Month: March 2020

“There is only one thing I dread, not to be worthy of my suffering.” – Fyodor Dostoevsky

 

 

 

 

 

Last time I introduced Viktor Frankl, a psychiatrist, holocaust survivor, and author of Man’s Search for Meaning. Frankl discovered that even extreme suffering does not make life meaningless, and can prompt personal meaning. However, as a physician and healer, his first caveat: if suffering is avoidable its cause should be removed. Anything else is masochism, not heroism. He does not advocate asceticism; on the contrary he writes: “in no way is suffering necessary to find meaning.”¹ Rather his point is that “meaning is possible even in spite of suffering.”²  This is the comfort he  offers to those facing unavoidable suffering

His philosophy is based on three fundamental premises:³

(1) The will is free.

(2) Humans have a will to meaning.

(3) There can be a meaning of life.

The first of these, freedom of the will, he considers the immediate data of experience, although of course freedom is limited by the human condition and by one’s circumstances. His life experiences have led him to believe that human will is directed – not to pleasure as asserted by Freud, nor to power as maintained by Nietzsche and Adler – but to meaning which subsumes the others. He adds that the meaning the will seeks requires a commitment to something beyond oneself or super meaning, and freedom makes one responsible for fulfilling it.

Frankl thinks there are three ways a human life can be meaningful: (1) what we give, i.e. creation, (2) what we take, for instance peak experiences or love of another, and (3) the stand we take to a fate we cannot avoid or change, such as an incurable disease.⁴ It is this latter point which he extracted from his experience in a concentration camp. But like Buddha, Frankl recognizes none of us can avoid what he calls the “tragic triad of human existence, namely pain, death, and guilt.”⁵

In fact, Frankl argues that to live is to suffer and if there is a purpose in life at all there must be a purpose in suffering and in dying. The reality of suffering is individual; thus one finds out for oneself its meaning and the possibility of growth despite indignity. One learns there is always one final human freedom, the freedom to choose one’s attitude to one’s circumstances. “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.”⁶

In brief, if we wish to be worthy of our suffering, we must prove our capacity to rise above our outward fate, to transcend it. Like Kant, who tells us we cannot expect happiness, only make ourselves worthy of it, Frankl tells us we cannot avoid suffering, but we can make ourselves worthy of it.

 

¹Frankl, Viktor, Man’s Search for Meaning. Washington Square Press, New York, 1984. ISBN 0-671-02337-3, page 136.

²Ibid.

³Frankl, Viktor, Psychotherapy and Existentialism. Washington Square Press, New York, 1967. Page 2.

⁴Ibid., page 15.

⁵Ibid.

⁶Frankl, Viktor, Man’s Search for Meaning. Washington Square Press, New York, 1984. ISBN 0-671-02337-3, page 99.

“Death wrapped itself around me till I was stifled. It stuck to me. I felt that I could touch it. The idea of dying, of no longer being, began to fascinate me. Not to exist any longer. Not to feel the horrible pains in my foot. Not to feel anything, neither weariness nor cold nor anything….” – Elie Wiesel, Night.

We have just completed an exploration of the Buddha’s analysis of the role of inevitable suffering in individual enlightenment. It seems to me the Buddha’s teachings are most instructive when applied to the common suffering we all experience, but less congenial to the extraordinary suffering such as extreme physical pain or flight from a war zone. At a minimum we may wish to consider the more sensitive approach we find in Viktor Fankl’s masterpiece Man’s Search for Meaning.

Frankl was a psychiatrist, who lost his father, mother, wife, and brother in the holocaust and was himself a Nazi concentration camp survivor.  In the first half of this book, he recounts the intense cruelty and deprivation that he and others endured over three years in the camps and his ground level attempts to survive and find meaning in the experience. If you decide to read it, be prepared for horrendous stories of inhumane treatment. However, he discovers within the torment “that human life, under any circumstances, never ceases to have a meaning, and that this infinite meaning of life includes suffering and dying, privation and death.”¹ After the war he returns to psychiatric practice in Vienna and develops a school of psychotherapy he calls logotherapy, which involves existential analysis and guidance to individual meaning.

What counsel can the reader with current extreme suffering derive from Dr. Frankl’s book?  First he tells us the psychological side of such circumstances: a mixed flow of emotions and apathy, cold detachment concerning one’s fate alternating with desperate strategies to preserve one’s remaining life, increased tolerance of  lesser suffering, religiousness, a grim sense of humor, and fixation on images of loved ones and natural beauty. But his two greatest observations are: (1) human beings have an incredible power to turn suffering into meaning, and (2) love is the highest goal to which a man can aspire.

Next time we will look in more detail at his philosophy based on his unimaginable suffering.

 

¹Frankl, Viktor, Man’s Search for Meaning. Washington Square Press, New York, 1984. ISBN 0-671-02337-3, page 104