Man’s Search for Meaning — Viktor Frankl
“Live 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.”
Start — 8/8/16 Finish — 8/9/16
Directives:
· Stop thinking of what you expect from life, but rather what life expects from you. Our answers to life’s daily questions must be in the form of right action and right conduct.
· We can only live by looking to the future. This is our salvation in the most difficult moments; the second we lose our faith in it, we allow ourselves to be subject to mental and physical decay.
· The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity to add a deeper meaning to his life.
· No matter how harsh one’s circumstances, and no matter how much is taken away, one will always be free to choose one’s attitude in any given circumstance. We are always in control of how we react to misfortune.
· If we can know the “why” of our existence, then we can bear almost any “how.” When we find a purpose that cannot be accomplished by anyone else, like caring for a loved one or finishing some creative work, we will never be able to throw our lives away.
· Live 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.
· Suffering is a chance to accomplish something; guilt is a chance to change oneself for the better; and life’s transitoriness is an incentive to take responsible action.
Notes:
Prison Life
· Apathy, the blunting of the emotions and the feeling that one could not care anymore, were the symptoms arising during the second stage of the prisoner’s psychological reactions, and which eventually made him insensitive to daily and hourly beatings. By means of this insensibility the prisoner soon surrounded himself with a very necessary protective shell.
o The camp inmate was frightened of making decisions and of taking any sort of initiative whatsoever. This was the results of a strong feeling that fate was one’s master, and that one must not try to influence it in any way, but instead let it take its own course.
· With the majority of the prisoners, the primitive life and the effort of having to concentrate on just saving one’s skin led to a total disregard of anything not serving that purpose, and explained the prisoners’ complete lack of sentiment.
· The intensification of inner life helped the prisoner find a refuge from the emptiness, desolation and spiritual poverty of his existence, by letting him escape into the past.
o As the intensification continued, the prisoner also experienced the beauty of art and nature as never before
o Just as surprising as it was for different forms of art and entertainment to rise up within camps, humor also found its way into the prisoner’s arsenal of coping mechanisms and new appreciation for trivial things
· Those who would give away their last piece of bread or would go around to comfort others were proof that man can always choose how he reacts to his circumstances
o It seemed that the sort of person a prisoner became was the result of an inner decision (to choose to not cave into irritability and complete apathy) — not just camp influences alone
o It is this spiritual freedom that gives life meaning and purpose
· “Moral deformity” resulting from the sudden release of mental pressure at the prisoner’s release was accompanied sometimes by bitterness and disillusionment upon return to former life
Logotherapy
· Mental health is based on a certain degree of 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.
o What we need is not a tensionless state, but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal that we have chosen for ourselves
· Instead of searching for an abstract meaning of life, we should each be looking for our own specific vocation or mission in life that demands fulfillment
o In this way, we cannot be replaced, nor can our life be repeated
o Life thus becomes a question that we choose to answer ourselves with the assignment we choose — we take responsibility rather than posing abstract questions
o Meaning will thus come from: creating a work or doing a deed, experiencing something or encountering someone, and the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering
· 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 demanded of man is not to endure the meaninglessness of life, but rather to bear his incapacity to grasp its unconditional meaningfulness in rational terms
· Excessive intention — the more we try to accomplish some unattainable aim like self-actualization directly the more difficulty and failure we will encounter
o Similarly, excessive attention to the things that plague us (or are said should plague us) can bring about actual sickness
o In that vein, we should look to paradoxical intention (ridiculing our obsessions by dealing with them in an ironical way) to cut the vicious circle of anxiety and symptoms
Phrases/Quotes:
· If someone now asked of us the truth of Dostoevsky’s statement that flatly defines man as a being who can get used to anything, we would reply, “Yes, a man can get used to anything, but do not ask us how.”
· Instead, he playfully picked up a stone and threw it at me. That, to me, seemed the way to attract the attention of a beast, to call a domestic animal back to its job, a creature with which you have so little in common that you do not even punish it.
