The Will to Meaning

The phrase is most closely linked to Viktor Frankl’s psychotherapy, but it was first articulated, in his own usage, by Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), the Christian existentialist. In this context meaning translates into value, belief, and purpose—all viewed as individual, internal, subjective achievements. The will to meaning is the inner striving for something altogether absent in objective reality—out there. Meaning, in this existential sense, is the very core of Frankl psychotherapy, which he calls logotherapy. The affirmation of meaning, in Frankl’s work, is about as close as one can get to an affirmation of human transcendence in secular terms—but even a superficial reading of Frankl reveals that he means just that. Human beings cannot be adequately described when ignoring the deeply felt will to meaning present in us. We have a soul.

The particular formulation here derives from competing schools of psychotherapy: Freudian, the will to pleasure, usually rendered as the pleasure principle, and the Adlerian, the will to power. Freud’s work was centered in the sexual drive, the Adlerian on the inferiority complex. Frankl does not deny that drives exist but classifies them as on a lower, biological level, than the quest from meaning, which rises above this level. Even the person most adequately adjusted sexually or in status will experience neuroses arising from life’s seeming meaninglessness. Indeed, in Frankl’s view that state, which he calls the existential vacuum, was the dominant neurosis of his time, the twentieth century. Does it continue to loom large today?

Meaning is transcending, in Frankl’s view, because it can illuminate and overcome even the greatest suffering, not least terminal suffering, by the vital acts of endurance and affirmation of the individual. All of his books are quite accessible. A good example is Man’s Search for Meaning. Do not, however, expect to find “the meaning of life” explained, chapter and verse. That remains an individual responsibility—another important word in Frankl’s thought.

On Being and Meaning

The aim of philosophical knowledge certainly does not consist in the knowledge of being, in a reflection of reality in the mind of the person who knows. Its aim is the knowledge of truth, the discovery of meaning, its purpose is to give an intelligible sense to reality. Philosophical knowledge, therefore, is not passive reflection, it is an active break-through, it is victory in the conflict with the meaninglessness of world reality. What I want to know is not reality but the truth about it, and I can recognize this truth only because there is in me myself, in the knowing subject, a source of truth, and union with truth is a possibility. The fact that there is in front of me a writing-table and I am writing with a pen on paper is not truth. It is something received by the senses and a statement of fact. The problem of truth is already posed in my writing. There is no truth of any sort of object; truth is only in the subject.

  [Nicolai Berdyaev, The Beginning & The End, Harper Torchbook, 1957, p. 42]

Berdyaev (1874-1948) was a Russian philosopher usually grouped with Christian existentialists. I got to know him in the 1950s. He is also sometimes called the philosopher of creativeness. In the following sixty some odd years, I’ve never had occasion to question his intuition. All harmony. He has this to say on the next page:

Truth is a creative act of spirit in which meaning is brought to birth. Truth stands higher than the reality which exercises compulsion upon us, higher than the “real” world. But still higher than truth is God, or to put it more truly—God is Truth.

Synchronicity and Meaning

I learn from Carl G. Jung that Richard Wilhelm (the translator of the I Ching) rendered the Tao as “meaning.” The usual translation is “the Way.” Jung then takes up this notion in his attempts to explain synchronicity.

Synchronicity is Jung’s label for what we call “meaningful coincidences.” His labeling is artfully modern. It emphasizes the coincidence of events in time but does not highlight meaning as part of the word. But of course the very essence of meaningful coincidences is the meaning; that essence only emerges when the coinciding events can not, repeat not, be explained as due to a linking cause. That’s why, of course, others often emphatically emphasize that the events are due to chance. To be sure, all of us associate meaning with cause-effect relationships. The only rational explanation of synchronicities, therefore, is to assume that some invisible agency is “arranging” reality. Why? To send us a message. Without such an assumption a meaningful coincidence loses its meaning; any significance we detect is strictly subjective and without any value. But, on the contrary, we perceive the meaning; we can’t accept Modernity’s dismissive judgment. Viscerally we know that meaning in such situations is most certainly a message, even if the message itself says little more than “something magical really does operate in the world.”

The classic example provided by Jung: A man is leaving home for an 11 am meeting as the doorbell rings. A delivery man is at the door with a black suit of the sort Europeans used to rent for funerals. The man did not order such a suit. An examination of the delivery slips shows that the actual target address is on the next block over. The delivery man made a mistake. Apologies. The man hurries off to his appointment. Three days later he learns that an aunt of his died on the day of the delivery at 11 am.

“Meaning” is one of those concepts we all innately understand, but giving the concept a formal definition is more problematical. Intention is one part of meaning. When we address somebody else, we intend to be understood. Meaning is also linked to essence. What we convey is not a thing, action, or conditions but its gist, the concept of it, a token for it. We may give things to people but we convey essences when we speak. Both intentions and capacities to abstract essences from phenomena (or to perceive phenomena when essences are conveyed to us) are capacities of conscious agents. Without the presence of agencies meanings have no reality; neither intention nor understanding is present. At the same time, if meanings can reach us by what appear to be chance arrangements of inorganic matter, and yet meaning is inescapably present, we must conclude that they take form as a consequence of an agent’s intention. Note that, of course, intentions are necessarily acts of agents. Moreover, an agent, in this case, is invisible and inaccessible.

When we discover meanings by studying phenomena, we discover the general intention that brought the phenomena about or still maintains them. An example. We discover pathways by means of which plants lift water and nutrients up from the ground to feed their higher-lying members. When meanings emerge from chance coincidences—events not necessarily linked by cause and effect—we’re getting a message. That’s the big difference between the two cases. The message is personal, not general. The very fact that it is possible for an individual to receive a message from the All (as it were) suggests that reality is constructed in a way quite differently than materialists image is possible. Indeed it is a shocking realization. Meaningful coincidences always have an element of surprise, a moment of bafflement. They bring a sensation of having been addressed by someone hidden.

