There is beauty in the struggle, not because we seek it out, but because if it is to occur, finding beauty is perhaps the only way to endure it. If we are stripped of everything outwardly — struggle has degraded us to the basest of animals again — what remains is still one’s inner freedom and responsibility in how they react to the struggle. Indeed, what remains is what Viktor E. Frankl refers to as “tragic optimism.” Frankl, a psychiatrist prior to WWII, who pioneered logotherapy, or a therapy concerned with the future and making meaning so as to have a future (as opposed to psychoanalysis, the predominant strain of his time, that delved into the past), knows from whence he speaks. He is a Holocaust survivor; he endured suffering and degradation. Nevertheless, he maintained his inner freedom and responsibility to react with tragic optimism to his present circumstances precisely because he imagined a future beyond the camps: his wife, and his life’s work regarding logotherapy. His 1946 book, Man’s Search for Meaning, is part-autobiographical about his experience in the concentration camps and part-scientific, expounding upon logotherapy. Frankl once said his meaning in life was to help others find theirs. With this book, he actualized that potential and found his meaning. Profound and poignant, anyone of any religious, spiritual, or secular persuasion will find much that resonates in Frankl’s book. It also must be said that it is quite accessible as far as a heavy book that deals with the Holocaust is concerned; it’s not dense in its retelling nor its scientific musings. Which is perhaps why Man’s Searching for Meaning has had such staying power.
I am responsible for my existence. What a resonant thought that is. Whatever may have led to my present being — and here I’m referring to untold generations of biological machinations — and whatever may occur to me externally by other forces, I am, nevertheless, responsible for my existence. That is what Frankl argues. You can only control how you react to what is done to you, not that it is done. This is why Frankl often sincerely suggested that the West Coast of the United States ought to have a Statue of Responsibility as a companion to the State of Liberty on the East Coast.
But what about the concentration camp prisoner, of whom Frankl was one? Surely, there is not meaning to be found in that kind of struggle. Well, before we get there, Frankl first discusses the psychological phases the prisoner goes through upon arriving at the camp. The first of these is the “illusion of reprieve,” or the idea that some external reprieve will end the unreality of the terrible reality. Faced with such a terrible reality, it’s alienating and lonely-making to imagine that all you have left to face it is what is inside you. Then, as the prisoner experiences the barbarism, cruelty, and inescapable death of the camp, he experiences a detached curiosity. That is, under such circumstances, it is impossible to know what the next hour will hold, much less the next day, hence a detached curiosity forms of what will transpire next. With enough exposure to the deprivations of the camp, though, the prisoner ultimately experiences a relative apathy, what Frankl refers to as a kind of “emotional death.” Essentially, one can no longer expend the usual emotions reacting to what they are bearing witness to.
Of course, throughout all of these phases is the thought of suicide, of ending it instead of continuing to face it. But this is where Frankl offers up the parable of Death in Tehran. A rich Persian was walking in his garden with a servant, when the servant cries that he’s encountered death and implores the rich Persian to give him his fastest horse so that the servant may avoid death by fleeing to Tehran. When the rich Persian returns to the house, Death is there, and upon being asked why he so terrified the Persian’s servant, Death replies (almost like a quip!), “I did not threaten him; I only showed surprise in still finding him here when I planned to meet him tonight in Tehran.” The implication of this parable is that one cannot outrun (or out-gallop, as it were) their fate. Instead, they must meet it as it is, and take the responsibility of owning up to their existence and how they react to such a fate. Again, as Frankl makes clear, one does not seek struggle, as one is not a masochist, but should struggle arrive at our shores, we cannot outrun it. We must embrace it to endure it, to find some modicum of “human achievement” within it. Obtaining such human achievement is about showing someone mired in struggle a future goal. Frankl likes to quote Nietzsche’s words here, “He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how.” If I have no reason to live, how can I bear it? That’s why Frankl imagined his wife and his book. But even though Frankl and logotherapy is future-oriented, it also renders a past worthy of our being. That is, all our “human achievement” and joys of the past can still light the present darkness. Frankl adds, “Having been is also a kind of being, and perhaps the surest kind.” That can be an anchor of sorts in which to formulate future goals.
