Critical Thinking
In my Man’s Search for Meaning course, I must neither be advocate nor adversary of Viktor Frankl. I must teach my students how to think for themselves. This means I must help them differentiate between informed opinions based on the consideration of counterarguments and bogus opinions based on the mindless habit of embracing the “herd’s” collective beliefs.
I must teach logical fallacies such as the either/or fallacy and show how arguments can’t always arrive at a black and white conclusion. When the world is no longer seen through a child’s black and white template, I explain to my students, we find ourselves in a world that is colored in gray and rich in nuance, paradox, and irony.
I must teach Aristotelian dialect, the back and forth between opposing views and show how opposing arguments can both have compelling points, making it impossible to say that one side of a debate will enjoy a “slam dunk” victory over another.
Having taught Man’s Search for Meaning for over twenty years, I find myself suffering a contradiction: On one hand, I’m very confident teaching Frankl’s book in the context of a Critical Thinking class. As an intellectual exercise, teaching Frankl’s book is something I can handle with a feeling of assuredness. However, as a book to apply to my life, I find I am somewhat lost and confused.
This befuddled state was underscored a couple of years ago when one of my students, Conner Patrick, showed an absolute disdain for my prized book. What made Conner’s objections to Man’s Search for Meaning particularly devastating is that in my close to thirty years of teaching he was by far my best writer. He was an English major who by his own admission had no career plans. Only eighteen years old, he had an immaculate prose style. He wasn’t one of those English major types who try to impress others by using “big vocabulary words.” Rather, Conner had this way of writing so that when I read his essays I imagined him walking happily through a boundless orchard of Language Trees, and he simply plucked the perfect word, like low-hanging fruit, as the word suited his writing purposes. His writing was vastly superior to mine. As I once said to him, “I have a V-6 under my hood. It serves me well enough. But you’ve got a V-12. I can’t match you.” I also told him I’d be shocked if he didn’t eventually become a published writer.
Conner was big, about six feet two inches and weighed well over 250 pounds. He wore faded jeans, hiking boots, flannel shirts, and a he had a scraggly beard that partially concealed freckles on his cherubic cheeks. He wore a wool herringbone golfer’s cap over his curly reddish-brown hair. Most of the time, he showed up to class with a guitar. He had a generally friendly persona and socialized with the other students though sometimes I’d catch his blue eyes narrow at others as if to reveal what I imagined to be contempt for the human race.
He would often stay after class, and we’d talk about his essays or about his sister Jennifer who had taken the same class from me a year earlier. In one of his essays, he wrote a narrative featuring a bald football coach hanging out with his high school buddies in a bar. The vivid description of the coach and the manner in which he spoke made it abundantly clear that he was a variation of a younger version of myself. It was clear that Conner had gleaned bits and pieces of personal anecdotes I had told to the class, and he had synthesized them to create a character who was in many ways my younger doppelgänger. Other students read the essay and got a kick out of it. The point is that Conner knew I respected his intelligence, and he felt comfortable making a jibe at me in his essay. He was also comfortable disagreeing with me.
This became evident after my first Viktor Frankl lecture in which I outlined the final “capstone” essay assignment: Students were to argue that either Frankl made a convincing case that meaning was the answer to the human problem of the “existential crisis” or that his book failed to convince them of this claim. After class, Conner waited for the other students to leave. Still sitting behind his desk, he said, “You don’t really believe in this shit, do you?”
“What?”
He looked impatient with my inadequate response. “Come on, man. You know you don’t believe in this shit.”
To my surprise, I knew immediately that part of me agreed with him. But contrary to this understanding, I said, “Well actually, I tend to be more agnostic when it comes to the subject of meaning.”
“Seriously?”
He was holding Frankl’s book in his giant hands and flipping the pages while looking at them with a sneer. “Take out the impressive Holocaust narrative and what are you left with? Just a bunch of homilies about positive thinking. It’s a bunch of Chicken Soup for the Soul crapola.”
