What is the meaning of life? In his marvelous book, Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl tells us this is the wrong question to ask. Rather one should ask, “What is the meaning of your life?”
From his earliest days, Viktor Frankl showed the sparkle of genius. At age three he decided to become a doctor. In his teens he was intrigued by psychology and philosophy. While still in high school he wrote a letter to Sigmund Freud which led to a continuing correspondence. Freud was so impressed with the young man that he sent one of Frankl's manuscripts to the International Journal of Psychoanalysis which published it. His first academic article published at age sixteen.
Not surprisingly, Frankl embarked on a career in psychiatry. Graduating with an MD in 1930, he started his career at the Steinhof Psychiatric Hospital in Vienna. In 1937 he went into private practice.
All during this time Frankl was developing his theory of logotherapy, the idea that treating psychological problems could be best achieved by being future oriented. By teaching his patients to be goal driven. To find meaning in their lives. In an afterword to his book, Man's Search for Meaning, the Philosopher of Medicine William J. Winslade contrasts this with the traditional psychotherapies of Freud and Adler which had focused on the patient's past, sometimes called "depth psychology." Frankl promoted what he called "height psychology." Looking forward, not backwards.
Frankl had already worked on a manuscript on logotherapy when he faced an existential crisis. Austria was taken over by the Nazis in the Anschluss of 1938. Persecution of Jews was on the rise when Frankl took a position with the Rothschild Hospital in Vienna as head of neurology. According to Wikipedia, "he helped numerous patients avoid the Nazi euthanasia program that targeted the mentally disabled." But the writing was on the wall when Frankl was offered an immigration visa to go to the United States. His parents were overjoyed but Frankl hesitated. As he puts it, he was plagued by questions.
Could I really afford to leave my parents alone to face their fate, to be sent, sooner or later, to a concentration camp, or even to a so-called extermination camp? Where did my responsibility lie? (Preface to the 1992 edition, xv)
Should he escape to freedom to "foster my brain child, logotherapy?" Or should he "concentrate my duties as a real child, the child of my parents who had to do whatever he could to protect them?"
He struggled with these questions waiting for a sign when he noticed a slab of marble on a table in his father's house. His father explained he had taken it from the site of the largest Viennese synagogue which had been burned to the ground by the Nazis. The marble slab had just one letter carved on it. His father had taken it because it was part of the tablets with the Ten Commandments on it. The letter stood for one of them. "Which one?" he asked. His father replied, "Honor thy father and thy mother that thy days may be long upon the land."
Frankl had his sign. He let his visa lapse and stayed with his parents. In September 1942 they were all arrested. They were separated and Frankl spent the remainder of the war, three long years, at four different camps: Theresienstadt, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Kaufering, and Turkheim.
After liberation, Frankl wrote A Psychologist Experiences the Concentration Camp over a nine day period in 1946. An English edition was published in 1959 as Man's Search for Meaning.
The book is divided into two sections: Experiences in a Concentration Camp and Logotherapy in a Nutshell. But while the first and longer segment is a fascinating insider's account of living in such horrifying conditions, and while Frankl delves into the psychology of the prisoner, I found the second part to be more substantive and revealing.
Frankl presents a profound argument for free will. Is it true that "man is no more than a product of many conditional and environmental factors?" he asks. (page 65) "Is man the accidental product of these?" He considers the "singular world of the concentration camp." Surely in such conditions, a man is stripped of all control over his life. But, Frankl asserts, "the experiences of camp life show that man does have a choice of action."
Man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind, even in such terrible conditions of psychic and physical stress. (65)
He quotes Dostoevski "There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings."
These words frequently came to my mind after I became acquainted with those martyrs whose behavior in camp, whose suffering and death, bore witness to the fact that the last inner freedom cannot be lost. (66)
The whole of the first section of the book is about how men coped with the ordeal of the concentration camp. In such conditions we still face choices. "He may forget his human dignity and become no more than an animal." or he may "add deeper meaning to his life."
Ayn Rand portrayed this ethos of dignity and even hope in the face of horrific and potentially soul-destroying conditions in her first novel, We the Living. The heroine, Kira, struggles throughout the novel against the horrors and corruption of life in Soviet Russia. She falls in love with Leo who starts out with noble ideals and a noble soul. But as Frankl argues in his book, we ultimately face a choice.
