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.

Transvaluation of All Values

Old Friedrich had it right, of course, but he gave it the wrong slant. The Friedrich I have in mind is Nietzsche. He coined this concept as die Umwertung aller Werte. He referred to religion in the broad sense and to Christianity specifically. He thought that Christianity was hostile to life, elevated the weak when, instead, we should admire the strong, worshipped the weak when we ought to worship, instead, the vital and energetic instead, etc. But Nietzsche was certainly a deep and profound thinker all the same, and if his conceptualization is distilled down from the big messy blog in which he managed to perceive it, it points at a great truth. In his book The Varieties of Religious Experience William James echoed this conceptualization somewhat, although much more mildly, when he contrasted sick-minded and healthy-minded individuals. They were contemporaries, needless to say, James born in 1842, Nietzsche in 1884, and such ideas were, alas, “in the air.” But it is possible to turn this insight upside-down in turn and then derive the genuine truth within it. Our times have happily (or unhappily) evolved a great deal since. We’ve come to know what the healthy-minded are capable of. Both died well before such plagues as communism, Nazism, and commercialism took hold, James in 1910, Nietzsche in 1900.

Curious this. It was “in the air,” the future. Nietzsche interpreted that strange emanation, either from the future or rising like a nasty vapor from his present, in a negative way and embraced primitivism. James felt the same thing but ended by up-holding the inherent value of those who were “soul-sick” and moved by a deep religious impulse. Freud and Jung, who followed them in 1856 and 1875 respectively, also went in different directions sensing the same air. Freud wrote The Future of an Illusion, meaning religion. Jung’s work anchored a broad movement back to religion by the West’s intellectual fellahin.

If we take values to represent the high—whatever meaning we want to give it—it is certainly true that the more stimulus we feel and the more intense it is, the lower we are in the scheme of nature. Pleasure is an intermediate here. The real stimulus is actually pain. And as in the physical, so also in other realms. I once read the comment in one of Idries Shah’s book, he was a Sufi teacher, that the most visible are of the lowest rank. That startled me at first back then, but I’ve come to see its truth. The most visible have power—and we worship power. Another tale that sticks in mind, in this context, I encountered in C.G. Jung’s autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Here it is, very brief:

There is a fine old story about a student who came to a rabbi and said, “In the olden days there were men who saw the face of God. Why don’t they any more?” The rabbi replied, “Because nowadays no one can stoop so low.” [C.G. Jung]

A variant of “visibility” is that celebrity, when nothing else is present, is almost pure vacuity. Noise is low, silence is high. Motion distracts; indeed when it intensifies, it confuses the mind; therefore advertisers treasure nano-second flickers on the screen to cloud the judgment. The with-it are without it. Solitude is beatitude—except in an age of social networking.

Much has changed since Nietzsche wished to transvalue values and thus get rid of the last traces of Christian culture that still lingered in the late nineteenth century. Well, be careful what you wish for. The paradox is that to wish for nothing might get you everything. But it will be boring in the meantime, and there is no put-down in this day and age as potent as to call something B‑O‑R‑I‑N‑G…

Games People Play

If we examine the complex way in which we behave (a sample of which is present in the last post), we become aware that we operate on multiple levels simultaneously. The psychological truth of this was popularized many years ago now by a book by Eric Berne entitled Games People Play. Berne called his method transactional analysis. It is based on a Freudian model which assumes that we have a Superego (call it social conditioning); an Id, call it our animal self, a child; and an Ego, meaning the realistic, rational self. The Ego was Freud’s favorite, of course. For him the religious sphere resided in the disreputable (because maladaptive) Superego or the childish (because undeveloped) Id. But never mind all that. According to Berne, if people communicate Superego-to-Superego, Id-to-Id, Ego-to-Ego, all is well. These are innocent ways for filling idle time. But if communications cross the boundaries—if you address me from your Superego and I respond from my Ego, trouble breaks out. The games turn nasty. My point here is that layers in the human are recognized even in pop psychology.

Berne’s analysis, however, is right on—whether you accept Freud’s materialism or not. Endless mischief is constantly caused in communications between people because they attack or criticize each other across the layers or, what is equally destructive, certainly of communications, denying the reality of all but one layer.

This categorization may be stated in other ways. Humans have a biological, organic existence, a rational layer above that, and a spiritual manifestation above the rational. All three have standing, as it were—not merely the layer in the middle, Freud’s Ego. Moreover, human understanding is hierarchical: the spiritual understanding is capable of, adequate for, understanding itself and the others those beneath it. The rational can understand the physical but is inadequate to understand the spiritual. Those who criticize religious phenomena on rational grounds are like some of the medieval geographers who never travelled anywhere but concocted their accounts from other’s tales and sheer say-so. They are just as deluded as the aggressively ignorant who despise all “book learning.” Every level is valuable, every art and science has its place—and its boundaries.

To illustrate, I’ll never forget the disaster that came about once when we hired a very nice contractor to redo our kitchen. I learned later that he and his laborers all had advanced degrees in English literature—but not finding jobs had decided to go into business on their own. Their sales pitch, of course, had been eloquent. I spent months after their premature departure fixing what they had messed up. And I managed it too—despite my education in history. I had to. Money had run out.