Man's Search for Meaning

I was fortunate enough to get Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning” on sale at the Amazon Kindle store but to be Frank with you, I would have paid full price for this one.  Let’s skip my personal acclaim for the benefits the Kindle has provided me and get right into it.

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.

This excerpt reminds me of a quote I read once about a butterfly sitting on your shoulder.  You can’t force the butterfly to sit on your should nor try to force it to stay there, it must happen.  This is something Frankl told his students when asked how to achieve success in life.  It also sets the context for his book.

But does a man who makes his observations while he himself is a prisoner possess the necessary detachment? Such detachment is granted to the outsider, but he is too far removed to make any statements of real value. Only the man inside knows.

So before Frankl begins describing his experiences within the concentration camp, he talks about man’s relationship with himself.  Here, I believe he is talking about the intense discipline one’s mind requires in order to successfully detach.  Detach too much and you risk accepting a deterministic mindset, detach too little and you risk living miles away from reality.  He also correctly acknowledges that it is only the person in the epidermis or the ghost in the machine that can make honest and valuable judgements on himself.

Setting the stage for the chronological psychological telling of his experience:

Three phases of the inmate’s mental reactions to camp life become apparent: the period following his admission; the period when he is well entrenched in camp routine; and the period following his release and liberation.

The engine’s whistle had an uncanny sound, like a cry for help sent out in commiseration for the unhappy load which it was destined to lead into perdition.

Here he comments on the thoughts circling in their brains as they begin going through the registration at the camp:

In psychiatry there is a certain condition known as delusion of reprieve. The condemned man, immediately before his execution, gets the illusion that he might be reprieved at the very last minute.

No one could yet grasp the fact that everything would be taken away.

all we possessed, literally, was our naked existence.

On entering camp a change took place in the minds of the men. With the end of uncertainty there came the uncertainty of the end. It was impossible to foresee whether or when, if at all, this form of existence would end.

Once they are all processed, they move into getting used to their new environment:

Cold curiosity predominated even in Auschwitz, somehow detaching the mind from its surroundings, which came to be regarded with a kind of objectivity.

I think it was Lessing who once said, “There are things which must cause you to lose your reason or you have none to lose.”

It was difficult to internalize or even conceptualize the feelings these people must have been processing during their days as I walked along the streets of Midtown Manhattan, the 1 train and Merchants NY bar.  There were passages that made it through however:

And on came the snow. This, of course, caused frostbite and chilblains. Every single step became real torture.

So what goes on in the brain in a situation like this?  Frankl expounds:

A thought transfixed me: 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.

Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved. It finds its deepest meaning in his spiritual being, his inner self. Whether or not he is actually present, whether or not he is still alive at all, ceases somehow to be of importance.

As one in the West progresses through life and battles with the ebbs and flows of existence, our beliefs, values, principles are rarely challenged maybe not even thought about.  Many personal development and spiritual coaches proclaim the disciplined search for personal values and principles to be of major importance in the pursuit of the optimal experience.  In the next passage, Frankl describes the inmates battles with their values and principles:

A man’s character became involved to the point that he was caught in a mental turmoil which threatened all the values he held and threw them into doubt.

Under the influence of a world which no longer recognized the value of human life and human dignity, which had robbed man of his will and had made him an object to be exterminated (having planned, however, to make full use of him first-to the last ounce of his physical resources) -under this influence the personal ego finally suffered a loss of values.

The consciousness of one’s inner value is anchored in higher, more spiritual things, and cannot be shaken by camp life. But how many free men, let alone prisoners, possess it?

As Frankly continues with his count of life in the camp, he begins to elaborate on a key characteristic of the men who surrounded him – that of personal choice and action.

The experiences of camp life show that man does have a choice of action. There were enough examples, often of a heroic nature, which proved that apathy could be overcome, irritability suppressed. Man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind, even in such terrible conditions of psychic and physical stress.

Fundamentally, therefore, any man can, even under such circumstances, decide what shall become of him-mentally and spiritually.

Here lies the chance for a man either to make use of or to forgo the opportunities of attaining the moral values that a difficult situation may afford him. And this decides whether he is worthy of his sufferings or not.

At this point, he begins to segregate the men into two camps – those that were worthy of suffering and progressed, and those that found their lives meaningless.

From all this we may learn that there are two races of men in this world, but only these two-the “race” of the decent man and the “race” of the indecent man. Both are found everywhere; they penetrate into all groups of society. No group consists entirely of decent or indecent people. In this sense, no group is of “pure race”-and therefore one occasionally found a decent fellow among the camp guards.

Such people forgot that often it is just such an exceptionally difficult external situation which gives man the opportunity to grow spiritually beyond himself. Instead of taking the camp’s difficulties as a test of their inner strength, they did not take their life seriously and despised it as something of no consequence. They preferred to close their eyes and to live in the past. Life for such people became meaningless.

Yet, in reality, there was an opportunity and a challenge. One could make a victory of those experiences, turning life into an inner triumph, or one could ignore the challenge and simply vegetate, as did a majority of the prisoners.

It is a peculiarity of man that he can only live by looking to the future-sub specie aeternitatis. And this is his salvation in the most difficult moments of his existence, although he sometimes has to force his mind to the task.

What does Spinoza say in his Ethics? -’Affectus, qui passio est, desinit esse passio simulatque eius claram et distinctam formamus ideam. Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it.

As we said before, any attempt to restore a man’s inner strength in the camp had first to succeed in showing him some future goal. Nietzsche’s words, “He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how,”

I thought the way Frankl turned the oft-quoted eternal question, “what is the meaning of life?” on its head:

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.

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. No man and no destiny can be compared with any other man or any other destiny. No situation repeats itself, and each situation calls for a different response. Sometimes the situation in which a man finds himself may require him to shape his own fate by action. At other times it is more advantageous for him to make use of an opportunity for contemplation and to realize assets in this way. Sometimes man may be required simply to accept fate, to bear his cross. Every situation is distinguished by its uniqueness, and there is always only one right answer to the problem posed by the situation at hand.

When a man finds that it is his destiny to suffer, he will have to accept his suffering as his task; his single and unique task. He will have to acknowledge the fact that even in suffering he is unique and alone in the universe. No one can relieve him of his suffering or suffer in his place. His unique opportunity lies in the way in which he bears his burden.

Reading the first part of the book was extremely humbling.  The suffering these people had to trek through is unimaginable but Frankl makes it clear that suffering is not a necessity to find meaning in life.  What is a necessity is to always consciously move forward.  This parallels with Atlas Shrugged’s Volitional Consciousness.  Please stay tuned for the next article that will analyze the 2nd part of his book that focuses on his psychoanalytical method called Logotherapy.