of derangement and moral dissolution.
Seven. "Defender of the Faith" by Philip Roth: The main conflict is loyalty to the tribe (Tribalism) vs. loyalty to moral duty.
One. Explain the story’s opening, “I am in love with my wife.”
He blurts out this statement. It appears to have been produced from some kind of fear or guilt or both. He makes the announcement like a compulsion.
We see a man so terrified by his state of not knowing who he is and what his desires are that he must constantly remind himself that he loves his wife when the story’s evidence points to feelings toward his wife that are, at best, confused, ambiguous, and conflicted.
His conflicted feelings are further reinforced by the affair he has with the allegedly plain looking woman.
In one opening sentence, Sherwood Anderson introduces us to the themes of Modernism:
We can’t know or understand ourselves or others. We are strangers to ourselves. We our impostors incapable of understanding our “real agenda.”
We suffer from dualism or Left Hand-Right Hand Syndrome (the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand does and vice versa).
There is no free will. Rather, we are ruled by unconscious psychological forces we cannot control. We are compulsive and as such we are slaves to our compulsions.
Every plot point is an ironic reversal so that we feel we live in an “upside down world.”
We suffer unresolved conflict between private desires and public duty.
“I am in love with my wife,” therefore, is a statement wrought with deception and desperation.
He WISHES he loved his wife, just like later in the story when we read, “He wanted to dream of the woman who was to be his wife . . .”
He wants to feel all the feelings he is SUPPOSED to feel for his wife, but he does not.
Perhaps he does not love his wife.
Or perhaps he loves her but not in a conventional way that would appease his conscience.
Or perhaps he feels repelled by her and everything she represents: domesticity, being a slave to conformity and image, sentimental notions of love are beyond his reach.
Or perhaps he loves her desperately as an antidote to the sin of adultery and chaos that stirs in his hedonistic self.
Or perhaps he obsesses over all the above possibilities but cannot pinpoint his emotions, as he remains a miserable slave to ambiguity and confusion.
Welcome to Modernism.
Two. What kinds of changes are taking place with the unnamedman?
He is overcome with a creative flurry of writing resulting in an award that results in minor celebrity.
His elevated esteem in the eyes of others has a drug-like effect on him. Intoxicated, disoriented, he becomes unhinged. He reminds me of the character who becomes "drugged" after getting a new overcoat in the Gogol short story, "The Overcoat."
He is engaged to be married to a judge’s daughter. The the father is a judge points to a possible metaphor about the kind of world the man is entering: a world of judgment, right and wrong, black and white, moral and immoral. This crisply defined world appears to be incompatible with the gray, murky, morally ambiguous world of the storyteller.
He has also received a job promotion that affords him elevated status.
All three events point to a man who is in the public eye, a cause of much ego gratification, even intoxication, which he seems to enjoy.
But the downside of this public adulation is perhaps a sense of anxiety and pressure (added responsibilities) that causes him to have a sort of breakdown manifest in obsessive-compulsive behavior.
This period is described as an “abnormal time” in which he was “floating on air.” Could he perhaps be disoriented, even delirious?
For many, the spotlight feels claustrophobia and performance anxiety, causing those people to feel like caged animals who need an outlet.
His sense of anxiety is further reinforced by the knowledge that he begins to suffer insomnia. Sleep deprivation could push him toward insanity of some kind.
He appears to be a man unhinged, severed from any core self that would make him feel whole and calm. He is a contrast of his fiancé who evidences singularity of purpose and seems to know herself.
For many, the spotlight feels claustrophobia and performance anxiety, causing those people to feel like caged animals who need an outlet.
Perhaps the man seeks an outlet where he can “be himself,” whatever that may be.
Three. Speak to the man’s attraction to the shopkeeper’s wife.
We read about this compulsive obsession the storyteller has with an older woman with “bright gray eyes.”
The narrator tells us the storyteller assured him “at least twenty times” that she was a “very ordinary person with nothing special or notable about her.” But her presence “stirred him profoundly.”
Again, we are faced with ambiguity. We don’t know if the woman is truly plain looking or a stunning beauty since the storyteller has proven that he appears to say one thing when in fact he means the opposite.
But another interpretation is that she is indeed plain looking; however, the storyteller’s desperate state inexplicably draws him to her. We don’t know.
