Meaning Despite Everything

There are pains before which arguments are useless. A sick child, a sudden loss, a passage of life where everything collapses at once: none of the philosophical answers examined in this essay erases them. That is not their purpose. What Viktor Frankl does is something different: he does not answer suffering, he shows what can still be done with it.

❦A psychiatrist in the camps

Viktor Frankl (1905-1997) was a Viennese psychiatrist when he was deported to Auschwitz, then to other camps, in 1942. He lost his wife, his parents, his brother. He survived and was liberated in 1945. What he had observed during those years, he published under the title Man's Search for Meaning (1946): a book since read by tens of millions of people.

His central observation is not philosophical: it is clinical. In the camps, the prisoners who collapsed most quickly were not necessarily the physically weakest. They were often those who had nothing left to hold on for. And those who endured best, not always the most robust, were those who still had a why: someone to find again, a work to finish, a promise to keep, an intact faith. Frankl quotes Nietzsche without distorting him: "He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how."

❦Logotherapy: healing through meaning

From this observation, Frankl developed a therapy he calls logotherapy (from the Greek logos, meaning). His idea: the primary motivation of human beings is not pleasure (Freud), nor power (Adler), but the quest for meaning. A human being can endure almost anything, provided that what they are going through has, in their own eyes, some significance.

Frankl distinguishes three paths through which meaning can be found or recovered. Through what one creates or accomplishes: a work, a craft, a care. Through what one receives: an encounter, a love, a beauty one lets in. And, the most difficult, through the way one holds oneself before what cannot be changed, an illness, a loss, a limit. This third path, Frankl calls the freedom of attitude: even when all external freedom is removed, there remains an inner freedom, the freedom to choose how to stand before what happens.

❦What this says about disenchantment

The essay Le désenchantement du monde (French) describes how modernity has emptied the world of objective meaning: the cosmos no longer speaks, the stars no longer say anything. Frankl does not contest this diagnosis, but he shifts it. Meaning, for him, is not to be found in the cosmos or deduced from a theology: it is to be found, actively, in one's own life, through one's own choices of gaze and attitude. It is not a given meaning, but a discovered one, and this discovery is within anyone's reach, believer or not.

It is a modest answer to Weber, but perhaps the most honest one: we cannot re-enchant the cosmos by decree, but we can choose to treat our own life as if it had meaning, and find, afterward, that this wager changes something in the way we move through it.

❦Suffering without meaning, and suffering with

Frankl does not say suffering is good. He does not say it always has a meaning, nor that one must accept it without fighting against it. He says something more precise: a suffering that cannot be avoided can still be traversed in a way that does not destroy you, provided you do not lose the question of meaning along the way.

The Quran knows this tension. The figure of Job (Ayyūb), does not receive an explanation: he receives a presence, and recovers the capacity to act. Meaning is not given as an answer to suffering: it stands beside it, and that is sometimes enough to continue.

Frankl writes that what distinguishes the human being from the animal is that the animal cannot choose its response to what happens to it: it reacts. The human being, however, has a space between stimulus and response, and it is in that space that freedom resides. All the spiritual traditions in this neighbourhood name that space differently: the nafs lawwāma, the moral conscience, grace, the logos. Frankl, coming from psychiatry and from the experience of the camps, gives it a simple name: the choice of one's attitude.

We cannot always choose what happens. We can choose how we stand before what happens. Perhaps that is where meaning begins, and nowhere else. وَاللَّهُ أَعْلَم (God alone knows).

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