Man's Search for Meaning (Viktor Frankl)
OVERVIEW
Viktor Frankl is famously remembered as the psychiatrist who founded the practice of logotherapy, which centres on man’s search for meaning and on meaning as the primary driving force of our lives (not sex, like Freud believed, or power, like Adler believed). After receiving his medical degree in Vienna, Frankl began work as a psychiatrist and started compiling a manuscript that outlined this new system of psychotherapy. In 1942, Frankl is sent to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, where his manuscript is destroyed. Frankl survives the Nazi concentration camps, but his wife and family do not.
If anyone would be forgiven for abandoning the opinion that life is good or meaningful, it would be Frankl. Instead, Frankl uses his experiences to inform the rest of his life’s work, which is to help people find meaning in their lives, even in the face of great suffering.
The meaning of life vs. the meaning of my life
Frankl is not interested in the general meaning of life, but rather in the meaning that can be realized in any one person’s life at any given moment. To illustrate the distinction, consider if you asked a chess grandmaster “what is the best move in the world?” No answer to that question exists outside the context of any one game at any specific point in time with any unique set of players. So too with human existence. We shouldn’t concern ourselves with uncovering an abstract meaning of life, but rather concentrate on what can be fulfilled in our own, singular lives.
And, as you may have suspected, the only person who can answer “what is the meaning of my life” is the person who asked. Frankl says each man is questioned by life, and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life. Our meaning is fulfilled by our responsibleness. We actualize the potential meaning of our lives through our choices. And further, “the opportunities to act properly, the potentialities to fulfill a meaning, are affected by the irreversibility of our lives.” Your life is finite, and what you make of yourself, and your life, is final. Frankl encourages us to ask ourselves: if I were living this life for the second time, how would I choose to act now so as not to act as wrongly as I did before? This question should stimulate our sense of responsibleness. Imagine first that the present is past and second that the past may yet be changed. By asking “what would I do differently?”, we answer “what should I do now?”
And remember, even if everything has been taken from you, even if you have no ability to change your circumstances, you still retain the ability to choose your own attitude. This inner freedom, the freedom to choose your own way, is unassailable.
The character of meaning
So, what attitudes might we foster or what actions might we take that would fulfill a potential meaning? Frankl is clear that meaning is outward-looking. Our lives are not closed systems, and so it follows that meaning is to be discovered in the world. Actualizing meaning requires participation, not mere introspection. Frankl terms this characteristic of logotherapy “the self-transcendence of human existence,” which is to say that the more one forgets himself, the more he gives himself over to a cause to serve or a person to love, the more he fulfills his living.
Humans find meaning by interacting with the world in three primary ways: 1) through our work or projects, 2) through love, and 3) through our courage in the face of unavoidable suffering. The first speaks to achieving or accomplishing something worthwhile through purposeful work. The second speaks to loving other people, and devotion to things like goodness, beauty, and truth. And last, choosing one’s attitude, a will to meaning, in the face of great difficulty. All three possess the critical characteristic of “striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.”
But let’s linger on the third category, unavoidable suffering, and how it could ever be meaningful, or lend itself to something freely chosen. Frankl steadfastly believes that any man can endure suffering on the condition that he is able to find a meaning in that suffering. Not to say that suffering is necessary (suffering should be avoided wherever possible), nor that our suffering has any inherent purpose, but rather that we can still adopt perspectives that engender meaning. To use an example from the book, a mother who struggles to care for her disabled son comes to appreciate that without her, his care would almost certainly be transferred to people who are not nearly as loving or attentive; she reframes her suffering now as a meaningful sacrifice to something deeply important to her, the well-being of her child. While enduring unimaginable cruelty in the death camps, Frankl chose his own attitude; he chose to be brave, and loving, and hopeful. Even in the face of suffering, we can still choose worthwhile goals, even if those goals are simply the attitude we bring to our circumstances. We all possess this inviolable inner freedom.
Meaning and value
One final point about usefulness. Consider the many interpretations of meaning that centre solely on creation, the production of something valuable that persists in the world. What of this type of meaning can be possessed by someone whose time is short, or whose ableness is severely restricted? Even 75 years ago when “Man’s Search For Meaning” was published, Frankl made the observation that his society was characterized by “achievement orientation,” that our value was tied entirely to our vitality and our production. Put another way, the meaningfulness we could achieve, and the value of our living, was contingent upon our present usefulness. Frankl argued then, and it still resonates today, that this achievement orientation “blurs the decisive difference between being valuable in the sense of dignity and being valuable in the sense of usefulness.” If a meaningful life is a valuable life, and meaning is unconditional (which is to say that it can be realized regardless of our circumstances), then it must follow that the value of a human life is unconditional as well. We’ve heard this sentiment elsewhere (especially in Stephen Jenkinson’s “Die Wise” and Ira Byock’s “Dying Well”), but it bears repeating. No matter who we are, whether we are among the frail elderly or the incurably ill, our lives have meaning and value.
Frankl ends with a special note about the past – an encouragement to think of all the deeds you have done, the love you have given, and the suffering you have endured with courage and dignity. All of this, though it may be in the past, can never be taken from us. Even when dying, when the future and its possibilities are lost to us, we still have the realities of our past, the meanings we fulfilled and the values we realized.
Having been is also a kind of being, and perhaps the surest kind.
WHAT NOW? (actions for mortal atheists)
Identify your projects, focus on love
Although we lingered on the third way humans discover meaning, in the face of unavoidable suffering, most of us will attempt to actualize meaning through purposeful work and love (the first two ways). Purposeful work is not only for our careers, but for any project that’s important to us and that we find meaning in, like raising children, supporting a cause, writing a novel, or learning something new. When we take actions that contribute to achieving something we find meaningful, we are fulfilling the first pathway to meaning. The second way to meaning, rather than through achievement, is through experience. We have all had experiences that felt meaningful, through nature, culture, art, goodness, truth, beauty, and of course our relationships to other people. Underlying meaningful experience is love, that feeling of “ultimate togetherness” as Frankl says. To me it seems that love is foundational to connecting with things in the world (nature, objects, and people), and inspiring the self-transcendence that Frankl is after. We can also intuit that love enhances our feelings of responsibleness, which you’ll recall is key to actualizing meaning. We love our children and feel responsible for their safety, we connect with nature and feel responsible for its protection. I think it’s fair to say that through loving experience, we are driven to action, thus fulfilling both the first and second pathway in parallel.
To put it simply, the first two pathways to meaning involve creation and connection. What achievements are we working towards, and how well are we loving and connecting with the world around us and the people in it? We can ask ourselves, what meaning can I actualize in this moment? What is life asking of me now, and how shall I answer for it?
IN SUM:
Is this book entirely secular? No.
If I had to describe the book in one sentence? The creator of logotherapy, the psychoanalytic technique that centres on man’s will to meaning, writes about his therapeutic philosophy and how his lived experienced of the Holocaust informed his practice.
Who should read this book? Anyone concerned with how to discover meaning in life, and especially anyone facing intractable suffering.