I didn’t mind Conner disagreeing with me or Frankl. What I minded is that he seemed to be questioning my book selection. I had, according to his judgment, selected tripe and was making the students write their final essay on a book full of clichés. I felt I had to defend myself and explain that I had a deep personal attachment to Man’s Search for Meaning.
“I’m not going to lie to you, Conner,” I said. “When I first read Frankl at the age of eighteen, the part where he is marching with the prisoners at dawn and he is comforted by the spirit of his wife, I wept like a baby for like five hours.”
Conner shrugged his shoulders, winced, and said, “I’m glad you got something out of it, and Frankl seems like a great guy. But all the stuff about finding meaning is bullshit. You know as well as I do there is no meaning.”
“Is that what I’m supposed to tell my six-year-old daughters?”
“You can tell them the truth or you can tell them lies. It’s your choice.”
“I want my daughters to grow up, get educated, find meaning, and find love in their lives. That gives me meaning. Does that make me stupid?”
“Except that you’re not talking about meaning. You’re talking about survival and self-preservation. The love for your daughters is instinctive. I get that. But there’s no meaning as Frankl writes about it.”
“So you think Frankl is delusional?”
“Of course he’s delusional. That doesn’t mean I don’t sympathize with him. Look, I get it. He went through horrendous shit, and he had to make himself believe that all his suffering was meaningful. I would have done the same thing. It probably preserved his sanity to make himself believe that, but at the end of the day his philosophy is just another mind-fuck. He had to make himself believe he had found meaning. Otherwise, he would have gone crazy. Most people do that. It’s a coping mechanism. It’s not meaning.”
It wasn’t just Conner’s blunt words. It was his expression as he looked at me, as if to say he was certain beyond a shadow of a doubt that I was Conner’s kindred spirit and therefore I had to be in complete agreement with him. His expression was so convincing that I felt I was being swayed by his argument by not just his words but by some invisible force that I could not resist.
If you could only imagine how disconcerting this was. As an instructor with three decades of experience, I feel I should be a rock, a man of solid conviction who can stand up to disagreement. And usually I am. But in the presence of Conner’s reproach, I felt I was standing on shifting sand.
Then he said, “Why are you teaching this crap? Does it make you feel better to stuff meaning down your students’ throats?”
“This is a critical thinking class. I want students to think for themselves.”
“But you’re a hypocrite. You tell us to think for ourselves, yet you can’t even do it yourself. You’re letting your emotions cloud your judgment here. Look, I get you love Frankl. He was a great man. But you love him so much you can’t think straight. You tell us that to be critical thinkers we have to be dispassionate and remove ourselves emotionally from whatever subject we’re addressing. But you can’t do that with Frankl. Take away your admiration for his heroism and your fond memories of crying for five hours when he talked about his love for his wife and what do you have left? A book full of clichés about finding meaning. And you know as well as I do there is no meaning. All the suffering we go through is meaningless.”
And then to make his point, he explained that his mother was very religious, and when he and his sister were little his mother felt called by God to be a foster parent for babies whose mothers had abused drugs and alcohol.
“Ever since I was a little kid,” he said, “there have been crack babies in my house. They don’t get better. They’re fucked up for the rest of their lives. They sleep all night with their eyes open. Some of them squawk like prehistoric birds. They’ve got permanent brain damage. It’s a nightmare. And what has my mother gained? The babies grow up to be permanently disabled. Many of them can’t even talk. And because my mother felt called upon by God to do this mission of futility, she neglected Jennifer and me. In fact, she relied on us to help her with these kids. That’s how we spent our childhood. Day and night, we had to tend to these squawking babies. To this day, Jennifer and I both resent our mother. We’re both dying to move out. Neither of us want children. Honestly, this higher purpose my mother has embraced is not something Frankl should be proud of. I always thought my mother either had this pathological need to do what she does, or it is part of her ego to show her religious friends that she is better than them. Or a bit of both. Bottom-line, I’ve grown up dealing with a bunch of bullshit in the name of meaning.”
