2nd April 2006
The Will-to-Meaning: A Review Essay on Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
“Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it.” Spinoza(Quoted by Viktor Frankl in his Man’s Search for Meaning)
Logo therapy is the third Viennese School of Psychoanalysis and its proponent Viktor Frankl is one of the most important thinkers of the post-war Europe.The depth of insight and the profound compassion we find in his theoretical writings derive from his closest encounter with suffering; hence carry a unique force of conviction. This essay is a discussion of the main tenets of Logo therapy and their relevance to the contemporary world.When intellectuals are sucked into a situation which is excruciating and inescapable, they feel a necessity to ask their own selves as well as one another whether there is a meaning in life that is so vulnerable, so wretched and so full of undeserved suffering. Most get an emphatic No for an answer; some others get an emphatic Yes for an answer. Those who get No for an answer find the life absurd, lacking in significance.Jean-Paul Sartre, who belongs to this category, drew the conclusion that man’s existence precedes his essence. According to him, man has invented himself and formulated all the values, meanings, truth,justice, religions, God, what he essentially is, what he should be, and what he would ultimately become,which constitute his “essence.” Man finds a meaning in his life, observes Sartre, because he believes life is eternal, because his ethical choice has validity beyond the terrestrial existence. But in actuality,man’s belief in eternity and transcendental justice are illusions. Hence, man’s notion of himself and them earnings he attributes to all the above-quote abstractions are artificial constructs. Existential philosophy of the atheistic kind, of which Sartre is a leading spokesman, denies any higher or transcendental destiny to man. On the other hand, those who get an affirmative answer carry forward their quest for them earning in suffering. Such a thinker was Viktor Frankl who got Yes for an answer. For him, man does not invent himself, but discovers himself; he does not invent the meaning of his life, but only detects it.He tells the world that the Auschwitz concentration camp was a living laboratory where he conducted his experiment and discovered the meaning in suffering and he meaning of man’s life. He declares that his survival was largely due to his faith in the meaning in his suffering, to his will-to-meaning.Viktor Frankl (1905-1997), the Austrian psychiatrist,psychotherapist and thinker, offers a reason why man must over come his tendency to give up struggle when the going gets terribly tough. He spent nearly four years in the concentration camp at Auschwitz and in some other camps known also as death-camps and extermination camps because the purpose of sending the Jews there was to kill them through torture and hard labour. While there, he formulated and perfected his theory of existential psychology known also as Logo therapy. Frankl was a practicing psycho therapist and a professor of Psychology in Vienna when the Nazis arrested him along with his parents, wife, brothers and sisters. He and one of his sisters survived;others died in concentration camps.While he was staying in the Auschwitz concentration camp, indisputably the most notorious one, he watched people die daily around him succumbing to malnutrition, hunger, cold, hard labour, Corp real punishment and, above all, despair. He survived them all because he was supported and strengthened by an indomitable will-to-meaning. On his return, he dictated a book titled From Death-Camp to Existentialism, which was revised, enlarged and published as Man’s Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logo therapy in 1963.This will-to-meaning, he explains, is not a technical know-how or a special preserve of the elitist, but a man’s attitude to life, which enables him to discover a reason for which he must live. In the concentration camp all the traditional reasons why a man should wish to live are taken away one after another, and he is made to wait for death, which would terminate a life without meaning. During such critical moments, Frankl realized that “everything can be taken from man but one thing; the last of human freedoms- to choose one’sattitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s won way.” The victim may choose both to lose all sense of direction and succumb to despair, or to become worthy of his suffering by finding a meaning for which he must suffer.Logo therapy, as a distinct school of psycho analysis,(the third Viennese school of psychotherapy, the other two are the Freudian school and the Adlerian schools)lays stress on man’s innate longing for meaning, as distinct from man’s innate longing for pleasure a laSigmund Freud and man’s innate longing for a superiority la Alfred Adler. This meaning is unique and specific in that it must and can be fulfilled only by him. Only then does it achieve significance in a broader sense.The individual does not invent this meaning in order to deceive himself; he