What’s clear is that as the man’s marriage looms near, with its implications of a conventional life of conformity and slave morality to society’s script, the man hungers for Another World, Los Otros, so that the shopkeeper’s wife becomes his most compelling reality.
We read, “During that week in the midst of his distraction she was the only person he knew who stood out clear and distinct in his mind. When he wanted to think noble thoughts, he could think only of her. Before he knew what was happening his imagination had taken hold of the notion of having a love affair with the woman.”
By “noble thoughts,” we can assume living a life of convention and purity when in fact the man is having doubts about enlisting or conscribing himself into such an imprisoned state.
There is an adage that marriage for a woman is the beginning of her life, but that marriage for a man is the death of his.
Perhaps the man is feeling an impending death and panic has set in.
His obsession with the shopkeeper’s woman reinforces the Modernist theme that we cannot understand others or ourselves. We read, “I could not understand myself,” as the storyteller vents his vexation about obsession with a plain looking older woman as he is presumably about to marry a young beauty.
As the man’s obsession with the other woman grows so does his torment, and we see a man being pulled apart into two opposing worlds, one of illicit passion and the other of domestic convention.
We read, “There was but one woman in the world I wanted to live with me and to be my comrade in undertaking to improve my own character and my position in the world, but for the moment, you see, I wanted this other woman to be in my arms. She had worked her way into my being. On all sides people were saying I was a big man who would do big things, and there I was.”
To be a “big man” and enjoy the high esteem and veneration of others, he feels compelled to live a life of marital convention in accordance with society’s script of what it means to be a big man.
The above speaks to man’s conflict with public duty, and his craving for public approval, and his private desires, which run contrary to society’s blueprint for success.
This conflict and the man’s attempt to suppress his private urges result in self-hatred. He grows more “furious” at himself. He tries to read pious literature to cleanse his naughty soul.
But attempts at finding morality through reading fail him. We read, “The voices in the books were like the voices of the dead. I did not hear them. The words printed on the lines would not penetrate into my consciousness. I tried to think of the woman I loved, but her figure had also become something far away, something with which I for the moment seemed to have nothing to do.”
Four. Is there evidence that the shopkeeper’s wife is a maternal figure?
We read that “She must have been ten years older than myself.” And that when he tried to put pennies on the glass counter, “the pennies made a rattling noise.”
Juxtaposing an older woman with a “rattling noise” could suggest a baby rattler in the presence of an All Comforting Mommy.
The anxiety and panic preceding a marriage, which to the man may feel like a prison sentence, may cause him to regress and seek a Mother Figure.
These feelings would be unconscious and would speak to Modernism’s worldview that we are creatures not of free agency or free will but creatures beholden to unconscious impulses.
Five. Describe the secret meeting with the shopkeeper’s wife.
He experiences Dionysian ecstasy and rapture, holding her, and connecting with her on this higher level than anything he has experienced before. We read, “I had forgotten everything in the world but just her.”
We are now introduced to a powerful conflict in the story, the struggle between Dionysian and Apollonian forces.
Dionysian refers to the overpowering force of ecstasy that, short lived, destroys everything in its wake. It is the Angelina Jolie of the Life Force.
Apollonian refers to nest building, domesticity, and monogamy. It is the Jennifer Aniston of the Life Force.
Our storyteller is caught between Angelina Jolie and Jennifer Aniston.
Six. What does the fiancé’s letter reveal about her?
She is pure of heart. She has a singularity of purpose, to marry, unlike her fiancé who is torn between Dionysian and Apollonian forces.
Her purity of heart makes her fiancé feel guilty, but he want to feed off his future wife’s purity in the hopes that she will in turn purify him and cure him of his madness. But is he ever cured?
Remember, the story begins with him talking about her after their marriage and he compulsively blurts, “I am in love with my wife,” like a mantra that only a man who doesn’t love his wife would repeat in a vain attempt to cure his heart of his madness.
He reads the letter to gain strength from it, to find “resolve” to resist temptation, and his resolve fails him completely. We read, “The woman came at seven o’clock, and, as you may have guessed, I let her in and forgot the resolution I had made.”
Like a drug, the woman feeds his Dionysian appetites: “I felt very happy and strong.”
Seven. What does the man say about his feelings for the shopkeeper’s wife after she leaves his apartment?
