Jon Bauer

I’ve finished Frankl’s: Man’s Search For Meaning, and could strain something from recommending it so hard. It’s such a little hip flask of warmth against that sometimes cold of the everyday.

Frankl was a neurologist and psychiatrist, and Man’s Search For Meaning is an account of his time in several concentration camps. To read him is to learn what an intelligent, educated man gleaned from surviving a paradigm as reducing as a concentration camp.

Where I have only tried to dismantle life in my mind, he had his life dismantled. This gives him immediate authority, and if he weren’t dead I would prize meeting him over the Dalai Lama or Obama, or Portman.

Maybe not Portman.

His account is written in simple prose and with an admirable absence of blame or anger. Plus he’s managed to convey the lowest conditions of his imprisonment without taking his eye off the highest lessons and the most uplifting moments.

After the narrative is a short treatise on meaning and Frankl’s own branch of psychotherapy: logotherapy (‘meaning therapy’). Frankl agrees that life IS empty of any inherent, catch-all, pre-packed meaning. And anyway, why do we need one so? What’s wrong with our own meaning? It IS our life after all.

For Frankl, even suffering has meaning and his book highlights examples of how, in the void of Auschwitz, when all chattels of identity had been stripped away, people were able to go on with just a tiny slither of their own inner purpose – the final breaking point of a human coinciding with the breaking of their sense of personal meaning or future purpose. In fact, even if someone faced certain death, many found enough meaning in focusing on their deportment right to the end. Even though their death would probably be one indistinct death among millions, often without witness.

For me, this last facet is evidence enough for the power of our own inner meaning, and the case could rest there.

Frankl’s book tells me that when I struggle to swallow life it’s because I’ve strayed from my deeply held purpose or value (that’s for those of us who’ve discerned it). Or I’ve lost faith in how much I can take my own meaning seriously – something I’m simultaneously guilty and not-guilty of. But it is perhaps this failing above all which leads us to look for a greater meaning outside ourselves. A meaning that will never, ever, be found.

If you give up on your own meaning, or if you undermine it, then you wash yourself up on an existential island. And all you’ll have to turn to is that search for an inherent meaning greater than your own life. Cue Religion (hiss hiss boo!)

So, great news! Whilst life is inherently empty of meaning, Frankl says mine isn’t. In fact it’s full of it. And it’s ok to believe my own hype. In fact, it’s critical. Then you just need the courage to live as close to it as possible, and not be swayed by popular opinion or obstacle.

And from this emphasis shift I suppose I might be better equipped to rub shoulders with more diverse others, no matter how different their life might look to mine. Because what makes my meaning better? As if I’ve now got a sort of roadmap for understanding all viewpoints.

Who knows, it may even change the way I go about a difference of viewpoint, or behaviour. Or even the way I debate (boo hiss hiss).

Not that bad behaviour can be condoned. You can’t say, It’s not my fault, man, it’s my meaning. Frankl saw man in what is arguably his lowest context, and he writes of the descent of many inmates to the level of swine. But he also points out that many rose to the level of saint too.

And if they managed that in Auschwitz, then I can get at least a fraction of the way.

Oh and may I end with what Frankl says about happiness, as well as pointing out that I'm not obsessed with him, just temporarily dazzled.

Don't aim at success -- the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one's dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your consicence commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long run -- in the long run I say! - success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it.