I went home depressed and defeated. I had nothing to refute Conner with after class. I felt I needed to process what he had said and come up with a response the next time I saw him. Or better yet, without telling the students Conner’s personal details, I wanted to bring up Conner’s disagreement with Frankl and show possible ways to counter that disagreement. The next class meeting, I asked Conner if I could do just that, and he approved. So the next class I presented the argument that Conner had made.
“Conner wants us to ignore Frankl’s heroism for a moment and analyze his claims about finding meaning through embracing a life of suffering. One, Conner claims that much of the suffering in this world is senseless and meaningless. Two, Conner claims that we just make up meaning to make ourselves feel better. Let’s concede to Conner that much suffering in this world is indeed senseless, such as the Great Tsunami that killed a quarter of a million people. But let’s challenge Conner’s second claim, that what we call meaning is a delusion. What we’re really talking about, according to Conner, are coping mechanisms, not meaning.”
I looked in the back of the room at Conner. He was apparently enjoying his devil’s advocate role evidenced by the beaming smile on his face.
“Conner says there is no meaning, but I would argue we all exist on a Meaning Scale with spiritual decrepitude at one end of the spectrum and flourishing on the other. Let’s take an extreme example of an addict. If a man becomes a drug addict, he is in a condition of decrepitude or moral dissolution. He has burned bridges with his friends and family, and he lives only for himself. As an addict, he loves the things he’s addicted to more than he loves people. His life is without meaning. Everyone with me so far?”
The students nodded.
“At the other end of the spectrum,” I continued, “there are people who find a passion for their life work and this passion combined with discipline brings out their higher self. They have found meaning, or at least, relatively speaking, more meaning than the addict who lives holed up somewhere in isolation. So when we find something that we work hard at, we flourish in that discipline, and to flourish is to find meaning.”
I looked at Conner whose lips curled into a sneer. He said, “It’s great that people flourish, but don’t confuse flourishing with meaning. I know a young evangelist who is amazing at what he does. He’s only sixteen years old, and talks about God and makes people convert to his religion. That’s his so-called meaning. But this evangelist has an older brother, a former evangelist now atheist, who travels the world explaining why he converted to atheism. He helps lots of religious people disavow their faith and become atheists. Both of these brothers are flourishing in what they do, but they both can’t be right. They are diametrically opposed to one another. At the end of the day, they do what they do because it makes them feel good. Therefore, meaning is not some objective reality. It’s a fantasy that energizes people. In other words, it’s complete bullshit.”
His arms were crossed and he was grinning at me with triumph. After a pause, he made it clear that he wasn’t finished with me yet. He said, “There’s a second problem with your argument. Contradicting the very principles you’ve drilled into us all semester, your argument smacks of the either-or fallacy. You’ve presented us with an over simplistic black and white universe where people are either decaying into a state of mental disintegration or they are blossoming in their craft. In fact, both processes can occur simultaneously. I know of many famous writers who flourished in the craft of writing novels while suffering the effects of alcoholism. People are complicated, Mr. McMahon. You, me, everyone in this room. We can both self-destruct and flourish at the same time. You’re as smart as I am. You know this as well as I do, but you’re too emotionally invested in Viktor Frankl. Who wouldn’t be? Who wants to believe that against our own will we’ve been delivered into a world without meaning and purpose? Who wants to believe that all we can do is fiddle around with entertainments and hobbies that will keep us occupied during our lifetime before we’re buried into the ground?”
I had that dizzying sensation that I was on shifting sand again. I felt myself being pulled into Conner’s meaningless universe. In a panic, I relied on one of my canned arguments based on the 1971 movie Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. In the DVD extra, there is an interview with Gene Wilder. He explains that the movie is about teaching us boundaries. Flailing for life support, I said, “Boundaries give us meaning. Boundaries teach us discipline. Boundaries save us from excess. Children whose parents teach them boundaries are happier than children whose parents don’t. You see, Conner, boundaries point toward meaning.”