only discovers it because it is already there. Whereas the Freudian and A dlerian schools of psychotherapy intend to offer their clients homeostasis, a tension-free state, Logo therapy tries to offer individuals noo-dynamics, which Frankl defines as “ the spiritual dynamics in a polar fieldof tension where one pole is represented by a meaning to be fulfilled and the other pole by the man who must fulfill it.”Man living in the post-war world faces an existential vacuum caused by his two-fold loss. First, he had lost his basic animal instinct at the very outset of human civilization when he developed his faculty of making choices. Second, the traditional props “that had buttressed his behaviour” are no longer able to support him and tell him what he ought to do. Deprived of both these supports, man is “governed by what others want him to do, thus increasingly falling prey to conformism.’ And that conformism, in its turn,aggravates his feeling of the existential vacuum and“manifests itself in a state of boredom.”The very essence of man’s existence lies in his being responsible. But he cannot be responsible if his actions and decisions are guided by his desire to conform. The aim of Logo therapy is to instill this“responsibleness” into those who suffer from existential vacuum. “ So live,” Frankl advises his patients, “as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!” The purpose of this maxim is to invite man to imagine first that the present is past and, second, that the past may yet be changed and amended. The transitoriness of existence,he argues, does not make life meaningless, because “in the past, nothing is irrevocably lost but everything is irrevocably stored.” It gives man the option to decide to what and for whom he is responsible, without imposing on him any value judgment spelt out by the psychotherapist.The difference between other psychotherapists and the Logot herapist is that of the painters and the eye specialist. Painters try to convey a picture of the world as they see it; an ophthalmologist tries to enable us to see the world as it really is. Hence, the role of the Logo therapist is to widen the visual field of the patient, so that “ the whole spectrum of meaning and values becomes conscious and visible to him.” As a result, truth imposes itself on the patient without doctor’s intervention The true meaning of man’s life, Frankl maintains, is to be found in the world outside of him, rather than within him or in his own psyche. This is in radical opposition to the traditional belief that the self-knowledge is a sine qua non for knowing the world. He further claims that the real aim of human life is not self-actualization, but self-transcendence. Self-actualization cannot be attained if it is made an end in itself.Self-actualization is only the side-effect of self-transcendence just as sex is a side-effect of love, not vice verse. In Logotherapy love is not treated as an epiphenomenon i.e. a secondary phenomenon, a by-product, but as a primary phenomenon.Frankl writes: “Sex is justified, even sanctified, as soon as, but only as long as, it is a vehicle of love.Thus love is not understood as a mere side-effect of sex but sex as a way of expressing the experience of that ultimate togetherness that is called love.”Dostoevsky has once said: “There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.”Frankl, who quotes this saying, wants to be worthy of his sufferings. The most important aspect of Logo therapy is its treatment of suffering. In tragedies, suffering of the protagonist is extolled because it enables him to see clearly the meaning of existence. The lucidity, which the tragic protagonist acquires through his suffering, helps him transcend life’s limitations, penetrate the penumbra and discovers the meaning of his suffering. Job listening to the inscrutable voice of thunder, blinded Oedipus in his sanctuary at Athens, Lear buffeted by the storm and Hamlet deciding to fight the fatal duel, all have discovered the meaning of their sufferings. By suffering meaningfully, he confronts the inimical forces that try to over power his humanity and intimidate his dignity. Both Tragedy and Logo therapy share the view that suffering is not an avoidable evil, but a necessary process to reveal the meaning of life.In orthodox Christianity physical suffering is made to appear as a mode of purification. In the illogical literature, purgatorial suffering is considered necessary for spiritual regeneration. The idea of purgatorial suffering carries with it an amount of shame because it presupposes an uncleanness born of sins the sufferer has either inherited or committed.Traditional religions consider suffering a necessary evil and a punishment which man can avoid by being good. In a world where suffering is viewed as a by-product of guilt, the sufferer “is not only unhappy, but also ashamed of being unhappy.” In contradistinction to all these attitudes to suffering,Logotherapist helps the sufferer in being worthy of his suffering and enables him to find a meaning in his suffering. It is possible to find a meaning in suffering when suffering is not viewed as