· At that moment I became intensely conscious of the fact that no dream, no matter how horrible, could be as bad as the reality of the camp which surrounded us, and to which I was about to recall him.
· 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 — in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment.
· To draw an analogy: a man’s suffering is similar to the behavior of gas. If a certain quantity of gas is pumped into an empty chamber, it will fill the chamber completely and evenly, no matter how big the chamber. Thus suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little. Therefore, the “size” of human suffering is absolutely relative.
· “There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worth of my sufferings.” — Dostoyevsky
· Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it.
· But there was no need to be ashamed of tears, for tears bore witness that a man had the greatest of courage, the courage to suffer.
· 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.
· After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord’s Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.
Thoughts:
Towards the end of Viktor Frankl’s recollection of his time at Auschwitz, he speaks of a fellow prisoner with a hopeful dream. He tells Frankl that he heard a voice that would tell him what he wanted to know. The man responded logically by asking when the war would be over for him — as in, when would his suffering be over as a result of being freed from the camp. The voice responded knowingly and firmly: March thirtieth. It was February 1945 when the man told Frankl that dream. As the end of March approached, given the war news that was reaching the camp, it seemed extremely unlikely that the war would be over by the end of the month. Suddenly, on March twenty-ninth, the fellow prisoner became ill and ran a high fever. On the thirtieth, the man became delirious and lost consciousness. And on the thirty-first, the man was dead.
Did the prophecy in this man’s dream originally mean that he would be freed of his suffering through death? Or was the prophecy nonsense, the real point being that our state of mind and the hope we cling to for the future have drastic effects upon our physical well-being? Frankl uses his experiences at Auschwitz as an extremely powerful platform to talk about the human condition and what can make or break a man. And many of his anecdotes are geared towards this idea that in order for man to be happy he must: have a sense of meaning in his life, have some faith in his own future, and be able to find meaning in suffering. When we mentally and spiritually give in to our external circumstances, our bodies respond in kind; Frankl saw this sequence of events over and over at his time at the camp.
But the point of this autobiographical account (and following discussion of his theory of logotherapy) was not to detail the physical torment endured and the death witnessed during this horrible time — Frankl says there are plenty of books for this. Instead, Frankl uses this time to represent the ultimate obstacle faced by man: to find meaning in this transitory life that is often heavily influenced by conditions outside of our control. Influenced is the key word here. Because while there are plenty of forces that are not in our realm of control, our decision on how we react to our conditions is always in our control. We are always free to pick our attitude towards the things that happen to us. And to live as a prisoner at Auschwitz constrained a person’s life essentially to mere suffering. Most of what people had was simply to find some sort of meaning in their suffering, somehow finding a way to choose to be dignified in the face of overwhelming forces. Our choice of behavior in the face of such constraints determine whether we become misshapen by our conditions or remain ourselves in spite of them.
While the first half of this book is a depiction of a tragic and disturbing period of history, it is a fascinating account by someone who is looking back objectively upon his past as a rational observer and psychoanalyst. He details the degradation or flux of the prisoner’s mental state in three stages, speaking both from experience and as a witness of others. The second part of the book is Frankl’s discussion of his theory of logotherapy, which essentially dictates that most of man’s troubles and anxiety can be remedied by pursuing some purpose. There is no use in abstract and general questions like “what is the meaning of life.” Life is a question that we must choose to answer for ourselves — it is not enough to be free, we must take responsibility for our freedom. His discussion reminded me of Meditations (we must lead a life of right action regardless of our external circumstances), The Conquest of Happiness (happiness comes about when we learn to finally focus on things or people outside ourselves), and Obliquity (self-actualization and happiness must be pursued indirectly). It was an extremely practical and readily applicable discourse that could easily change anyone’s thinking for the better.
Ultimately, Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning is at once a potent recollection of wide-spread suffering and a rational review of what we are to think of such suffering. It is both an exercise in empathy and reasoning. I would readily recommend this one to anyone, and will probably revisit the second part of the book just for its succinct and beautiful way of wrestling with the human condition.
