Man's Search For Meaning
Long before the monthly book group morphed into today's weekly Member Monday we discussed (in 2006!) Viktor Frankl's Man's Search For Meaning. Powerful stuff, that was, diving into Frankl's WWII concentration camp experience with its unimaginable privation, total dehumanization, and no expectation of the next heartbeat only to -- surprise! -- soar from this existential underbelly to the very expression of life itself.
Frankl not only emerged, but flourished, to become M.D, Phd., world-renowned neurologist and psychiatrist, author of thirty books and world-wide speaker with another 29 honorary degrees. What was this enabling life source? Frankl credits the philosophy he founded -- Logotherapy -- which includes, among its tenets, the assertion that our main motivation for living is the will to find meaning in life.
Given that our weekly sessions are designed more for bite-sized backgrounders (rather than full books), the link below will take you to the three-page Wikipedia summary of Frankl's work. Accompanying that will be a movie.
We are pleased to announce the reintroduction of our monthly movie series with a showing of Casablanca on Thursday 6/23. Many of you have seen this classic and can probably even recite many of its lines. But let us look beyond this tender story and experience it in terms of what it says about the search for meaning. See it in allegorical terms (credit Lance Morrow's 1982 essay, We'll Always Have Casablanca):
Rick's Cafe' Americain is the state of the stateless. Rick sets himself up as a kind of chieftain or caliph in his isolated, autonomous, amoral fiefdom, where he rules absolutely. Victor and Rick are splintered aspects, it may be, of the same man. Ultimately, the ego rises above mere selfish despair and selfish desire. It is reborn in sacrifice and community: "It doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill o' beans in this crazy world." Idealism and its bride ascend into heaven on the Lisbon plane.; Rick goes off in a fog with Louis, men without women, to do mortal work in this world for the higher cause.
And, so, we might ask in what mortal work do we see ourselves in support of a higher cause? One might cite, perhaps, the decision to have children as our mortal imperative to serve the higher cause of propagating the species. On the other hand, it could also be seen as a bid to continue the Self, a kind of backhanded way to address the brain's inability to truly comprehend a finite existence (as we discussed in MM 6/13/22 Mind Your Mortality).
The latter would reduce the search for meaning to be little more than the search for permanence in drag: look at me commands some inner voice, look at me, my progeny, my novel, my wealth, my discovery (see that planet I discovered and named after me?). Distinguish the two in terms of the expectation for recognition.
All is context. Before we become overly enamored with the notion of man's search for meaning as an absolute, we might first look to the meaning being sought -- after all, Frankl's concentration camp commandant might have likewise been driven by his own sense of meaning right down to his polished belt buckle.
Joseph Campbell weighed in on all this when he suggested what we are all really seeking, rather than meaning, he said, is the "experience of being alive." He thereby invoked the Zen rhetorical question "What's the meaning of a flower?"
What's the meaning of "meaning"