He claims she left his mind, but we see evidence to the contrary.
In a series of bizarre statements full of contradictions, he says, “I am trying very hard to tell what happened to me. I am saying that I have not since that evening thought of the woman who came to my apartment. Now, to tell the facts of the case, that is not true.”
He then claims that his ecstatic experience with the shopkeeper’s wife gave him the strength to go through with his marriage. Further, his illicit affair gave him a “new faith in the outcome of our life together.”
Clearly, he is an unreliable narrator. The unreliable narrator is another striking feature of the Modernist Literature Movement.
Eight. How does the man fit in the people at his fiancé’s party?
He feels disconnected, guilty, and alienated from their laughter. He is not a real member of their tribe. He’s just faking it.
He has a secret life. He reminds me of Dexter from the Showtime series, a man who can’t live in conventional society but who must exercise an alter ego to preserve his sanity, which at the same time threatens his sanity.
This double life creates a tension. We read, “What they would have thought had they known the truth (about the illicit affair) about me God only knows!”
Nine. What mantra of lies and self-deceit do we see in the aftermath of the marriage?
The man claims, “If you were to say that my marriage is not a happy one I could call you a liar and be speaking the absolute truth.”
In Modernism there is no absolute truth, only gray and moral ambiguity.
We read other mantras of self-delusion: “And now you see I am married and everything is all right. My marriage is to me a very beautiful fact.”
We see here that self-delusion has no limits. We should be afraid of ourselves, very, very afraid.
This pessimistic view of humans incapable of knowing the truth and being full of self-deception is part of Modernism, which rejected the idea that religion could bring us to the light and truth. That, too, is a form of self-deceit in the Modernistic worldview.
Essay Two: The Best American Short Stories
Using the principles of literary analysis for writing paragraphs and thesis statements, develop an argumentative, cause and effect analysis, or extended definition thesis that addresses one or more of the assigned short stories.
Sample Approach for "The Other Woman": Developing a thesis for the theme of Modernism
The Modernism evident in "The Other Woman" explains our unhinged condition resulting from _______________, __________________, __________________, and ____________________.
Two things you need to know to write the above thesis:
One. What does it mean to be unhinged? (compulsive, beholden to Dionysian forces with no Apollonian counterbalance, no self-knowledge, beholden to a fictitious grandiose self that makes one blind to one's real self, no metacognition; the self is divided so that the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing and vice versa.)
Two. What are 4 major causes of the man's unhinged state in the story?
Sample Approach for Studying Demands of Marriage in the Story
In the powerful short story "The Other Woman," when we examine the man's needs for a woman we see that those needs represent Universal Man and that those needs are impossible, rendering most marriages doomed to misery, evidenced by __________________, __________________, ___________________, and ______________.
What You Need to Know
How is the man's needs in a woman both universal to most men, and how do those needs place impossible demands on women? Some of man's "needs" include trophy wife, Eros, Mom, upper class status and privilege, life coach, life manager, etc.
Another Thesis Approach: How Dualism Makes Us Crazy (Dualism consists of the opposing forces that make the man a conflicted character)
In "The Other Woman," the dualism evident in the story reveals a man who has lost his sanity evidenced by ____________________, ____________________, _________________, and ___________________.
What You Need to Know
What is dualism? How does dualism manifest in the main character? In what 4 ways does the dualism show that the man is crazy?
Developing PEEL Paragraphs (PEEL equals Point, Evidence or Example, Elaboration or Explanation, and Links)
When writing a research paper, it’s very important in the evidence or example section to use a quote from the text.
Paragraph Example (I've underlined the links or transitions)
The essay "Green Guilt" makes a powerful argument that we must accept the afflictions of guilt and sin, whether that guilt be caused by religious or secular forces, in order that we survive and thrive in a cooperative society. As we read in Asma’s essay, “All this internalized self-loathing is the cost we pay for being civilized. In a very well organized society that protects the interests of many, we have to refrain from our natural instincts.” Indeed, our natural instincts, if left unchecked, would create a barbaric world where no kind of viable or even pleasing society could flourish. A second curse of selfish desires unbridled by a sense of guilt and sin would be the moral dissolution that would ensue as hordes of people would become numb to pleasures resulting in frustration and increased violence. We see evidence of such mayhem and grand displays of nihilism in hedonistic societies right before they crumble such as the Fall of Rome. Finally, let us not neglect to point out that a sense of sin can prompt us to be more disciplined so that we maximize the success of our personal goals rather than squandering our life on the foolish errands prompted by our unharnessed desires. To conclude, Asma convincingly shows us that it is in our best interests to repress our base passions by swallowing the Sin Pill in order to fulfill our potential as individuals and as a society.