a punishment for some actual or acquired or stored-up amount of guilt; not as a purgatorial fire tormenting the alleged sinner with a view to burning off his impurities. Frankl and his co-sufferers at the Auschwitz concentration camp had a slim chance of survival, maybe one in twenty at best. His co-sufferers were of the opinion that if they did not survive the camp their suffering would have no meaning. The meaning in suffering or the meaning of life depended on the ultimate survival of the sufferer. Frankl, however,could not share their view. According to him, the life, whose meaning “ depends upon a happen stance –whether one escapes or not -, ultimately would not be worth-living at all.” He asks a poignant question: “Isit not conceivable that there is still another dimension possible, a world beyond man’s world; a world in which the question of an ultimate meaning ofhuman suffering would find an answer?” By posing such a question, Frankl is not trying to factor in the esoteric abstractions of mysticism. He is guided by a“cold detached curiosity” concerning man’s fate in order to find a concrete answer to humanity’s deepest yearning for meaning. The insight supporting Logotherapy is born out of a synergy of insights contributed by philosophy, tragedy and psychology.The most important message Logo therapy tries to instill in man is to remind him that he is not fully determined by his religious bringing up, his childhood traumas and influences, by his heredity, by his familial and sociological conditions; that he is a self-determining being who is capable of transcendental conditions imposed upon him by pan-determinism.Whereas the circumstances he will be in, misfortune or good fortune befalling him are not wholly determined by him, how he will take them and his attitude to suffering is entirely his decision, and in that he is a free agent. In his being a free agent lies his uniqueness as well as his humanness. By defying the predictions about him by the pan-determinism based on his upbringing, religious orientations, socio-cultural conditioning, man finally transcends himself. To the extent he transcends himself he actualizes himself.“In the concentration camps, for example”, writes Frankl feelingly,” in this living laboratory and on this testing ground, we watched and witnessed some four comrades behave like swine while others behaved like saints. Man has both potentialities within himself; which one is actualized depends on decisions but not on conditions.”
The Will-to-Meaning: A Review Essay on Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
“Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it.” Spinoza(Quoted by Viktor Frankl in his Man’s Search for Meaning)
Logo therapy is the third Viennese School of Psychoanalysis and its proponent Viktor Frankl is one of the most important thinkers of the post-war Europe.The depth of insight and the profound compassion we find in his theoretical writings derive from his closest encounter with suffering; hence carry a unique force of conviction. This essay is a discussion of the main tenets of Logo therapy and their relevance to the contemporary world.When intellectuals are sucked into a situation which is excruciating and inescapable, they feel a necessity to ask their own selves as well as one another whether there is a meaning in life that is so vulnerable, so wretched and so full of undeserved suffering. Most get an emphatic No for an answer; some others get an emphatic Yes for an answer. Those who get No for an answer find the life absurd, lacking in significance.Jean-Paul Sartre, who belongs to this category, drew the conclusion that man’s existence precedes his essence. According to him, man has invented himself and formulated all the values, meanings, truth,justice, religions, God, what he essentially is, what he should be, and what he would ultimately become,which constitute his “essence.” Man finds a meaning in his life, observes Sartre, because he believes life is eternal, because his ethical choice has validity beyond the terrestrial existence. But in actuality,man’s belief in eternity and transcendental justice are illusions. Hence, man’s notion of himself and them earnings he attributes to all the above-quote abstractions are artificial constructs. Existential philosophy of the atheistic kind, of which Sartre is a leading spokesman, denies any higher or transcendental destiny to man. On the other hand, those who get an affirmative answer carry forward their quest for them earning in suffering. Such a thinker was Viktor Frankl who got Yes for an answer. For him, man does not invent himself, but discovers himself; he does not invent the meaning of his life, but only detects it.He tells the world that the Auschwitz concentration camp was a living laboratory where he conducted his experiment and discovered the meaning in suffering and he meaning of man’s life. He declares that his survival was largely due to his faith in the meaning in his suffering, to his will-to-meaning.Viktor Frankl (1905-1997), the Austrian psychiatrist,psychotherapist and thinker, offers a reason why man must over come his tendency to