Viktor Frankl and Meaning

 

     The phenomenon of meaning, its social roots, its relation to human nature and the "who we are" (plurality) that has its roots in human nature yet transcends it (Arendt). Its relation to happiness. Meaning is at the very intersection of human nature and personhood. I got started thinking about this today by thinking about Viktor Frankl. I feel the modern social system, which is largely a function of the global economy, de-means human life daily. The focus on happiness - therapeutical and otherwise – functions among other things as an ideology to mask this. I want to try to unpack some of these intuitions.

 

All thinkers I admire resist the reduction of human beings to functions. Frankl's insight is that meaning is not simply a psychological state. One does not create meaning by deciding to feel meaningful. Meaning is discovered in responding to something real: a task, a person, a truth, a responsibility. Happiness may follow from this response but cannot be directly pursued. The more directly one seeks happiness, the more it recedes. I completely agree.

    Arendt adds another piece of the puzzle. Human beings are not merely members of a species; we are not (hopefully) an exemplar of an Ur-model, though I think that is a chilling possibility (Brave New World). We are born into a world of plurality. We become persons through speech, action, promise, remembrance, forgiveness, friendship, citizenship. We disclose who we are as well as what we are. Human nature provides the conditions for this but the actual "who" emerges only in a shared world among others. That is why meaning is never merely private. Even when I am alone, the things that matter to me have been shaped by language, traditions, communities, loves, loyalties, and forms of life. Meaning is social all the way down. The very language in which I ask "What is the meaning of my life?" was given to me by others.

     Many modern institutions are efficient at organizing production and consumption (if not just distribution and fulfillment of needs) but they weaken the very things through which meaning appears. Local communities disappear. Work becomes fragmented. Traditions lose authority. Places become interchangeable. Relationships become mobile and temporary. Economic value increasingly displaces other forms of value. This is not simply a conservative complaint. It appears in Marx's notion of alienation, in Arendt's analysis of mass society, in Josef Pieper's critique of total work, in Wendell Berry's defense of local communities, and in Christopher Lasch's critique of narcissism. What all these people share is the suspicion that a society can become highly productive while simultaneously eroding the conditions under which life appears meaningful.

     The therapeutic culture is part of this. If the social world itself is producing alienation, loneliness, rootlessness, and insignificance, it is tempting to reinterpret these as primarily psychological problems. The question becomes: "How can I feel better?" rather than "What kind of world are we creating?" Therapy undoubtedly has a legitimate role. Frankl himself was a psychiatrist. But some forms of therapeutic discourse function ideologically when they individualize what may be social, cultural, or spiritual wounds. A lonely person may not simply need coping strategies. He may need friends. A person who feels useless may not simply need self-esteem. He may need work that genuinely contributes something. A person who experiences life as meaningless may not simply need cognitive reframing. He may need participation in realities larger than himself.

 

. . .

Meaning lies at the intersection of human nature and personhood. Human nature provides certain fundamental capacities and needs: language, friendship, work, love, truth, beauty, belonging, transcendence. Yet meaning is never merely the satisfaction of common needs. It emerges through the unique ways persons respond to these possibilities and through the worlds they build together. Arendt would perhaps say that meaning appears wherever human beings disclose themselves to one another in a common world. Frankl would say that meaning appears wherever a person answers the demands of reality. Pieper would add that meaning appears most fully when we encounter reality not merely as users or producers but as contemplative beings capable of wonder. Much of contemporary life systematically pushes us away from all three: away from genuine plurality, away from genuine responsibility, and away from genuine contemplation.    The result is not merely unhappiness. It is something deeper: a weakening of the experience that one's life genuinely matters, belongs somewhere, and participates in a meaningful whole.

 

   Thus the problem of meaning cannot be solved entirely by psychology. It is simultaneously anthropological, social, political, moral, and ultimately metaphysical. The question "What gives life meaning?" inevitably becomes the question "What kind of beings are we, and what kind of world allows us to flourish as those beings?" For thinkers like Frankl, Arendt, Berry, Gaita, and Pieper, those two questions cannot ultimately be separated.

