Some notes from Viktor Frankl, Man's Search For Meaning, Pocket Books, revised & updated edition 1997. "A lengthy, austere, and deeply moving personal essay about Frankl's imprisonment in Auschwitz and other concentration camps for five years, and his struggle during this time to find reasons to live."
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It does not really matter what we expect from life but rather what life expects 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 right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and fulfil the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.
These tasks--and therefore the meaning of life--differ from man to man, and from moment to moment. Thus it is impossible to define the meaning of life in a general way. Questions about the meaning of life can never be answered by sweeping statements. Life does not mean something vague but something very real and concrete, just as life's tasks are also very real and concrete. They form man's destiny which is different and unique for each individual.
Human life under any circumstances never ceases to have a meaning, and that this infinite meaning of life includes suffering and dying, privation and death. Frankl's system of "logotherapy" is based on three tenets:
1. Life has meaning under all circumstances, even the most miserable ones.
2. Every person has an innate desire to find meaning, and this will to meaning is man's principle motivation for living.
3. Every person has the freedom to find meaning.
According to Frankl, life can be meaningful in three ways.
First, through what we give to the world in and through what we do, what we contribute, what we add to life, what we create. These Frankl calls creative values.
Secondly, through what we take from life and what life gives us, what we experience. These are realised in receptivity toward the world -- for example, in surrender to the beauty of nature or art, and above all in experiencing human beings in their uniqueness for to experience a human being in his uniqueness is to love him. These Frankl calls experiential values.
But what of those who are deprived of the opportunity to find meaning in a deed, or in work, or in love, and are faced with an unalterable fate (such as the situation in the concentration camp or an incurable disease, or going to blind, for example)? A third doorway of meaning is open to them. One choice remains that no one can take away from us - the choice of our attitude toward it. Frankl quotes, Goethe as saying: "There is no predicament that we cannot ennoble either by doing or enduring." And he has also cited a statement of Yehudi Bacon, a man who as a boy was imprisoned in Auschwitz and loft it when he was still a boy. Bacon declared "Suffering can have a meaning if it changes you for the better." In this way, as Frankl has said, life can have meaning to the last breath.
Frankl calls this the last of human freedoms - the capacity to choose one's attitude in a given set of circumstances. Frankl declares that the noblest appreciation of meaning is reserved to those people who faced with what looks like an unalterable situation, by the very attitude they choose to take to the predicament, rise above it and grow beyond themselves. What matters, he says, is the stand they take, a stand which allows for transmuting their predicament into achievement, triumph and heroism.
From The Choice is Ours, edited by Dorothy Berkley Phillips: "Life does not need comfort, when it can be offered meaning, nor pleasure, when it can be shown purpose. Reveal what is the purpose of existence and how he may attain it--the steps he must take--and man will go forward again hardily, happily, knowing that an effort, concentration, is the only life deserving the devotion, satisfying the nature and developing the potentialities of a self-conscious being."
Frankl: "When you can no longer change the situation you may change yourself, which means you may change your attitude towards your fate. Changing yourself in such cases means rising above yourself, going beyond yourself."
By Frankl's definition despair is caused by suffering in which the sufferer sees no meaning. "Suffering in itself has no meaning." Dr. Fabry says, "but we can assume meaningful attitudes towards events that in themselves are meaningless."
Bonaro Overstreet: "People always do what makes sense to them in terms of what they see. They do not do things which from their point of view, in the moment of action are stupid and uncalled for. They obey the imperative of their own awareness. Behaviour changes only as some expanded awareness makes the individual take into account what he did not notice before."
One of the first thing a logotherapist will do will be to invite the individual to sit down quietly and put down the things he likes and the things he does not like about himself -- a simple process but how may of us ever do it? Small wonder we know so little about ourselves.