give up struggle when the going gets terribly tough. He spent nearly four years in the concentration camp at Auschwitz and in some other camps known also as death-camps and extermination camps because the purpose of sending the Jews there was to kill them through torture and hard labour. While there, he formulated and perfected his theory of existential psychology known also as Logo therapy. Frankl was a practicing psycho therapist and a professor of Psychology in Vienna when the Nazis arrested him along with his parents, wife, brothers and sisters. He and one of his sisters survived;others died in concentration camps.While he was staying in the Auschwitz concentration camp, indisputably the most notorious one, he watched people die daily around him succumbing to malnutrition, hunger, cold, hard labour, Corp real punishment and, above all, despair. He survived them all because he was supported and strengthened by an indomitable will-to-meaning. On his return, he dictated a book titled From Death-Camp to Existentialism, which was revised, enlarged and published as Man’s Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logo therapy in 1963.This will-to-meaning, he explains, is not a technical know-how or a special preserve of the elitist, but a man’s attitude to life, which enables him to discover a reason for which he must live. In the concentration camp all the traditional reasons why a man should wish to live are taken away one after another, and he is made to wait for death, which would terminate a life without meaning. During such critical moments, Frankl realized that “everything can be taken from man but one thing; the last of human freedoms- to choose one’sattitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s won way.” The victim may choose both to lose all sense of direction and succumb to despair, or to become worthy of his suffering by finding a meaning for which he must suffer.Logo therapy, as a distinct school of psycho analysis,(the third Viennese school of psychotherapy, the other two are the Freudian school and the Adlerian schools)lays stress on man’s innate longing for meaning, as distinct from man’s innate longing for pleasure a laSigmund Freud and man’s innate longing for a superiority la Alfred Adler. This meaning is unique and specific in that it must and can be fulfilled only by him. Only then does it achieve significance in a broader sense.The individual does not invent this meaning in order to deceive himself; he only discovers it because it is already there. Whereas the Freudian and A dlerian schools of psychotherapy intend to offer their clients homeostasis, a tension-free state, Logo therapy tries to offer individuals noo-dynamics, which Frankl defines as “ the spiritual dynamics in a polar fieldof tension where one pole is represented by a meaning to be fulfilled and the other pole by the man who must fulfill it.”Man living in the post-war world faces an existential vacuum caused by his two-fold loss. First, he had lost his basic animal instinct at the very outset of human civilization when he developed his faculty of making choices. Second, the traditional props “that had buttressed his behaviour” are no longer able to support him and tell him what he ought to do. Deprived of both these supports, man is “governed by what others want him to do, thus increasingly falling prey to conformism.’ And that conformism, in its turn,aggravates his feeling of the existential vacuum and“manifests itself in a state of boredom.”The very essence of man’s existence lies in his being responsible. But he cannot be responsible if his actions and decisions are guided by his desire to conform. The aim of Logo therapy is to instill this“responsibleness” into those who suffer from existential vacuum. “ So live,” Frankl advises his patients, “as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!” The purpose of this maxim is to invite man to imagine first that the present is past and, second, that the past may yet be changed and amended. The transitoriness of existence,he argues, does not make life meaningless, because “in the past, nothing is irrevocably lost but everything is irrevocably stored.” It gives man the option to decide to what and for whom he is responsible, without imposing on him any value judgment spelt out by the psychotherapist.The difference between other psychotherapists and the Logot herapist is that of the painters and the eye specialist. Painters try to convey a picture of the world as they see it; an ophthalmologist tries to enable us to see the world as it really is. Hence, the role of the Logo therapist is to widen the visual field of the patient, so that “ the whole spectrum of meaning and values becomes conscious and visible to him.” As a result, truth imposes itself on the patient without doctor’s intervention The true meaning of man’s life, Frankl maintains, is to be found in the world outside of him, rather than within him or in his own psyche. This is in radical opposition to the traditional belief that the self-knowledge is a sine qua non for knowing the world. He further claims that the real aim of human life is not