Study Questions for “Greenleaf” by Flannery O’Connor
One. Discuss the symbolism of the bull when Mrs. May screams at him.
We read the bull was “like some patient god come down to woo her.” He has a “wreath across his horns.”
A few paragraphs later, we read that the bull’s “wreath slipped down to the base of his horns where it looked like a menacing prickly crown.”
These are images of Jesus Christ who wore a crown of thorns.
The racist Mrs. May screams a racial epithet and expresses not just her racism but also her animosity toward God, or more specifically for the Catholic writer O’Connor, Jesus Christ.
The unrepentant sinner is hostile in the presence of God and recoils like a snake. Much of this hostility is rooted in pride, the idea that “I’m good enough by myself and I don’t need anyone how to tell me to run my life.”
The bull, at least from Mrs. May’s point of view, is eating the house. She feels invaded as if her very house, the very foundation of her life, is being eviscerated and feeling threatened she lashes out.
Mrs. May is defensive and hostile and her hostility opens a window into her soul's deepest vulnerabilities. We will find that she is lonely and full of despair, but hides her helplessness behind a facade of proud grandiosity. Like Zoe in the short story, "You're Ugly, Too," her wall of grandiosity imprisons her.
Facebook is place where everyone talks about how great their life is. Very few Facebook posters talk about how horrible their life is. Facebook is, more often than not, a place for people to boast and to humblebrag about their "amazing" lives. This fiction becomes their delusion and their prison.
Mrs. May is similar to these Facebook posters in that she constantly elevates herself and tries to see herself as a superior person to others, and this prison repels the truth from coming into her world so that she can change for the better.
As a woman of faith who learned to distrust pride, the author Flannery O'Connor wants to portray Mrs. May in this way, as a prisoner of her pride and the delusions that are born from that pride.
Two. After wanting to wake up Mr. Greenleaf, the house worker, Mrs. May decides against it. Why?
She knows Mr. Greenleaf will question why her grown boys would let their mother get up at night and do the errand of calling on Mr. Greenleaf. Such a question challenges Mrs. May's prideful delusion that her sons are better than Mr. Greenleaf's.
That her boys would not do such an errand speaks to their incorrigible irresponsibility, stunted emotional growth, and general spiritual apathy that makes them ne’er-do-wells. They make Mrs. May's life a living hell and speak to her own sense of failure, a wound that she tries to hide behind her obnoxious pride.
That they are ne’er-do-wells or sloths speaks to Mrs. May’s own failure as a mother, and as a woman of immense and supreme pride she does not want to be even implicitly reprimanded for her maternal failures. In fact, Mrs. May is a fool to deny her failures. Wise people know that failures can help us. They can be learning tools. They can be agents of change. Marc Maron said you haven't really learned anything in life until someone has handed you your ____ on a stick. Failure and humiliation can be wake up calls to get off our butts and make the necessary changes in our lives.
Because Mrs. May has never experienced real love, with herself and with her own children, she offers herself cheap consolation such as boasting to herself about how great she is. For example, to obscure the failure of her sons, she gloats by taking glory for Mr. Greenleaf’s sons. She thinks, “that if the Greenleaf boys had risen in the world it was because she had given their father employment when no one else would have him.”
Three. Address the theme of self-delusion in Mrs. May—how she has a perception of herself that contradicts her true self.
She believes she is doing Mr. Greenleaf a favor by keeping him employed when in fact “she has a thing for him.” But she could never admit this to herself. She cannot confront her loneliness and her hunger for love and companionship. Her boys treat her like garbage, and she doesn't know how to deal with that except through denial. But the wound inside her grows and festers day by day. She is an open wound, an open infection.
Additionally, she sees herself as someone in control and someone who is superior to the confederacy of dunces that surround her. Of course, her life is the opposite of the way she perceives herself.
