Chapter 11
The Parable of the Man Who Over-Thought His Way Out of Life
Viktor Frankl is correct to warn us of the “existential vacuum,” an emptiness that makes us desperate and resort to mindless consumerism, a condition that turns us into debased creatures, more like animals than humans. Whenever I think of the human being as Sated, Mindless Beast, I am reminded of a delicious passage from a Tobias Wolff short story, “Smorgasbord,” in which the narrator describes the patrons of an all-you-can-eat buffet stuffing themselves:
They ducked their heads low to receive their food, and while they chewed it up they looked around suspiciously and circled their plates with their forearms. A big family to our left was the worst. There was something competitive and desperate about them; they seemed to be eating their way toward a condition where they would never have to eat again. You would have thought they were refuges from a great hunger, that outside these walls the land was afflicted with drought and barrenness. I felt a kind of desperation myself; I felt like I was growing emptier with every bite I took.
Wolff observes a painful irony between the feeders’ overeating accompanying a state of spiritual evisceration. History is full of such lost souls, those mindless consumers of bread and circus, who warn us to flee their empty existence and seek refuge in the life of the mind, the world of the intellect, in which we try to free ourselves through honest self-inventory and analysis, but often I fear that I, and others, error in the extreme of thinking, becoming too pensive for our own good.
I know people who have never read Man’s Search for Meaning, who don’t contemplate meaning or happiness and are not mindless consumers falling prey to the “existential vacuum.” They are so busy living a life rich with connection to their family, friends, and community that they have never bothered to ponder philosophy or meaning of life questions. They may not qualify as having a life of meaning, as Frankl defines it, but they are good, decent, happy people. And I would not disturb them from their rich life by vexing them with my existential questions.
Often I worry that I over-think meaning and that this can be dangerous. To confirm my anxieties, one of my students, from China, wrote about the topic of over-thinking meaning in his Viktor Frankl essay, which focused on a story that the student’s father had told him. The essay, “The Man Who Over-Thought His Way Out of Life” was about a young man who asked God the meaning of life. God told the young man to go to the sea and lift the rocks. God promised him that eventually he’d find underneath one of the rocks the answer he was looking for. The man lifted millions of rocks over the decades until he was a hundred years old. There was only one rock remaining by the seaside. At last, this must be the rock, the old man thought to himself. But when he lifted the rock, there was no answer beneath it. The old man looked into the sky, summoned God and told him he had done as God had instructed him, but he had found nothing. “Because,” God said, “there is no meaning, you idiot.” Laughing manically, God said, “I tricked you!”
Knowing he had wasted his entire existence on a fool’s errand, the hundred-year-old man shook his fist at God, cursed at him, and died.
I’m confidant Viktor Frankl would agree with the fable’s moral, that meaning is not an abstraction to be pursued but is part of the life we live and that the man who spent his life lifting stones failed to live any kind of life at all.
Teaching Man’s Search for Meaning, I fear I over-think meaning and stand at the coastline, millions of rocks upturned yet with more unanswered questions than I had before I started the venture. I am so lost, so mired in the abyss of ignorance that surely I am unworthy of teaching Frankl’s masterpiece.
Alan Watts pointed out that "meaning" is a linguistic construct and really should only be applied to language, namely words. I would say that the truest, clearest answer to "what is the meaning of life?" is "life is its own meaning." Just as the meaning of a flower is the flower itself - it is its own meaning.
I fear I reveal my mystical-artistic bias here.
Posted by: jonnybardo | 02/14/2014 at 01:40 PM
By the way, this chapter reminded me of the opening scene of Stardust Memories, which is probably my second favorite Woody Allen movie after Annie Hall.
Posted by: jonnybardo | 02/14/2014 at 01:45 PM