Words&Dirt

Summary:

Viktor E. Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning is a treasure trove of humanistic wisdom. Part One describes Frankl’s experiences in several concentration camps during World War II, including the notorious Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. As a gifted psychiatrist who had already begun to formulate his own flavor of existential therapy, Frankl entered the camps as both an unwilling participant and sober observer of the uniquely horrific aspects of human nature that camp life brought forth. Incredibly, Frankl was also able to identify and appreciate fleeting moments of natural beauty, humor, insight, and acts of kindness that punctuated “the abyss which is laid open by the concentration camp” (87).

Part Two summarizes Frankl’s theory of “Logotherapy,” a philosophical framework and therapeutic modality that emphasizes each individual’s “will to meaning” as the “primary motivation in his life” (99). Logotherapy is a future-facing attitude that invites us to consciously imbue even the worst suffering with meaning that stimulates the formulation of ethical action. Frankl passionately argues that, even in circumstances where we are robbed of everything but the bare fact of our continued existence, we still retain the ability to choose how we will meet the moment: “Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual” (77).  

Key Concepts and Notes:

• I have been reading and hearing about Frankl’s work for years, but for some reason I never picked up this book before now. Part of me regrets that because I surely could have benefitted from this text in earlier stages of my life, but I also think this was perhaps the perfect time for me to read it. Man’s Search for Meaning is a beautiful blend of existential philosophy and therapeutic psychology, so it speaks both to my intellectual past and my professional present.
• This book is packed with incredible quotes. The sampling I’ve provided below is an all-star list, but I easily could have doubled its length and still left a lot on the table. The book’s also very short, concise, and doesn’t waste the reader’s time. This is clearly one of the most important books of the 20th century, and Ilse Lasch’s translation is superb.
• From a values standpoint, Man’s Search for Meaning harmonized wonderfully with my personal ethics. While reading, I found myself constantly reminded of two of my most beloved intellectual figures: Josiah Royce and Scott Barry Kaufman. Frankl’s characterization of meaning as a kind of existential energy source that propels us toward right action is very similar to Royce’s description of how loyalty to our chosen cause(s) provides a road map to the good life. And Frankl’s assertion that “self-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence” is a fitting precursor to Kaufman’s concept of “healthy transcendence” as the highest form of human flourishing.
• Frankl’s explorations of how “inner life” and “inner freedom” helped prisoners survive the concentration camps offer indispensable and timeless lessons about how we frame the tragedies we live through, both in the moment and after the fact. In the stories we tell ourselves about our own lives, we can be helpless victims of overwhelming circumstances, or we can be courageous beings who struggle against an imperfect and sometimes-evil natural order. While we often have little or no control over the conditions that we must endure, a vast horizon of liberation can be found in our choice to imbue our experiences with meaning, and to then leverage that meaning in order to preserve and grow the ideas, relationships, settings, and practices that make life rich and worth living.
• There are deep and delightful connections between the core values of Logotherapy and the contemporary modality of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. As someone who confronted the worst possible atrocities of humanity’s dark side, Frankl understands the pervasiveness of human flaws and frailties, as well as the corresponding invitation to accept people and situations on their own terms. But acceptance, he would argue, should never be followed by detachment or insouciance; one must recognize and accept, and then act. Frankl’s claim that he practiced “height psychology”––in contrast to “depth psychology”––demonstrates his future-orientation and heroic belief that our possibilities for the present are influenced but not overdetermined by our past experiences.
• I love Frankl’s understanding of meaning as omnipresent in the quotidian tasks and constant fluctuations of life. For him, a generalized or broad sense of meaning is less important that the actionable meaning that can be identified in the here-and-now. “Everyone’s task is as unique as is his specific opportunity to implement it,” Frankl writes (109).
• Impressively, this book contains a brilliant passage that presages recent findings in neuroscience that describe the brain as an “allostatic organ” or “prediction machine” whose primary function is to orient the human organism toward its future rather than reaching and maintaining homeostasis. Frankl’s position that mental health is predicated on “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” is not only biologically sound but also psychologically crucial insofar as it reveals the paradoxical but necessary task of learning to strike a healthy balance between self-acceptance and self-improvement.
• While Frankl argues repeatedly that even the worst suffering can––and should––be assigned a useful meaning, he is also careful to point out that suffering ought to be avoided whenever possible. This saves him from being falsely interpreted as a thinker who believes that suffering is a prerequisite to discovering the meaning of one’s life.
• My final comment is that it was impossible for me to read this book without reflecting on the current war between Israel, Palestine, and Iran’s other proxy forces. I am also mindful the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine, and the myriad other conflicts going on around the world. Even radical partisans on both sides of any battle should agree that the death and destruction we have been witnessing are profoundly tragic. Preventing and avoiding war are almost always noble goals, but the reality is that sometimes we find ourselves embattled and embittered, submersed in suffering with no clarity about how to stop it. Frankl reminds us that, even as we live through a worst-case scenario, we still retain the ability to assign meaning to suffering and thereby empower ourselves with the capacity for flourishing and the will to confront evil with poise and courage.