 

. . .

 

Another go at it. I feel I need to concretize the intuition. If we speak only of human nature, we are speaking of what human beings generally are. We are rational, linguistic, social, dependent creatures. We need friendship, meaningful activity, truthfulness, beauty, belonging, and love. These are universal features of human flourishing.

     But meaning is never found in these general needs alone. Take friendship. Human nature may explain why human beings need friendship. But the meaning of friendship is not found in "friendship in general." It is found in this friend, with this history, these shared memories, this act of loyalty. Meaning enters when the universal human need becomes embodied in a concrete personal relationship.

    Or teaching, my vocation. Human nature may explain why human beings need education and why knowledge is a human good. But what gives meaning to my teaching is not the general fact that education exists. It is this particular student struggling with an idea, a student discovering a new possibility, a conversation that changes someone. Meaning appears in the encounter between universal human goods and particular persons. Perhaps that is what I mean by the intersection. Human nature provides the field of significance. Personhood provides the concrete realization. Without human nature, meaning would become completely subjective. Whatever anyone chooses would count as meaningful. Without personhood, meaning would become abstract. Friendship, justice, truth, beauty, and love would remain mere concepts.

    Meaning arises when universal human goods become concretely embodied in a personal life. This is why Frankl's examples are almost always particular. Not "love" but a particular wife. Not "work" but a particular task. Not "courage" but a particular response to suffering. Human nature tells us what kinds of things can be meaningful. Personhood determines how those meanings become actual in a unique life. Or, borrowing from Arendt, human nature explains what we are, while meaning emerges through the disclosure of who we are. A bee can flourish according to its nature. It builds a hive, gathers pollen, reproduces. But we do not speak of a bee finding meaning. A human being must do more than function according to nature. He must answer the question: "Who shall I become?" Meaning seems to arise in that space between nature and freedom, between the goods that call to us and the unique response we give to them.

 

. . .

 

This explains my unease with some modern therapeutic language. It often treats meaning as a subjective feeling located entirely within the individual. But my understanding is closer to Frankl, Arendt, Gaita, and even Aristotle:

meaning is neither merely "out there" in objective human nature nor merely "in here" as a psychological state. It is found in the lived relation between a person and the real goods that human nature makes possible.

     A father reading to his child is a good example. The meaning is not reducible to biology. Nor is it a private feeling. It arises in the concrete realization of a human good – love, care, transmission, belonging – through this particular father and this particular child. The universal and the personal meet in a single act. That may be the intersection I am trying to name. It is the place where human nature becomes biography. Where the universal becomes a story. Where "what we are" becomes "who I am." And meaning seems to live precisely there.

 

. . .

 

   I have emphasized - with Berry, MacIntyre, and others - that to realize the potential in human nature, i.e. virtue and a chance to flourish, we are by nature communal animals. Yet, and surely Berry would not disagree based on his Sabbath poems, we also need solitude, contemplation, a life apart from this community. This reminds me that human nature is a Spannungsfeld (field of tensions) of seeming opposites, which I first learned from a section of Weil's The Need for Roots. Weil argues that human beings possess multiple, sometimes competing needs of the soul. We need liberty, but also obedience. Equality, but also hierarchy. Security, but also risk. Personal initiative, but also social cooperation. Truth, but also rootedness in tradition. She does not try to dissolve the tensions. She thinks they belong to the structure of human existence itself, and I agree.

    Human beings are naturally communal animals. We need friendship, family, conversation, common projects, shared memories, traditions, and places. Without these we become diminished. This is one of the themes of Wendell Berry and Alasdair MacIntyre. Yet we are also creatures capable of contemplation. A person who never leaves the community cannot truly see it. He merely conforms to it. Genuine membership requires some distance. The poet, philosopher, monk, artist, and even the farmer walking alone through his fields all exemplify this need.

