Ch. 10: Meaninglessness Flashcards
Group of morons
Imagine a happy group of morons who are engaged in work. They are carrying bricks in an open field. As soon as they have stacked all the bricks at one end of the field, they proceed to transport them to the opposite end. This continues without stop and everyday of every year they are busy doing the same thing. One day one of the morons tops long enough to ask himself what he is doing. He wonders what purpose there is in carrying the bricks. And from that instant on he is not quite as content with his occupation as he had been before.
I am the moron who wonders why he is carrying the bricks.
Tolstoy’s “Life arrest”
What was the point of managing his estate, educating his son?
- “What for? I now have six thousand desyatins in the province of Samara and three hundred horses - what then?”
- “Well, what if I should be more famous than Gogol, Pushkin, Shakespeare, Moliere - than all the writers in the world - well, what then? I could find no reply. Such questions demand an immediate answer; without one it is impossible to live. Yet answer there was none.”
- At 50 he was close to suicide: “Is there any meaning in my life which will not be destroyed by the inevitable death awaiting me?”
How often do patients with Tolstoy’s malady seek therapy?
No comprehensive studies exist, but many experienced clinicians “tuned in” to these topics state that it’s common
Jung: “Absence of meaning plays a crucial role in the etiology of neurosis…About a third of my cases are not suffering from any clinically definable neurosis but from the senselessness and aimlessness of their lives.”
Frankl stated 20%
- And over 50% in a Viennese hospital
- He also concluded that the lack of meaning is the paramount existential stress
“Existential neurosis”
Maddi: “meaninglessness, or a chronic inability to believe in the truth, importance, usefulness or interest value of any of the things one is engaged in or can imagine doing”
Benjamin Wolfman: “Failure to find meaning in life, the feeling that one has nothing to live for, nothing to struggle for, nothing to hope for… unable to find any goal or direction in life, the feeling that though individuals perspire in their work, they have nothing to aspire to.”
Nicholas Hobbes: “Contemporary neuroses are not so much characterized by repression and conversion (i.e. Freud stuff) … not by lack of insight but lack of a sense of purpose, of meaning in life.”
The Problem of Meaning
- The human being seems to require meaning.
- Without goals, values, ideals there seems to be considerable stress, even suicide
- Frankl: “The individual in the concentration camp without meaning was unlikely to survive.”
- We apparently need absolutes - firm ideals to which we can aspire and guidelines by which to steer our lives. - The only true absolute is that there are no absolutes.
- Everything that is could have also been otherwise
- Human beings constitute themselves, their world, and their situation within that world
- There exists no grand design, no guidelines for living other than the individual creates
Meaning
Purpose
Significance
Meaning: refers to sense, or coherence.
- General term for what is intended to be expressed by something
- A search for meaning implies a search for coherence
Purpose: refers to intention, aim, function.
- When we inquire about the purpose of something, we are asking about its role or function
- What does it do? To what end?
In conventional usage “purpose” of life and “meaning” are used interchangeably, and so will Yalom.
Significance:
- Used in one sense, it has the same implication as “meaning”
- Another sense confuses since it also refers to “importance” or “consequence”
Cosmic Meaning
Terrestrial Meaning
Cosmic meaning: implies some design existing outside of and superior to the person and invariably refers to some magical or spiritual ordering of the universe
Terrestrial meaning: one may have a personal sense of meaning without a cosmic meaning system
- Generally, a sense of cosmic meaning also means that one has a corresponding sense of terrestrial meaning - the terrestrial meaning is to harmonize with that cosmic meaning
- E.g. having some instrumental part to play in the cosmic harmony
- Of course, one may also believe in cosmic meaning but be unable to comprehend one’s own place in that grand design
- However, such a person rather suffers from personal guilt or fallennes than meaninglessness
How to know what is proper, what is God’s will?
Fundamentalist approach
Faith
Emulate God
How to know what is proper, what is God’s will?
Fundamentalist approach: holy word aka follow the Bible
Faith: one can never know with certainty what God wants and has to be satisfied with hints and guesses
- Pascal: “The branch cannot hope to know the tree’s meaning.”