Our Mysterious Origins

Two kinds of instructions reach us in childhood. Put in the generic terms, one is to excel; the other is to serve the community. These are usually summed by the phrase: “Be good.” The sheer fact that we are here is never discussed. It’s self-evident. Our relationship to others is also obvious. We begin in a dependent role. Indeed, we continue to be dependent until death. What changes is that, later, we have more freedom in choosing our network of connections. If we’re lucky. We are formed by interaction on the one hand, by internal urges and needs on the other. The early advice we get is essentially correct—improve, serve. For most nothing more is needed. Life flows on hemmed in by these banks. And because our needs and mutual relations continue to the end—and societies always have a routine explanation for existence, some kind of story or ideology—something must happen to make us question the conventions. Some kind of inner urge—or external stimulus—must trigger questioning. When that happens, it can shock, or stimulate, us. We’ll be temporarily disoriented.

In life’s normal give-and-take, where the bumps and jostles stay within a well-accustomed range—and pleasures and joys are customary too—nothing presents itself to make us question our place and function. But when the cake of custom cracks, tragedy strikes, troubles arise, strange ecstasies (however brought about) make us lose our balance, then we also temporarily lose our sense of place. The degree of disturbance will suggest the degree to which we’ll question our place. Individual sensitivities will either magnify or minimize the shocks. Shocks lead to learning. With time we include more and more of reality into our compass. We expand our horizons, adjust our sense of alignment. But, here again, personal traits and education will lead to different outcomes.

Children exposed early to cosmic orientations—as I was, growing up in a Catholic environment—will spontaneous integrate cosmic stories. To grow is to integrate external influences with our own intuitions. We are far from blank boards on which environmental influences scribble out our fate. We take elements of the cosmologies we’re taught and integrate them (or suspend them) depending on the answers from within. If receive philosophical “objects” as children, we integrate them right alongside all the practical: it is all one to us.

Indeed, thinking about it, it’s obvious that the precise name of things is not all that important for the child. As children we learn quite early—intuitively, as it were—to handle abstractions skillfully. Concepts like God or king or good or evil rapidly come to occupy a place in a structure of relationships. Quite early in our lives we develop a clear concepts of negatives too— in the sense of “empty,” “lost,” or “gone.” All concepts have physical analogies, but we find it easy to abstract: we see the general concept of “lost” whether we have lost a shoe, glove, or a pencil. We have concepts of time long before we learn to read a clock. “Just a minute,” our mother will say. We have a clear and painful sense of waiting. Space is no more problematical: here and there, far and near.

But that which is most central to our being is deeply hidden. We never question ourselves. I still rather clearly remember my initial reaction in college to hearing the concept of “being” formally discussed. I experienced a certain surprise, mixed with bemusement. It struck me as droll that ancient wise men should have labored so hard thinking about something so obvious; and I thought it vaguely illegitimate to separate “being” from that which “was”—as if you could. I did not then realize that the dance around “being” was the late and advanced articulation of something rather more basic and fundamental. It is the problem of ultimate orientation, namely the issue of “What am I doing here?” Analyzing that simple but stark question one comes up with its opposite, Nothingness. But nothingness isn’t particularly helpful except for philosophizing. Like mathematicians, philosophers manipulate symbols using rules of logic. Philosophy tempts people with the mirage of answers. It can be difficult and complex; these difficulties and complexities more or less hide how empty the enterprise actually is unless it stays firmly anchored in experience.

Meanwhile the stark question is legitimate. It is central to grasping the human condition—even if philosophy as such—formal schemes like Kant’s for instance—cannot answer it. Not viscerally. Not at the level where we live. Only a myth can even come close to the essence of the thing. The manipulation of the labels we attach to experience resembles the operation of a kaleidoscope: we produce ever new patterns but by moving the same old colored bits of glass in a confined space; nothing really changes except the arrangement.

What is most central to our being is its meaning. Our existence, by itself, is not answer enough. So long as a consensus satisfies us, so long as our orientation is adequate for daily needs, the issue of what we’re doing here rarely arises: we’re working, resting, having fun. Life is a flow of experience, stimulus, response. We’re carried on a river of time. We have no knowledge of our origin—we woke up already floating on the river—and the terminus of our voyage is still far away. Moreover, we can easily imagine ourselves continuing on beyond our passing or, if so inclined, imagine ourselves falling into a dreamless and permanent state of sleep.

Nor does this condition, even once it’s realized, exercise people excessively unless something radical is also present, arising from within. If our condition is reasonably comfortable—or can be imagined to improve—we accept traditional wisdom, shy from the seemingly hopeless effort to tackle the problem. We say, “Well, that’s the way things are.” Half of our nature is pragmatic, straight-forward, practical, and sensible. We optimize. Part of optimization is not to bother reinventing wheels. We learn in childhood to accept explanations from our elders—and traditional wisdom is exactly that. We don’t relish becoming engineers, plumbers, or seamstresses when the electricity fails, a pipe bursts, or something tears. First we seek our comfort and adaptation at least cost. Next we rouse ourselves to organize fixes to things that really go wrong. Even when things become quite hopeless, the vast majority of humankind apparently chooses dumb endurance in the face of adversity—exactly as animals do—swamped by that half of our nature which is nature. We hang in there, we hunker down. We have to wander a long ways, and already highly sensitized, before we ever even reach the borderzone.