     Berry understands this. His Sabbath poems are records of solitude. He enters the woods alone. He becomes silent. The social world recedes. Yet this solitude is not individualism. He returns from it more deeply connected to the land, the creatures, and the community. This may point to something deeper about human nature itself. We are simultaneously beings of belonging and beings of transcendence. We belong somewhere but we also possess the capacity to step back from every particular belonging and contemplate it. We need community, yet we also need solitude. We need tradition but we need enough distance to judge traditions. We need action, yet we need contemplation. We need rootedness, yet we are drawn beyond every particular place toward truth as such.

     Meaning seems to arise not from one side of these polarities but from their fruitful tension. A life of pure community risks conformity and absorption into the collective;a life of pure solitude risks isolation and sterility. A life of pure work risks becoming what Pieper called "total work."

A life of pure contemplation risks detachment from responsibility. Human flourishing seems to require movement between the poles.

 

 Many of the thinkers I return to, such as Aristotle, Weil, Berry, Pieper, Gaita, Arendt, Murdoch – share a suspicion of systems that attempt to resolve these tensions once and for all. Modern economic life privileges productivity over contemplation. Certain romantic movements go in the opposite direction (in rebellion), prvileging self-expression over communal obligations. Some forms of collectivism subordinate the person to the community. Some forms of liberal individualism dissolve the community into autonomous choices. But we areconstituted by these tensions. We are not one thing but a dynamic unity of apparently contrary needs. Human nature is not a fixed blueprint but a field of ordered tensions – a Spannungsfeld. And perhaps wisdom consists less in choosing one side than in learning how to inhabit those tensions well.

     Thus Weil's account feels so true my experience. We do not merely need freedom. We need freedom and belonging. We do not merely need individuality. We need individuality and participation. We do not merely need community. We need community and solitude. A healthy human life is not the victory of one pole over the other. It is a kind of rhythm between them. Berry walking alone on a Sabbath morning and then returning to his family, neighbors, and farm may be as good an image of that rhythm as any philosopher has given us. It is not an escape from community but a return to it through contemplation. And perhaps contemplation itself is possible only because there is a world of people and things worth returning to.

 

. . .

 

    Frankl's insights about suffering, one's attitude toward it, as a source of meaning, as opposed to the thought that we are all supposed to be happy ala Brave New World is important. But without a certain range of metaphysical horizons, would that thought make sense? What does Frankl say about that if anything?

   I think that this is one of the deepest questions in Frankl, and I think he is deliberately ambiguous about it. Frankl certainly rejects the idea that happiness is the goal of life. Happiness, he says, is a by-product. Human beings seek meaning, not pleasure. In that respect he stands against the world portrayed in Brave New World, where suffering is eliminated, desires are managed, and happiness becomes the supreme social objective.

    For Frankl, suffering can become meaningful when it cannot be avoided and when a person responds to it with dignity, courage, fidelity, or love. His famous examples from the death camps/concentration camps involve people who retained their humanity despite conditions that stripped them of almost everything else. But why should suffering borne nobly matter? Why is dignity preferable to despair? Why is courage better than surrender? Why should fidelity to a dead spouse remain meaningful if death is simply annihilation? I just thing they are, period. In this case, there is no answer to the question why. There is the absolute.

  But at this point Frankl becomes somewhat elusive. As a psychiatrist, he wanted logotherapy to be available to religious and non-religious people alike. He therefore refused to make belief in God or immortality a formal requirement of meaning. Meaning, he thought, could be discovered within ordinary life, work, love, and responsibility.

   But he repeatedly implies that meaning points beyond itself. One of his favorite ideas is that conscience is not merely a subjective feeling but a kind of organ for perceiving objective meaning. That already implies a reality larger than the self. He also writes at times as if ultimate meaning transcends human understanding altogether. We may not know why suffering occurs, but we can still trust that life has meaning under all conditions. That sounds quite religious. Frankl once wrote: "It is not we who are permitted to question the meaning of life – it is life that questions us." I like that. It implies that reality itself addresses us with demands. Meaning is not something we invent. We answer to it. Absolutely right.