In the novel, Leo falls in with corrupt and dangerous men, something she begs him not to do. He sees this as the only way to deal with a corrupt system. Kira's nobility of soul becomes an affront to his betrayal. He grows increasingly resentful of her and treats her cruelly. One commentator on the book, Onkar Ghate, calls calls Leo's decline a "spiritual murder-suicide" (The Plight of Leo Kovalensky in Essays on Ayn Rand's We the Living, 323) but it is really a choice. Leo chooses to give up his soul. Kira, on the other hand, makes a different choice. And even at the very end when she tries to escape from Russia and is shot and dying, she thinks to herself, "You’re a good soldier, Kira Argounova, you’re a good soldier and now’s the time to prove it… Now… Just one effort… One last effort…" (We the Living) and as she lays dying, Rand writes:
Life had been, if only because she had known it could be, and she felt it now as a hymn without sound, deep under the little hole that dripped red drops into the snow, deeper than that from which the red drops came. A moment or an eternity—did it matter? Life, undefeated, existed and could exist.
She smiled, her last smile, to so much that had been possible.
Kira is the fictional representation of the indomitable spirit that Frankl writes about.
"It is a peculiarity of man," writes Frankl, "that he can only live by looking to the future." (73) He goes on to describe one particular day. He had limped for many kilometers to a work site with other prisoners. It was bitterly cold and his feet were blistered from his worn out shoes. He thought about immediate needs and plans—"How could I get a piece of wire to replace the fragment which served as one of my shoelaces?"—and so on, but he "became disgusted" that he had to put his mind "to think only of such trivial things." So he forced his mind to think of other things. In his mind's eye he saw himself presenting a lecture "on the psychology of the concentration camp!"
By this method I succeeded somehow in rising above the situation, above the sufferings of the moment, and I observed them as if they were already of the past. (73)
He tells of a couple of men who were feeling suicidal. They had nothing to live for any more. One was reminded that he had a "child who he adored and who was waiting for him in a foreign land." (79) The other was a scientist who had yet to finish a series of books he had started. When these things were brought to awareness, both found a reason to live.
Interestingly, Frankl occasionally encountered small kindnesses from a guard. On the other hand there were the capos—prisoners who worked as overseers for the Nazis. Some of these were among the cruelest of task masters. There were, he concluded, only "two races of men" in the world, "the decent man" and "the indecent man." (86) "No group consists entirely of decent or indecent people," he goes on. You'll find both types everywhere.
The first section of the book is a rich tapestry of the lives of ordinary men put into extraordinary circumstances and how they responded to these challenges. Challenges that sometimes made these men extraordinary.
The second part includes a chapter called Logotherapy in a Nutshell. And a nutshell it is, just 37 pages. His original writings on logotherapy comprised twenty volumes.
Frankl recalls an American doctor asking him if he was a psychoanalyst. He replied that he was a psychotherapist and had his own school of thought which he called logotherapy. The doctor asked if he would explain the difference between psychoanalysis and logotherapy in one sentence. Sure, Frankl replied, but first tell me what is the essence of psychoanalysis. "During psychoanalysis," the doctor replied, "the patient must lie down on a couch and tell you things which sometimes are very disagreeable to tell."
Frankl replied: "In logotherapy the patient may remain sitting erect but he must hear things which sometimes are very disagreeable to hear." (98)
Although this was meant to be facetious, there is, Frankl writes, an important truth here. Logotherapy is "less retrospective and less introspective." It "focuses rather on the future."
The Greek word logos, he writes, "denotes 'meaning.'" Logotherapy "focuses on the meaning of human existence as well as on man's search for such a meaning." (98-99)
But Frankl is not talking about some abstract concept like the meaning of life in a general sense. His is a very individualized approach and each man or woman has to discover his own meaning in life. It can be a person, a career, an aspiration, or a dream. Though Frankl himself is a deeply religious man and his Jewish faith has a profound personal meaning for Frankl, each individual is different. Unique.