self-actualization, but self-transcendence. Self-actualization cannot be attained if it is made an end in itself.Self-actualization is only the side-effect of self-transcendence just as sex is a side-effect of love, not vice verse. In Logotherapy love is not treated as an epiphenomenon i.e. a secondary phenomenon, a by-product, but as a primary phenomenon.Frankl writes: “Sex is justified, even sanctified, as soon as, but only as long as, it is a vehicle of love.Thus love is not understood as a mere side-effect of sex but sex as a way of expressing the experience of that ultimate togetherness that is called love.”Dostoevsky has once said: “There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.”Frankl, who quotes this saying, wants to be worthy of his sufferings. The most important aspect of Logo therapy is its treatment of suffering. In tragedies, suffering of the protagonist is extolled because it enables him to see clearly the meaning of existence. The lucidity, which the tragic protagonist acquires through his suffering, helps him transcend life’s limitations, penetrate the penumbra and discovers the meaning of his suffering. Job listening to the inscrutable voice of thunder, blinded Oedipus in his sanctuary at Athens, Lear buffeted by the storm and Hamlet deciding to fight the fatal duel, all have discovered the meaning of their sufferings. By suffering meaningfully, he confronts the inimical forces that try to over power his humanity and intimidate his dignity. Both Tragedy and Logo therapy share the view that suffering is not an avoidable evil, but a necessary process to reveal the meaning of life.In orthodox Christianity physical suffering is made to appear as a mode of purification. In the illogical literature, purgatorial suffering is considered necessary for spiritual regeneration. The idea of purgatorial suffering carries with it an amount of shame because it presupposes an uncleanness born of sins the sufferer has either inherited or committed.Traditional religions consider suffering a necessary evil and a punishment which man can avoid by being good. In a world where suffering is viewed as a by-product of guilt, the sufferer “is not only unhappy, but also ashamed of being unhappy.” In contradistinction to all these attitudes to suffering,Logotherapist helps the sufferer in being worthy of his suffering and enables him to find a meaning in his suffering. It is possible to find a meaning in suffering when suffering is not viewed as a punishment for some actual or acquired or stored-up amount of guilt; not as a purgatorial fire tormenting the alleged sinner with a view to burning off his impurities. Frankl and his co-sufferers at the Auschwitz concentration camp had a slim chance of survival, maybe one in twenty at best. His co-sufferers were of the opinion that if they did not survive the camp their suffering would have no meaning. The meaning in suffering or the meaning of life depended on the ultimate survival of the sufferer. Frankl, however,could not share their view. According to him, the life, whose meaning “ depends upon a happen stance –whether one escapes or not -, ultimately would not be worth-living at all.” He asks a poignant question: “Isit not conceivable that there is still another dimension possible, a world beyond man’s world; a world in which the question of an ultimate meaning ofhuman suffering would find an answer?” By posing such a question, Frankl is not trying to factor in the esoteric abstractions of mysticism. He is guided by a“cold detached curiosity” concerning man’s fate in order to find a concrete answer to humanity’s deepest yearning for meaning. The insight supporting Logotherapy is born out of a synergy of insights contributed by philosophy, tragedy and psychology.The most important message Logo therapy tries to instill in man is to remind him that he is not fully determined by his religious bringing up, his childhood traumas and influences, by his heredity, by his familial and sociological conditions; that he is a self-determining being who is capable of transcendental conditions imposed upon him by pan-determinism.Whereas the circumstances he will be in, misfortune or good fortune befalling him are not wholly determined by him, how he will take them and his attitude to suffering is entirely his decision, and in that he is a free agent. In his being a free agent lies his uniqueness as well as his humanness. By defying the predictions about him by the pan-determinism based on his upbringing, religious orientations, socio-cultural conditioning, man finally transcends himself. To the extent he transcends himself he actualizes himself.“In the concentration camps, for example”, writes Frankl feelingly,” in this living laboratory and on this testing ground, we watched and witnessed some four comrades behave like swine while others behaved like saints. Man has both potentialities within himself; which one is actualized depends on decisions but not on conditions.”
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Essay On Purpose In Life
Please! proper spacingbetweenwords!
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