    The question then becomes: who or what is doing the questioning? Frankl does not give a definitive answer as far as I know. As I understand him, he wanted to leave open a space where the religious person could say "God" and the secular person could say "the objective demands of reality." I would press here.  Suppose there is no God, no immortality, no ultimate justice, no transcendent order, no enduring significance beyond death. Then what exactly makes suffering meaningful? One could still say that courage is admirable. One could still say that loyalty is noble. One could still say that love is beautiful. But it is difficult to explain why these things ultimately matter rather than merely being preferences we happen to admire. Again,I think that confuses the kind of thing for which we need reasons to justify it from an absolute command or reality that we are called to submit to, unconditionally.

   This is where Frankl's position differs from many existentialists. For Sartre, meaning is fundamentally created by human choice. For Frankl, meaning is discovered. If meaning is discovered, then there must be something there to discover. And if there is something there to discover, one naturally begins asking metaphysical questions about the structure of reality itself. I think this is why so many readers eventually move beyond Frankl toward religious or metaphysical reflection. For me, influenced by Gaita, the absolute of loving your children, say, regardless of any other benefit or reason why, points to some reality that makes demands on us, or issues invitations, but which we can only experience as an absolute ‘love your children’, no reason for this possible. It is good. It is right. Etc. just saying the say thing with different worlds. Frankl’s account of meaning also seems to presuppose that reality is somehow hospitable to meaning.

    The alternative is difficult to sustain. If the universe is ultimately indifferent, if suffering is simply pointless pain, if love ends in absolute annihilation, if justice is finally defeated by death, then Frankl's language of responsibility, dignity, and meaning begins to sound strangely unsupported. One can, indeed must, still affirm it, but one wants to know what holds it up.

     Thus I think Frankl stands at a threshold. He shows that human beings need meaning more deeply than happiness. He shows that suffering can be transformed by meaning. But he leaves largely unanswered the further question that concerns me: What sort of reality must exist for meaning itself to be ultimately real? That question leads beyond psychotherapy into metaphysics, theology, and philosophy.

 

 

P. S.

 

  What is the difference between thinking "the phenomenon of meaning" and "the concept of meaning"? The concept of meaning is an intellectual object. It is what we arrive at when we ask things like ‘What do we mean by meaning’? or ‘How should it be defined?’ or ‘How does it differ from happiness, purpose, value, significance, or truth?’ This is the philosopher's conceptual work.

   The phenomenon of meaning is something prior to the concept. It is the lived reality that gives rise to the concept in the first place. A child experiences meaning long before possessing the concept of meaning. A farmer caring for a field. A mother sitting beside a sick child. A student discovering a vocation. A mourner keeping faith with the dead. A prisoner enduring suffering for something he loves. All of these involve meaning as a lived phenomenon before anyone formulates a theory about it.

 

For example, for Heidegger, there is a difference between a theory of truth and the phenomenon of truth as unconcealment. For Gadamer, there is a difference between a theory of understanding and the lived phenomenon of understanding. For Wittgenstein, there is a difference between a definition of a word and the actual forms of life in which the word has its home.For Gaita, there is a difference between defining love and seeing what love looks like in the life of a saint, a mother, or a friend. The phenomenon always comes first. The concept is a reflective attempt to articulate what is already there.

  One danger of modern thought is that it often mistakes the concept for the phenomenon. For example, a psychologist might define meaning in terms of subjective well-being. A sociologist might define it in terms of social integration. An economist might define it in terms of preference satisfaction.

Yet before all these theories stands the phenomenon itself: the lived experience that some things matter, that some acts are noble, that some sufferings are worth enduring, that some loves are irreplaceable.

    Frankl begins from the phenomenon rather than the concept. He does not start by defining meaning. He begins with the fact that some prisoners lost the will to live while others retained it because they experienced a task, a love, a responsibility, or a hope that gave their suffering significance. Only afterward does he theorize.

    If you approach meaning as a concept, you may ask what meaning is. If you approach meaning as a phenomenon, you ask what is happening when a human being experiences life as meaningful. That second question immediately opens onto friendship, work, love, memory, suffering, contemplation, community, transcendence, mortality, and hope. It becomes anthropological rather than merely conceptual.

    My question here involved the phenomenon of meaning, and what its existence revealed about human beings and the world we inhabit. Trying to understand a dimension of human reality.