Conner shook his head. “Boundaries are important. We’ve evolved to learn how to create boundaries as a survival mechanism. But they don’t constitute meaning.”
Still flailing for life support, I said, “Take away meaning and what’s left? A nihilistic free-for-all? A Darwinian nightmare of survival for the fittest where the strong kill and cripple the weak?”
With an insouciant smile, Conner said, “Calm down, Mr. McMahon. Everything’s going to be okay. We don’t submit to raw Darwinism because that’s not in our self-interests. We’ve evolved to live in cooperative societies. That too is a survival mechanism, but it’s not meaning.”
“So we’re just products of evolution? Is that it?”
“Pretty much. Can’t handle it, Mr. McMahon?”
“If what you’re saying is true, the majority of the human race would go into despair and kill themselves.”
“Not at all. The majority of the human race delude themselves in a variety of ways, including the stupid belief that there’s meaning. Books like Viktor Frankl’s add to the human race’s collective delusion. I’m cool with it. If people want to believe in Santa Claus for the rest of their life, more power to them.”
“Can I ask you a personal question, Mr. Patrick?”
“Go for it.”
“Why are you going to college?”
“Something to do.”
“You mean you have no plan?”
“Not really.”
“Wouldn’t you rather have a plan? I mean, if you had to choose between having a plan and not having a plan, isn’t having a plan the better option?”
“Not necessarily. I know lots of students who majored in whatever, and just before they were about to graduate, they realized they hated their major. Their life sucks. A lot of plans are misguided. A lot of times, having a plan is worse than having no plan at all.”
I felt like Conner and I were engaged in the medieval sport of jousting back and forth, and so far he had stabbed me with his sword repeatedly in my midsection. I instinctively brushed my hand against the front of my moist shirt, but it wasn’t blood. It was sweat.
“But having a plan,” I said, “gives us a goal for our future. And goals help us live our lives more fully. As Frankl likes to quote from Nietzsche, ‘He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How.’”
“He who has a Why may in fact be deluded. Fascist autocrats and despots have a Why, and they are patently evil. As far as living life more fully, that’s a good thing to strive for. But it isn’t meaning. It’s just living in the present. And who needs to read a book to know the obvious? Truth be told, Mr. McMahon, you’ve given us a book of platitudes and clichés.”
By this time, I could feel the other students were siding with Conner. They were smiling at their hero as if he were about to mount a mutiny against the captain of the ship. Conner, too, sensed what was going on. He stood up and addressed the class.
“Okay, guys, the party’s over. Mr. McMahon and I had this whole thing planned all along. It was a rehearsed script. It was to show you guys how Socratic dialogue really works.”
Students were chiming in by saying it was one of the most amazing classes they had ever been in. One student said he regretted not videotaping it on his phone and uploading it on YouTube. Another student said that Conner and I were remarkable actors who should make Hollywood movies.
The class ended. The students shuffled out of the room one by room. Conner remained in his seat.
“What the hell?” I said. “You had your teeth in my jugular. You were destroying my arguments one by one. But then you bailed me out. Why did you do that?”
“Look, man. I didn’t know shit before I took your class. You taught me all these critical thinking skills. I wasn’t about to take the weapons you gave me and throw you under the bus. I don’t like very many people, but I like you, so that’s just how it played out.”
“Thirty years of teaching, and I’ve never lost an argument. You changed all that. I had my ass handed to me on a stick.”
“Which means it’s time to confess the truth. I’m right, and Frankl is wrong. Come on, man, admit it.”
“I can’t. I mean, you make a lot of good points, but I refuse to give up on meaning.”
“Come on, man, I saved your ass.”
“What can I say, Conner? You’re one of the smartest people I’ve ever known. You’ll probably be published someday. You’ll probably live a life of glory I’ve only dreamed about. But I can’t say you’re right just because you spared me humiliation. I sincerely have a kernel of faith that there might be meaning. If I said anything else, I’d be a liar.”
“Fair enough. But watch what you say next time in class because I’m going to kick your ass.”
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