Favorite Quotes:

Don’t aim at success––the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long run––in the long run, I say!––success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it. (xiv-xv)

In spite of all the enforced physical and mental primitiveness of the life in a concentration camp, it was possible for spiritual life to deepen. Sensitive people who were used to a rich intellectual life may have suffered much pain (they were often of a delicate constitution), but the damage to their inner selves was less. They were able to retreat from their terrible surroundings to a life of inner riches and spiritual freedom. Only in this way can one explain the apparent paradox that some prisoners of a less hearty make-up often seemed to survive camp life better than did those of a robust nature. (36)

For the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth––that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way––an honorable way––in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment. (38)

We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms––to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way. (65-6)

What was really needed was a fundamental change in our attitude toward life. We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life––daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual. (77)

This uniqueness and singleness which distinguishes each individual and gives a meaning to his existence has a bearing on creative work as much as it does on human love. When the impossibility of replacing a person is realized, it allows the responsibility which a man has for his existence and its continuance to appear in all its magnitude. A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the “why” for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any “how.” (79-80)

Man’s search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life and not a “secondary rationalization” of instinctual drives. This meaning is unique and specific in that it must and can be fulfilled by him alone; only then does it achieve a significance which will satisfy his own will to meaning. There are some authors who contend that meanings and values are nothing but “defense mechanisms, reaction formations and sublimations.” But as for myself, I would not be willing to live merely for the sake of my “defense mechanisms,” nor would I be ready to die merely for the sake of my “reaction formations.” Man, however, is able to live and even to die for the sake of his ideals and values! (99)

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. Such a tension is inherent in the human being and therefore is indispensable to mental well-being. We should not, then, be hesitant about challenging man with a potential meaning for him to fulfill. It is only thus that we evoke his will to meaning from its state of latency. I consider it 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. What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and the 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. What man needs is not homeostasis but what I call “noö-dynamics,” i.e., the existential dynamics of a polar field of tension where one pole is represented by a meaning that is to be fulfilled and the other pole by the man who has to fulfill it. And one should not think that this holds true only for normal conditions; in neurotic individuals, it is even more valid. If architects want to strengthen a decrepit arch, they increase the load which is laid upon it, for thereby the parts are joined more firmly together. So if therapists wish to foster their patients’ mental health, they should not be afraid to create a sound amount of tension through a reorientation toward the meaning of one’s life. (104-5)

The meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person’s life at a given moment. To put the question in general terms would be comparable to the question posed to a chess champion: “Tell me, Master, what is the best move in the world?” There simply is no such thing as the best or even a good move apart from a particular situation in a game and the particular personality of one’s opponent. The same holds for human existence. One should not search for an abstract meaning of life. Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out a concrete assignment which demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated. Thus, everyone’s task is as unique as his specific opportunity to implement it.

As each situation in life represents a challenge to man and presents a problem for him to solve, the question of the meaning of life may actually be reversed. Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible. Thus, logotherapy sees in responsibleness the very essence of human existence. (108-9)

By declaring that man is responsible and must actualize the potential meaning of his life, I wish to stress that the true meaning of life is to be discovered in the world rather than within man or his own psyche, as though it were a closed system. I have termed this constitutive characteristic “the self-transcendence of human existence.” It denotes the fact that being human always points, and is directed, to something, or someone, other than oneself––be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter. The more one forgets himself––by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love––the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself. What is called self-actualization is not an attainable aim at all, for the simple reason that the more one would strive for it, the more he would miss it. In other words, self-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence. (110-1)

Logotherapy, keeping in mind the essential transitoriness of human existence, is not pessimistic but rather activistic. To express this point figuratively we might say: The pessimist resembles a man who observes with fear and sadness that his wall calendar, from which he daily tears a sheet, grows thinner with each passing day. On the other hand, the person who attacks the problems of life actively is like a man who removes each successive leaf from his calendar and files it neatly and carefully away with its predecessors, after first having jotted down a few diary notes on the back. He can reflect with pride and joy on all the richness set down in these notes, on all the life he has already lived to the fullest. What will it matter to him if he notices that he is growing old? Has he any reason to envy the young people whom he sees, or wax nostalgic over his own lost youth? What reasons has he to envy a young person? For the possibilities that a young person has, the future which is in store for him? “No, thank you,” he will think. “Instead of possibilities, I have realities in my past, not only the reality of work done and of love loved, but of sufferings bravely suffered. These sufferings are even the things of which I am most proud, though these are things which cannot inspire envy.” (121-2)

Happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to “be happy.” Once the reason is found, however, one becomes happy automatically. As we see, a human being is not one in pursuit of happiness but rather in search of a reason to become happy, last but not least, through actualizing the potential meaning inherent and dormant in a given situation. (138)

Consider a movie: it consists of thousands upon thousands of individual pictures, and each of them makes sense and carries a meaning, yet the meaning of the whole film cannot be seen before its last sequence is shown. However, we cannot understand the whole film without having first understood each of its components, each of the individual pictures. Isn’t it the same with life? Doesn’t the final meaning of life, too, reveal itself, if at all, only at its end, on the verge of death? And doesn’t this final meaning, too, depend on whether or not the potential meaning of each single situation has been actualized to the best of the respective individual’s knowledge and belief? (143-4)

You may of course ask whether we really need to refer to “saints.” Wouldn’t it suffice just to refer to decent people? It is true that they form a minority. More than that, they will always remain a minority. And yet I see therein the very challenge to join the minority. For the world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best. (154)

Rating: 10/10