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.
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.”
“To be or not to be, that is the question.”
Two. Don’t use pretentious, grandiose, overwrought, bloated, self-regarding, clichéd, unintentionally funny openings:
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?
Introducing Quotations in Your Research Paper
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.
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 |
once |
until |
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.
Principles of Subordination and Coordination
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