The universal quest for meaning

I’ve already cited Philosophy Now (Issue 162, June/July 2024) in my last 2 posts and I’m about to do it again. Every issue has a theme, and this one is called ‘The Meaning Issue’, so it’s no surprise that 2 of the articles reference Viktor Frankl’s seminal book, Man’s Search for Meaning. I’ve said that it’s probably the only book I’ve read that I think everyone should read.
 
For those who don’t know, Frankl was an Auschwitz survivor and a ‘logotherapist’, a term he coined to describe his own version of existential psychological therapy. Basically, Frankl saw purpose as being the unrecognised essence of our existence, and its lack as a source of mental issues like depression, neuroticism and stress. I’ve written about the importance of purpose previously, so I might repeat myself.
 
One of the articles (by Georgia Arkell) compares Frankl’s ideas on existentialism with Sartre’s, and finds Frankl more optimistic. I know that I’m taking a famous line out of context, but I feel it sums up their differences. Sartre famously said, ‘Hell is other people’, but Frankl lived through hell, and would no doubt, have strongly disagreed. Frankl argued that we can find meaning even under the most extreme circumstances, and he should know.
 
To quote from Arkell’s article:
 
Frankl noted that the prisoners who appeared to have the highest chance of survival were those with some aim or meaning directed beyond themselves and beyond day to day survival.
 
Then there is this, in Frankl’s own words (from Man’s Search for Meaning):
 
…it becomes clear that the sort of person the prisoner became was the result of an inner-decision and not the result of camp influences alone. Fundamentally then, any man can, under such circumstances, decide what shall become of him – mentally and spiritually.
 
I should point out that my own father spent 2.5 years as a POW in Germany, though it wasn’t a death camp, even though, according to his own testimony, it was only Red Cross food parcels that kept him alive. He rarely talked about it, as he was a firm believer that you couldn’t make the experience of war, in all its manifestations, comprehensible to anyone who hadn’t experienced it. But in light of Frankl’s words, I wonder now how my father did find meaning. There is one aspect of his experience that might shed some light on that – he escaped no less than 3 times.
 
My father was very principled, some might say, to a fault. He volunteered to stay and look after the wounded when they were ordered to evacuate Crete, because, as he said, it was his job (he was an ambulance officer in the Field Ambulance Corp). That action probably later saved his life, but that’s another story. Also on Crete, while trying to escape with another prisoner with the help of a local woman (it was always the women who did this, according to my father), they were discovered by a German, whilst hiding. My father gave himself up so the other 2 could escape. The Australian escapee made it back home and was able to tell my grandmother that her son was still alive (she only knew he was missing in action). But the 3 attempts I mentioned all happened after he was taken to Germany, and on one occasion, the Commandant asked him, why did he escape? My father answered matter-of-factly, ‘It’s my job’. Apparently, due to his sincerity (not for being a smart-arse), the Commandant chose not to punish him.
 
So, I think my father survived because he stuck to some core values and principles that became his own rock and anchor. His attempts to escape are manifestations of his personal affirmation that he never lost hope.
 
Frankl understood better than most, because of his lived experience, the importance of hope to a person’s survival. As an aside, our (Australian) government has a very deliberate policy of eliminating all hope for asylum seekers who arrive by sea. I think it’s so iniquitous, it should be a recognised crime – it goes to the heart of human rights. Slightly off-topic, but very relevant.
 
Loss of hope is something I’ve explored in my own fiction, where we witness its loss like a ball of tightly wound string slowly unravelling (not the metaphor I used in the book), as a key character is abandoned on a distant world (it’s sci-fi, for those who don’t know). I’ve been told by at least one reader that it’s the most impactful section in the book. True story: I was once sitting next to someone on a bus who was up to that part of the book, and as he got up to leave, he said, ‘If she dies, I’ll never speak to you again.’
 
See how easily I get side-tracked - my mind goes off on tangents – I can’t help myself. I’m the same in conversations.
 
Back to the topic: the other article in Philosophy Now that references Frankl, Finding Meaning in Suffering, by Patrick Testa (a psychiatric clinician with a BA in philosophy and political science) also quotes from Man’s Search for Meaning:
 
There are some authors who contend that meanings and values are nothing but defense mechanisms or reaction formulations…  But for myself, I would not be willing to live merely for the sake of my defense mechanisms, nor would I be ready to die merely for the sake of my reaction formulations. (Emphasis in Testa’s quote)
 
This quote was the original trigger for this essay, as it leads me to consider the role of identity. I’ve long argued that identity is what someone is willing to die for (which Frankl specifically mentions), therefore willing to kill for. Identity is strongly related to ‘meaning’ for most people, albeit at a subconscious level. For some people, their identity is their profession, for others it’s their heritage, and for many it’s their political affiliation. The point about identity is that it both binds us and divides us.
 
But if you were to ask someone what their identity is, they might well struggle to answer – I know I do – but if it appears to be threatened, even erroneously, they will become combative. Speaking for myself, I struggled to find meaning for a large portion of my life, seeking it in relationships that were more fantasy than realistic. I think I only found meaning (or purpose) when I was able to channel my artistic drives and also express my intellectual meanderings like I’m doing on this blog. So that axiomatically becomes my identity. I’ve written more than once about the importance of freedom, by which I mean the freedom to express one’s thoughts and any artistic urges. Even in my profession (which is in engineering), I found I was best when left to my own devices, and suffered most when someone tried to put me in a box and confine me to their way of thinking.
 
I can’t imagine living in a society where that particular freedom is curtailed, yet they exist. I would argue that a society where its participants can’t flourish would stagnate and not progress in any way, except possibly in a strictly material sense. We’ve seen that in totalitarian regimes all over the world.
 
Lastly, one can’t leave this topic without talking about religion. In fact, I imagine that many, on reading the title, would have expected that would be the starting point. I’ll provide a reference at the end, but very early on in the life of this blog, I wrote a post called Hope, which was really a response to a somewhat facile argument by William Lane Craig that atheists can’t possibly have hope. I don’t think I can improve on that argument here, but it also ties into the topic of identity that I just referred to.
 
Apart from identity, which is usually cultural, there is the universal regard for human suffering. As pointed out in the articles I cited, suffering is an unavoidable aspect of life. The Buddhist philosophy makes this its starting point – It’s the first of the Four Noble Truths, from which the other 3 stem. I expect a lot of religions have arisen as a means to psychologically ‘explain’ the purpose of suffering. It’s also a feature of virtually all fiction, without a religious argument in sight.
 
But it’s also a key feature of Frankl’s philosophy. Arguably, without suffering, we can’t find meaning. I’ve argued previously that we don’t find wisdom through learning and achievements, but through dealing with adversity – it’s even a specific teaching in the I Ching, albeit expressed in different words:
 
Adversity is the opposite of success, but it can lead to success if it befalls the right person.
 
I expect many of us can identify with that. Meaning can be found in the darkest of psychological places, yet without it, we wouldn’t keep going.
 
 
Other posts relevant to this topic: Homage to my Old Man; Hope; The importance of purpose; Freedom, justice, happiness and truth; Freedom, a moral imperative.