The morning after Donald Trump won the presidential election this week, I stumbled out of bed and searched my bookshelf for a slim volume I hadn’t seen in years: Human search for meaning By Viktor Frankl.
Frankl knew a thing or two about surviving through times of increasing authoritarianism. A Viennese Jew born in the early 20th century, she was a budding psychiatrist and philosopher when she was sent to a Nazi concentration camp a few months after her marriage. His wife and other family members died in the camp – but he survived.
We are not, thank God, faced with difficult situations like Frankl’s. But Trump has given us every reason to fear that he plans to hollow out American democracy and aspires to authoritarian rule. A big part of what makes it scary is the sense that our agency will be severely limited — that, for example, we will become more free to make decisions about our own bodies. And that can lead to depression.
This is precisely where Frankl can help us: he argued that humans always have agency, even when we are faced with the terrifying reality that it is too late to undo it. “When we can no longer change a situation,” he wrote, “we are challenged to change ourselves.”
We do that, Frankl says, by choosing how we make meaning out of situations. His own experiences at the camp helped him crystallize his philosophy and the branch of psychotherapy he pioneered: logotherapy (which literally translates to “meaning-therapy”). He practiced this in the camp, ministering to fellow prisoners hungry for a way to make sense of their suffering. After the Holocaust was over, he advocated using it with all kinds of people, since the human search for meaning is universal.
It was here that Frankl broke with his intellectual ancestor, Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis who believed that humans are driven by the “pleasure principle”—an instinct to seek immediate gratification. “It is one of the fundamental principles of logotherapy that man’s main concern is not to gain pleasure or avoid pain but to find a meaning in his life,” wrote Frankle. Human search for meaning.
Frankl was inspired by proto-existential philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, who fought against nihilism or despair at the meaninglessness of life and replaced it with a conviction: life cannot come with any built-in meaning – but it only means that we create our own meaning. to do
Frankl’s key idea — that life is potentially meaningful in any situation, because humans always retain the freedom to express our values in how we respond to life’s tragedies — can provide a philosophical tonic for many people who are feeling depressed right now. If you are one of them, read on.
Frankl’s advice is to ask yourself, “What does life expect of me?”
In times of depression, many of us feel that all our efforts are futile, so there is no point in even trying. We ask ourselves: What does it mean, anyway?
in his book Yes To Life: Despite EverythingFrankl turns the question upside down:
At this point it will be helpful [to perform] A conceptual turn through 180 degrees, after which the question can no longer be “What can I expect from life?” But now can only be “What does life expect of me?” What work in life is waiting for me?
The question about the meaning of life is not properly asked, if it is asked as it is usually asked: we are not allowed to ask about the meaning of life – it is life that asks questions, questions dictate. To us… we have to answer, to answer the constant, hourly questions of life.
In other words, we’re used to thinking that life can give us answers, but Frankl says it’s just the opposite: life itself is constantly asking us one question — how do you face this situation? And this one? And this one? – and it is our duty to answer. The answers we must give are different in each moment, because each moment demands something new from us: when a new president takes office, for example, we must each consider anew how best to use our particular talents and resources to meet the needs. . New Political Realities:
The question that life asks us, and the answer to which we can perceive the meaning of the present moment, varies not only from hour to hour but also from person to person: for each person at each moment the question is completely different.
Therefore, we can see how the question of the meaning of life is raised very simply, unless it is raised with absolute specificity, in the narrowness of the here and now. Asking about the “meaning of life” in this way seems to us as silly as the question of a journalist interviewing a world chess champion, “And now, master, please tell me: which chess move do you think is the best?” In a very specific, concrete game situation, is there any move, a specific move, that is good, or even best, outside of a certain configuration of pieces?
This means that the work of creating meaning in life is never complete – it is something we have to show up again and again. And Frankl argued that we do this not by looking inward, but by looking at the world.
Under normal circumstances, we can create meaning by creating or doing something that feels valuable, such as writing a novel. Or we may delight in experiencing the beauty of nature or the love of another human being. But when the elements of a good and stable life are being taken away, there is still a way to create meaning: we can face suffering and express our values in how we respond to it. It is a power that no one can take away from us.
How to live Frankl’s “tragic optimism” by committing to your values
at the end Human search for meaningFrankl posits a position he calls “tragic optimism.”
The philosopher did not believe that human nature is all good or all bad. In fact, he sees both naïve optimism and pure pessimism as forms of nihilism: both views imagine humans as having a nature that is completely predetermined, so both views rob humans of agency. Instead, Frankl prefers to see people who constantly choose, who have the freedom to make their own meaning even in the most dire circumstances.
Frankl himself embodied that in the camps, where he knew the chances of survival were slim. And he describes a moment that I find incredibly moving:
It did not seem possible that the manuscript of my first book, which I hid in my coat when I arrived at Auschwitz, would ever be recovered. Thus, I had to endure and overcome the loss of my emotional child. And now it seemed as if nothing and no one would escape me; I have no physical or mental children of my own! So I found myself faced with the question of whether there was any meaning to the end of my life in such a situation.
I had not yet noticed that an answer to the question with which I had been wrestling so passionately was already in store for me, and that this answer would be given to me shortly after. This was the case when I had to surrender my clothes and inherited the tattered rags of a prisoner who had already been sent to the gas chambers shortly after arriving at the Auschwitz railway station. Instead of many pages of my manuscript, I found in my newly acquired coat pocket a single page torn from a Hebrew prayer book, containing the most important Jewish prayers, Shema Israel. How should I interpret such a “coincidence” as a challenge the bus My thoughts instead of just putting them on paper?
Frankl interpreted the page as a sign that the man “walked straight into that gas chamber”—that he had chosen to stick to his faith despite facing death, and that, in fact, he would become a walking embodiment of it. Trust, a page is not needed to describe it.
He found many ways to “live his thoughts” at camp. Frankl describes, for example, how he chose to respond with dignity to a Nazi officer who beat him while he was working hard in the extreme cold. And how he chose to treat typhus patients in a camp. “I decided to volunteer,” he wrote, because “if I had to die, my death might have some meaning. I thought that undoubtedly as a doctor I would have more purpose to try and help my comrades.”
What we are facing in the United States today cannot be compared to what Frank faced during World War II. But his philosophy and the way he personally embodies it provide us with a helpful reminder: now is the time to live our thoughts. To ask ourselves what our values are – and then work to put them into action
As America enters a second term under Trump, there are many things to worry about. What happens to pregnant people? What about low income people? What about undocumented people?
As you consider what you think, think about practical steps you can take now to “save your thoughts.” For example, if you are concerned about undocumented people, you might consider donating to an effective nonprofit organization. International Refugee Assistance Scheme Or sponsoring a refugee family to resettle in your community.
Will your actions change everything? probably not But they can change some things for some people. And even if they don’t — as Frankl reminds us, sometimes changing a painful situation is beyond your control — you’ll know that you’re doing your duty to the world and that you’re helping to lay a foundation for the future you see. want
“From this psychological point of view nothing can frighten us any more, no future, no apparent lack of future,” wrote Frankl. “For now the present is everything because it holds for us the eternal new questions of life.”
Or, to put it another way: life doesn’t answer you, but you still answer life.
