O. THE HUMAN SEARCH FOR MEANING

                        "The world is not  a divine sport, it is a divine destiny.  There is

divine meaning in the life of the world, of man, of human

persons, of you and me."                 --Martin Buber

When all is said and done, what is it that people most want in their lives?   Countless answers to that question have been proposed.  Psychologist and founder of psychoanalyses, Sigmund Freud, was convinced that what people wanted most was pleasure.  Alfred Adler, a student of Freud's who later broke away from many of his teachings, claimed that what people really wanted most and struggled for is power.  But it was another Viennese psychiatrist  by the name of Viktor Frankl who proposed what I believe is the nearest thing to a right answer to our question.  He said what people really want most deep down is meaning, a sense that their lives mean something.  Pleasure and power and any number of others things may be inadequate avenues to finding meaning, but it is the human search for meaning that undergirds all human actions, drives and decisions.  As Frankl says, "Many of us have enough to live by, but nothing to live for; we have the means, but no meaning."  So Frankl identified this as the human being's most fundamental search.  (It might be interesting to note that experiments have shown that even monkeys will work longer and harder to discover what is on the other side of a trapdoor than they will for either food or sex.)

"Within be Fed", by Tim Holmes

Frankl arrived at his conclusion as a result of his own experience as an inmate of Nazi death-camps during World War II in which both his parents and his wife lost their lives.  That kind of personal loss and the apparently hopeless situation of the holocaust would surely leave one pleasure-less and powerless.  But, Frankl discovered, if one could find anything that could invest one with a sense of meaning in such an apparently hopeless situation, he could survive psychologically virtually anything.  As he said, one can handle any "what" if he has a "why."

Fortunately, he did survive the death-camp experience an this insight concerning the centrality of the human search for meaning became the foundation stone of his whole approach to psychotherapy.  He called his program "logotherapy" interpreting the Greek word "Logos" to mean "meaning" .  The word actually means many things such as.  "reason," "structure" or "purpose."  But it certainly can mean "meaning" as well.  So Frankl treated his patients in terms of what impeded and what could restore a sense of meaning in their lives.

I believe that Frankl's insight is valid and that there is nothing more fundamental to a satisfying personal existence than a sense of meaning.  Even if one's sense of meaning is derived from cruel and selfish purposes, it is still the "meaningfulness" of one's life that sustains one.  One may build an empire to find meaning, or one may sacrifice his wealth or even his life for a cause that he believes invests his life with meaning.  Whether the decisions are selfish or self-giving, whether compassionate or cruel, whether narrow or far-reaching, it is the sense of the meaning of one's life that is the prime objective.

While Frankl was the first to identify the search for meaning as the central human quest and therefore the appropriate focus in psychotherapy, he was by no means the first to allude to its importance.  Peter Berger has said that it is impossible for humans to live without a nomis or an ordering principle in their lives.  Vaclav Havel, playwright and former president of Czechoslovakia [and owner of a Tim Holmes sculpture- Ed.], has said,

"The need for meaning and the search for it...accompany the 'I' from its beginning to its end." (GAW/30).

The tragedy of an absence of a sense of meaning in life is captured by Shakespeare in MacBeth:

"Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more;  it is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury

Signifying nothing.   (Act 5, scene 5)

The question of the meaning of life exists on two levels.  On the one level the question asks if there is meaning to the entire human enterprise set within the contexts of nature (from microcosm to macrocosm--from genes to galaxies) and of history (from the beginning of the human race to its ultimate conclusion).  The second level is the more personal.  It is the question of the meaning of one's own unique and individual life.

In the next little reflection we'll begin the search on the second, more personal level and suggest some practical handles for getting hold of the question.  And we'll do it in a way that avoids heavy philosophical reflection and also avoids a sense of critical emergency.  Marianna Huffington has written:

I have heard speakers who describe the search for meaning in ways that

leave me exhausted.  They advocate a kind of ferociousness in the search

that would be terrifying at the breakfast table, as if we must launch each

day by tightening our fists, gritting our teeth, tensing our muscles and

telling ourselves through clenched jaws, 'Now, search!'  Such an approach

seems less like a spiritual exploration and more like an existential Aerobics

workout.  -The Fourth Instinct: The Call of the Soul. Simon and Schuster, l994, p.199.

This search needn't be an aerobics exercise, but it is important.  It's also important to understand just what the heck we mean by "meaning" anyway and to that we'll turn next.

Next:  THE MEANING OF MEANING - This is not a word game!

EXTENDED READING:     Man's Search for Meaning,  by Viktor Frankl

                  The Politics of Meaning,  by Michael  Lerner

TOOLS AND APPROACHES   - O