He makes the profound observation that
Mental health is based on a certain degree of tension, the tension between what one has already achieved and what one still ought to accomplish, or the gap between what one is and what one should become. (104-105)
He goes on to argue that "it is a dangerous misconception of mental hygiene to assume that what man needs in the first place is equilibrium or, as it is called in biology, 'homeostasis,' i.e., a tensionless state." In this respect he reflects the view of Isaiah Berlin that Utopias are inherently static and hence boring.
In the TV series The Good Place, some four recently deceased people find themselves in a way station to heaven, a purgatory if you will, but eventually find their way to the actual heaven. They find, to their chagrin, that this utopia of heaven is boring as hell, so to speak. There is no tension. Nothing to strive for. And given the opportunity to redesign heaven, one of the answers they arrive at is the option to choose oblivion, merging one's atoms with the universe.
Frankl puts it this way:
What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him. (105)
Yet many people experience what Frankl calls an "existential vacuum." "They lack the awareness of a meaning worth living for. They are haunted by the experience of their inner emptiness, a void within themselves." (106) A person caught in this void sometimes see a false dichotomy, "he either wishes to do what other people do (conformism) or he does what other people wish him to do (totalitarianism)."
Frankl notes that in surveys of his students, 25 percent of his European students showed "a more-or-less marked degree of existential vacuum. Among my American students it was not 25 but 60 percent." This lack of a sense of meaning in one's life is a widespread and serious problem.
But the logotherapist cannot spell out what a person's meaning in life should be.
For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day, and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person's life at a given moment. (108)
The meaning of one's life is fluid and dynamic. It is constantly changing, never static. "Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out a concrete assignment which demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor his life repeated." (109)
Each man, he avers, "can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible. Thus, logotherapy sees in responsibleness the very essence of human existence."
"That is why," Frankl continues, "the 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." (110)
Contrary to utilitarianism which argues that the essence of man is the seeking of pleasure and avoidance of pain, Frankl suggests that man's main concern is "to see a meaning in his life." (113) But, he adds, this does not mean that suffering is necessary to find meaning. "I only insist that meaning is possible even in spite of suffering." Suffering should be avoided if possible. "To suffer unnecessarily is masochistic rather than heroic."
Pleasure is, and must remain, a side-effect or by-product, and is destroyed and spoiled to the degree to which it is made a goal in itself. (122)
With meaning in your life, pleasure happens naturally, but it cannot be forced.
Frankl relates several examples of logotherapy in action and it is, to some extent, a very Socratic process. Logotherapy is not didactic. It does not tell you what to think. It tells you how to think. By asking questions, the therapist gets into the patient's psyche. Learns what trouble are ailing him. And by further questioning, gets the patient to discover his own meaning in life.
Frankl is a very perceptive observer of the human scene and of society in general. Reflecting on the existential vacuum in society, Frankl writes:
The existential vacuum which is the mass neurosis of the present time can be described as a private and personal form of nihilism; for nihilism can be defined as the contention that being has no meaning. (129)
"There is," he writes, "a danger inherent in the teaching of man's 'nothingness,' the theory that man is nothing but the result of biological, psychological and sociological conditions, or the product of heredity and environment." (130) Such a philosophy, Frankl continues, fosters a "neurotic fatalism" that can make a person believe "that he is a pawn and victim of outside influences or inner circumstances."
It all comes back to Frankl's case for free will. Certainly he acknowledges that "a human being is a finite thing and his freedom is restricted." But, he adds, what human beings have "is not freedom from conditions, but it is freedom to take a stand toward the conditions."
In particular, Frankl opposes what he calls pan-determinism, the idea that human actions are fully determined. I conclude with these words from Frankl:
Man is not fully conditioned and determined but rather determines himself whether he gives in to conditions or stands up to them. In other words, man is ultimately self-determining. Man does not simply exist but always decides what his existence will be, what he will become in the next moment.
Man is capable of changing the world for the better if possible, and of changing himself for the better if necessary. (131)
Postscript
Although this edition of The Pendulum has been late in coming, I have not been idle. I read five books in January and published two essays on my other blog, The Jolly Libertarian. I have critiqued several chapters of a novel for which I am an alpha reader. (The final three chapters arrived yesterday and I’ll be looking at those shortly.)