Even after Frankl and his fellow prisoners were liberated, though, “freedom” had lost its meaning to them. ” … we did not yet belong to this world.” After years of suffering and degradation, it’s almost as if the prisoners had to reacclimate themselves to the reality outside of the camps, a reality where freedom was possible again. As one rehabs a leg that has not been walked upon, the prisoners had to rehab their capacity for experiencing true joy again.
Whether within the camps or outside of them, Frankl’s contention is that man’s search for meaning is the primary motivational force. Welfare is not enough. Material means are not enough. That is because meaning is something that transcends the self. Which is to say, self-actualization — becoming who you feel you ought to be — is brought about, in part, by self-transcendence. One transcends the self by looking beyond the self, i.e., devoting one’s self to an external source of meaning. What are those sources? Creating something or doing a deed; experiencing or encountering someone (love!); and by the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering (emphasis mine). And this tension between who one presently is and who one agitates to be in the future is a healthy tension as far as Frankl is concerned. Reaching some sort of mental “homeostasis” is not the goal. The striving is the cauldron for achieving self-actualization, self-transcendence, and meaning. There is another tension that seems to accompany material wellness or even familial wellness: the attendant shame at experiencing and feeling unhappy. Unhappiness alone is not the vexing issue, but the coupling of one’s shame over it as well.
Returning to unavoidable suffering, the third way of achieving meaning, it’s almost axiomatic in that, if it depended upon surviving the suffering, then how would there be any meaning in the suffering? The meaning bears fruit because one is not sure they are going to survive it. Which is a microcosm of life itself! Except here, we actually know life is finite and will end, which is why we have to find meaning in it, lest we turn to nihilism, which Frankl categorically rejects. Moreover, it is not that one ought to be inspired by struggle per se. After all, since it is unavoidable, the person did not choose to suffer. We do not valorize the masochist! Rather, we can be proud of ourselves, and inspiring to others, in how we responded to the suffering. By way of example, Frankl has a tremendous footnote story of a Polish cardiologist who helped organize the Warsaw ghetto uprising. When told he performed a heroic deed, the doctor replied, “Listen, to take a gun and shoot is no great thing; but if the SS leads you to a gas chamber or to a mass grave to execute you on the spot, and you can’t do anything about it — except for going your way with dignity — you see, this is what I would call heroism.” You still have the freedom and responsibility of your dignity!
Frankl could’ve emerged from the concentration camp with the intention of assigning collective guilt (he didn’t) or becoming a nihilist (he opposed as much) or even rendering the Nazi guards as all bad (he didn’t even do that). Instead, he found that in the latter category, there were some acts of kindness. In this way, the concentration camps became a “living laboratory” to how man behaves as either swine or saints; “man has both potentialities within himself.” It is through this living laboratory, Frankl says, that his generation came to know man as he really is. “After all, man is the 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.” How can you not find beauty in that?
Tragic optimism is about finding that beauty even when faced with unavoidable pain, guilt, or death. Humans have an unyielding capacity for, as Frankl says, turning suffering into human achievement and accomplishment; deriving from guilt the opportunity to change one’s self for the better; and deriving from life’s transitoriness an incentive to take responsible action. However, despite our American credo of the “pursuit of happiness,” happiness, love, and indeed optimism, can not pursued as such, but ensue, Frankl says. Reason, or meaning, is the foundation for the ensuing happiness, love, and optimism. One cannot, to use another logotherapy term, hyper-intend to be happy, to love, or to be optimistic. The reason comes before the ensuing.
So, then, what is the meaning of life? Frankl does not presuppose to provide any one answer for any one person, as it varies for everyone, which is the point. The meaning is derived from whatever propels someone into the future. To keep living. To keep struggling, as it were, against the human condition, against the dying of the light, to paraphrase Dylan Thomas. That is the most beautiful thing of all.
Milam's Musings 