In fact, she is a frightened woman who hides her fears behind her pride. Her fears are over her vulnerability, her disconnection to her sons, her disconnection to herself, and her precarious hold on reality. Her pride makes her a crazed human being.
Her pride prevents her from seeing the above. She needs help, yet sees herself as a composed, superior figure.
Part of her vulnerability is that her sons don’t respect her, or respect life at all for that matter. And she must bear witness to their disintegrating personalities, which eats away at her day by day.
In the story we read that when Mrs. May tells her oldest son Scofield to get a better insurance job, so he can marry a “nice girl,” he says, “Why Mamma, I’m not going to marry until you’re dead and gone and then I’m going to marry me some nice fat farm girl that can take over this place!” He's a demon child.
She’s afraid her sons “will marry trash and ruin everything I’ve done.” In fact, her sons already have souls of trash.
Later in the story, we find that Mr. Greenleaf’s wife, who engages in “prayer healing,” screams Jesus over and over so that Mrs. May “felt as if some violent unleashed force had broken out of the ground and was charging toward her.”
In Flannery O’Connor’s religious view, God charges us. He is an active participant in our salvation and some meet in the middle while others, like Mrs. May, recoil like snakes and run the other way.
Four. How does Mrs. May’s attitude reveal her to be a phony?
We read that she sees herself as “a good Christian woman with a large respect for religion, though she did not, of course, believe any of it was true.”
Religion for Mrs. May is a costume of respectability, a way to achieve outward appearances.
Five. What other sin afflicts Mrs. May?
In addition to pride and vanity, Mrs. May suffers from the sin of envy, the resentment toward others whom she perceives to enjoy a superior life to the one she leads.
For example, she resents O.T. and E.T., the twin sons of Mr. Greenleaf, who are “energetic” and ambitious and successful. However, Mrs. May dismisses their success by saying they were dependent on her kindness and World War II, which afforded them military benefits to go to the university.
Mrs. May sees the above as negative: The US taxpayers were paying for their French wives, she thinks.
They provide a stark contrast to her morally toxic sons, the youngest who is also sickly, a lugubrious “intellectual,” a term that is used as a pejorative.
Over and over, we see the sons are bitterly sarcastic and mean-spirited toward their mother.
We read that “Scofield only exasperated her beyond endurance but Wesley caused her real anxiety.” Wesley doesn’t like anything. He seems like a walking corpse who as a misanthrope hates the world.
Wesley complains how he hates his life and his surroundings, but he doesn’t go anywhere or lift a finger to change his situation.
He denigrates his mother. At one point, he says sarcastically to admonish his mother for harping on him finding a wife, “Well, why don’t you do something practical, woman? Why don’t you pray for me like Mrs. Greenleaf would?”
In another scene, Wesley says, “I wouldn’t milk a cow to save your soul from hell.”
The boys are sick of their mom saying, “When I die . . .” because they seem to wish she really would die and resent her for looking so healthy that death is too far away from her.
We also read they are demonically possessed in the scene where they argue at the kitchen table. We read that Scofield becomes grotesque: “His brother’s pleasant face had changed so that an ugly family resemblance showed between them.”
It appears Mrs. May’s sins have infected her children with her spiritual disease.
They suffer spiritual extinction or acedia and languish through life without purpose or meaning (their acedia or “slacker disease,” contrasts in some ways with consumerism disease in “The Country Husband”).
Furthermore, the sons suffer from the classic case of spoiled kid syndrome: children who resent the very parents that enable them and that never taught them responsibility or accountability.
Six. What motives drive Mrs. May’s insistence that the bull be killed?
She wants to spite Mr. Greenleaf’s twin sons because she envies them. They are the antithesis of her devil boys.
We read she has been “working continuously for fifteen years” and she is tired, but her fatigue is the real work she does in her life: spiting and envying others while puffing herself up with pride.
Seven. How does the religious allegory conclude the story?
When the bull pierces her heart, we read that she is like Dracula encountering the Cross: “She continued to stare straight ahead but the entire scene in front of her had changed—the tree line was a dark wound in a world that was nothing but sky—and she had the look of a person whose sight has been suddenly restored but who finds the light unbearable.”
Eight. What disease consumes Mrs. May?
Mrs. May’s disease is spiritual and consuming, eating her from the inside. She is rotting.
We can call her disease victimization.