The five books I read are:
How to Be Right in a World Gone Wrong by James O’Brien
Knots and Crosses by Ian Rankin (fiction)
The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure by Greg Lukianoff & Jonathan Haidt
City Limits by James Peron (fiction)
Free Speech in Canada: A beginner's guide from ancient roots to current controversies by Christine Van Geyn & Josh Dehaas
I’m currently reading Socrates by Paul Johnson, a brilliant biography.
Planned articles include
a review of City Limits which is an hilarious comedy with a serious side. The author, James Peron, is a well known Ayn Rand fan who had a lot of connections with prominent libertarians including Barbara and Nathaniel Branden.
Part 2 of Wokeism: Pro and Con – this will look at the con side referencing The Coddling of the American Mind as well as Michael Huemer’s Progressive Myths.
Modern Socratics – a look at Socratic thinking based on Johnson’s biography and a look at two modern day Socratic thinkers: Jan Helfeld, author of The Socratic Assassin, who writes from an Objectivist/libertarian orientation, and James O’Brien, author of How to Be Right in a World Gone Wrong, who writes from a liberal perspective.
a review of Whisper of the Heart, a animated film from Japan’s Studio Ghibli. If you’ve never seen a film from this studio, I highly recommend this film and the brilliant My Neighbor Totoro.
Brief Notes on Donald Trump and Canada
As a Canadian and a libertarian I am appalled by Donald Trump’s assault on Canada. His tariffs come into effect on Feb. 4th. 10% on energy and 25% on everything else. It is my hope that the pain caused to Americans by his ill-conceived and economically illiterate plan will cause a backlash in America that will see him retreat from this stupid endeavor. (Postscript: On Feb. 3 the stock markets started to tank in response to the impending tariffs. Many Americans who would be adversely affected, including Republicans, made their views known. And after consultations with Canada’s Prime Minister, Trump put the tariffs on hold for another month. The backlash in America prevailed.)
But it will have one positive side effect if it makes Canada abolish its own intra-provincial trade barriers. Currently it is much easier for many Canadian companies to export to the United States than to another province. And another positive side effect would be fostering the development of more trading partners and a lesser reliance on trade with the United States. I’d even favor Canada becoming part of the European Economic Union.
While some of my friends in the libertarian community are avid Trump fans and supporters, I see him as a narcissistic megalomaniac who wants to turn America into an imperialist power with himself as Emperor. His lust for Greenland and the Panama Canal as well as his desire to turn Canada into the 51st state have imperialism written all over them.
For an intelligent critical account of the Trump administration I highly recommend Robert Reich’s substack page. While occasional essays are paid subscriber only, most are free. Reich writes frequently and cogently. I don’t agree with all he says but his observations and critiques are worth a read. It’s his contention that Trump is trying to turn America into an oligarchy, rule by the rich.
Links of Interest
Why Canada Will NOT Become the 51st State – a detailed look at the cultural, psychological and legal barriers to Canada becoming the 51st state.
The Protectionist Gambit – a look at the folly of protectionism and who it hurts.
Knots and Crosses by Ian Rankin - my review at Goodreads. This is Rankin’s first John Rebus novel. A bit unsettling but an entertaining read. I’ll probably read a few more.
Robert Reich’s Substack Page – the link is to a recent post reprinting former Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretiens’ open letter to Donald Trump in The Globe and Mail. I think Chretien’s view reflects the majority view in Canada and I agree with most of it. I don’t support the call for countervailing duties which is the wrong approach to dealing with American tariffs. It sounds like tough talk but will hurt Canadians more than it hurts Americans.
Fake Nous - Michael Huemer’s Substack Page - also a blog I recommend. Huemer is a libertarian anarchist who writes well and presents a solid common sense approach to ideas. I don’t agree with all he writes but agree with a substantial amount of it. Link is to his most recent post. Many posts are available free though some are paid subscriber only.
Isaiah Berlin on Utilitarianism - Berlin argues that pure utilitarianism based on the pleasure/pain dichotomy will lead to a technocratic form of totalitarianism.
Currently visiting my son in Regina and flying home tomorrow.
Cheers
Marco
Thank you for the information about Frankl. I read Man's Search for Meaning when I was 11 and have been curious about logotherapy ever since.