Dr. Fabry mentions and which is closely linked with the doorway of self-discovery and that is what he calls uniqueness. He points out that when we feel replaceable -- in job or relationship -- life seems meaninglessness. We may feel replaceable as a worker, voter, consumer, even a spouse or parents, but there are areas where we are unique. Creative activities and human relationships are the two areas where our uniqueness is most obvious and meaning is most accessible. "Only we relate to our offspring, a spouse or a friend in the way we do," says Dr. Fabry. "Only we make a poem, a painting, a collage in exactly the manner we create it. Here we are irreplaceable."
Discovering yourself, finding out what you like and what you dislike about yourself, realising that you do not have to remain as you are, that indeed there is really no such person as you as you are but only you as you are becoming, and that what you become depends on you for you are man, the being who continually decides what he is -- All this process can be a doorway finding meaning.
Closely related to this process is the discovery of our own uniqueness, our own objective potentiality, in the areas of personal relationship and creative activity, in the circumstances I which we know and realise that we are irreplaceable. As Dr. Fabry says, "every time you perceive yourself as you really are, meaning will shine forth."
I referred to Viktor Frankl's contention that meaning in life cannot be given but must be discovered by each person individually.
However, as Dr. Joseph Fabry, has pointed out, there are circumstances in which we are likely to find meaning, what he calls, "doorways to meaning" and he has indicated five such circumstances:
- situations in which we discover a truth about ourselves
- experiencing our uniqueness
- situations in which we exercise the power of choice
- circumstances that require responsibility
- transcending our self-centredness and reaching beyond the self towards causes to serve or people to love.
In her book Advice from a Failure Jo Coudert describes a conversation that took place at a dinner party she was attending. She was sitting next a man, an artist, who was arguing with two guests who teach in the New York City school system that they were unfair to complain about the viciousness of their students in behavior and their apathy toward learning because the students undoubtedly came from backgrounds that might fairly be described as both deprived and depraved. The teachers did not disagree about the backgrounds; indeed they cited with compassion individual histories that typically included events of a girl being raped by her uncle and a boy having no known father but a succession transient ones; but they made the point that the children's behavior made it impossible to teach them. The artist was arguing the cause -- the children's horrendous backgrounds -- was producing the effect, the children's unteachableness. While not disputing this, teachers were pointing out the effect, their unteachablenss, was perpetuating the cause, lives of illiteracy, poverty, and degradation.
Jo Coudert pointed out that while there is no question but slums must be replaced by decent housing, poverty alleviated, and teaching methods improved, there is equally no question, however, but that the destroying circularity of a life must be broken by the person living it. She said "it seems harsh to say that delinquent raped by an uncle is responsible for her life." "But, harsh or not, it is a fact. Each of us, no matter what our experiences, is in charge of how we live our lives simply because no one else can drop the attitudes we hod which dictate our behavior. A therapist may tease attitudes out of the matrix of a life and hold them up to be seen, or a wise and good person may contravene attitudes by steadfastly behaving at variance with them, but only the person whose attitudes they are can decide to let them go."
"We are responsible for the attitudes. Though alien in origin, they are solely our own now, which means that we have a choice about them. We need not keep them. We can discard them. We are the only one who can."
What is self-transcendence? It means being related to something or someone other than oneself. It means forgetting oneself for the sake of a meaning to fulfil, a cause to serve, another human being to lovingly encounter.
In Frankl's view, it is only to the extent that some one is living out this self-transcendence is he truly human or does he become his true self. The more a human being is dedicated to love or work, to a cause to serve or a human being to love, the more he becomes human and the more he actualises himself.
Frankl asserts that not the pursuit of happiness but the pursuit of meaning is what is really satisfying and fulfilling to a human being. In his view happiness must come to us as a by-product or side effect. "The more you hunt for happiness or the more you chase self-acturalisation," he says, "the less it is available to you."
Sigmund Freud, when asked what were the constituents of mental health, he replied: love and work.
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There is an evil twin to the saintly virtue Frankl discovers. As the old observation goes: I am persistent. You are stubborn. That other guy is pig-headed. Behavior--and misbehavior--in school surely grow from the same search for meaning Frankl encountered in the concentration camp.