The distinguishing characteristics of victimization are the following:
You always blame and scapegoat others for your misery rather than taking responsibility for your own actions.
You suffer from a superiority complex in which you see yourself as a genius surrounded by a Confederacy of Dunces when in fact your self-image is an illusion. Your grandeur points to your delusional state of mind.
Your sense of grandeur also points to your pride, which repels instruction, wisdom, and necessary change.
Your sense that you are a victim while observing others living a life that is better than yours consumes you with bitterness and resentment. These toxins eat you from the inside out.
You feel so invested in your victimization that evidence contrary to your delusions has no effect on you. You need to vindicate your bitter emotions by playing out your role as the victim.
The energy you devote to being a victim is GREATER than the energy you could use to improve your life.
The cause of your victimization is egotism or narcissism, the belief that you and your problems are special and burden you on a remarkable and grand scale.
Essay Option: Cause and Effect Analysis
Support, refute, or complicate the argument that O'Connor's religious faith, which is so evident in the story, does not compromise but in fact strengthens her cautionary tale about the dangers of pride and how those of us mired in pride are a "damned lot" doomed to languish in our own private hell.
The Sin of Pride in Flannery O’Connor’s “Greenleaf”
I’m teaching a story next semester by Flannery O’Connor. It’s called “Greenleaf” and it was included in The Best Short Stories of the Century edited by John Updike.
The story is about a sour woman, Mrs, May, a widow with two grown sons on a ranch, both of whom hate her guts and treat her miserably. Neither has a girlfriend or any kind of prospect for marriage.
Mrs. May is what we could call the Grandma Sour Pants archetype. She thinks she’s smarter and classier than everyone else.
She thinks everyone around her is getting a free ride while she gets an unfair shake.
She has no core morality other than to keep up appearances.
Her two convictions in life are her own vanity and the belief that she is a victim of an unfair universe that rewards idiots and punishes a superior person like herself.
Not surprisingly, she’s bitter and this bitterness consumes her from the inside out.
Bitterness on this colossal scale is a spiritual disease that eats us like corrosive battery acid.
It spreads to other members of the family. Mrs. May’s sons are clearly diseased as well.
The question is does she choose to be diseased by bitterness and misery or does the bitterness present itself as a compulsion?
The answer is probably a bit of both. She both chooses to be miserable and feels compelled to do so.
She’s made some decision along the way that being miserable is the appropriate response to her life circumstances.
She has the right to feel angry that her boys are grotesque shriveled souls who cannot love or find love in their lives.
She feels she has the right to be angry that her handyman Mr. Greenleaf has two sons who, after getting out of the army, went to college and did well for themselves, even marrying some French women.
She got the bad end of the bargain in her analysis.
But she’s blind to the fact that her Enemy isn’t life’s circumstances but her own moral hypocrisy, narcissism, entitlement, and pride.
She seems unwilling or unable to make an honest critique of herself.
She appears smart enough for analysis. The problem is her emotional state.
O’Connor, a Catholic writer who writes from a very strong Catholic point of view, sees Mrs. May’s problem from the Sin of Pride.
Pride creates a lot of problems. One that stands out is we’d rather be miserable than admit we’re wrong in our actions and/or our disposition toward life.
Mrs. May would rather be miserable than admit she spoiled her children. She enabled them and in doing so they lack the maturity to love. They are impotent.
One of my favorite characters from television is George Costanza from Seinfeld. There’s a scene where he’s in the diner telling Jerry he can’t stand his girlfriend and he can’t stand being in a relationship.
Pride as a disease has five distinguishing characteristics.
Number one, you asserted this elevated grandeur or superiority about yourself based on a false premise: wealth, youth, beauty, economic and social class, materialism, taste, your intellect.
Number two, you feel that you are a victim, that all your problems are the world’s fault because you’re a misunderstood genius surrounded by a Confederacy of Dunces. Additionally, your problems are special and unique and no one can understand them. No one can feel your victimization as powerfully as you can.
Number three, you are blind to the fact that you are your own worst enemy. Rather than take accountability, you scapegoat others for all your problems.
Number four, your pride prevents you from admitting wrongdoing or making mistakes so you’d rather suffer in your pride than come clean.
Number five, your pride is so entrenched that you don’t come clean and admit you’re wrong until you’ve hit rock bottom and have had your butt handed to you on a stick.