- Frankl used the analogy of the ape used in research to find an effective poliomyelitis serum - the ape was in a lot of pain and because of its cognitive limitations could never apprehend the meaning of the situation
So too, the human being cannot hope to know with fullness a meaning that exists in a dimension beyond comprehension
- Emulate God: God represents perfection so the purpose of life is to strive towards it
- Aristotle considered intellectual perfection as the ultimate, God is “thought thinking itself”
- Moses Maimonides (12th) century had for types of perfection:
1) physical possession, which he dismissed as impermanent
2) perfection of the body, failing to differentiate from animal
3) moral perfection, praiseworthy but limited in the sense that it serves others
4) rational perfection, “true human perfection”, permits the human to apprehend God
Rilke’s poem
What will you do, God, if I die? I am your jug, what if I shatter? I am your drink, what if I spoil? I am your robe and your profession Losing me, you lose your meaning.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s “controlled complication”
life is a single unity, life is a “single and gigantic organism”
- All of evolution is thus an orthogenetic process and, just as factors inside a single developing organism determine its ultimate outcome, so too do predetermined factors influence the ultimate outcome of the cosmic evolutionary process - a process destined to end with the human being in an absolute state of love and spiritual union.
“Although only a small fraction of those who try to scale the heights of human achievement will arrive anywhere close to the summit, it is imperative that there be a multitude of climbers. Otherwise the summit may not be reached by anybody. The individually lost and forgotten multitudes have not lived in vain, provided that they, too, made the efforts to climb.”
“The gates of the future will admit only an advance of all together, in a direction in which all together could join and achieve fulfillment in a spiritual renovation of the earth.”
Personal Meaning in the Absence of Cosmic Meaning
Around three hundred years ago views about cosmic coherence began to suffer due to a scientific attitude and the Kantian questioning of the existence of a fixed objective reality
The more it was brought into doubt, the more difficult it was for the human being to embrace a cosmic meaning system
But meaning systems can’t be relinquished without some substitute - perhaps we can forgo the question ‘Why do we live?’ But we cannot postpone the question of ‘How do we live?’
Camus’s “absurd”
Camus used the word “absurd” to refer to human’s basic condition, a transcendent, meaning-seeking being who must live in a world that has no meaning
- We are moral creatures who demand that the world supply a basis for moral judgement, but the world does not supply one - it is completely indifferent
- The tension between human aspiration and the world’s indifference is what is absurd
What then are we to do?
The Stranger
The Myth of Sisyphus
Tha Plague
In The Stranger, Meursault lived in a state of value-nihilism: “It’s all the same to me”
- He attends to his mother’s funeral, copulates, works, and kills an Arab on the beach all in the same profound indifference
In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus explored the tension between his nihilism and his ethical demands and began to forge a new humanistically based vision of personal life meaning
- By cherishing our “nights of despair”, by facing the very vortex of meaninglessness, we can construct a new life meaning and arrive at posture of heroic nihilism
- The world’s indifference can be transcended by rebellion, a prideful rebellion against one’s condition.
“There is nothing equal to the spectacle of human pride.”
In The Plague Camus described many reactions to plague (metaphorically the Nazi occupation of France or, beyond that, all forms of injustice and inhumanity)
- The character who probably best represents the author’s idealized self-image is Dr. Rieux, the fireless fighter of the plague who never fails to react with courage, vitality, love, and a sense of deep empathy with the plague’s victims
Orestes, the hero of Sartre’s play The Flies (Les Mouches)
Orestes, reared away from Argos, journeys home to find his sister Electra and together they revenge the murder of their father (Agamemnon) by killing the murderers - their mother Clytemnestra and her husband Aegistheus
Yalom: “This play may be seen as a pilgrimage to meaning”
- Orestes first looks for meaning and purpose in a return to home, roots, comradeship, refers to slave
- Later he realizes that he has always done as the gods wished in order to find peace within the status quo
- Orestes wrenches from his earlier meaning system and enters his crisis of meaninglessness
- At that moment, Orestes makes the leap Sartre made in his personal life - not a leap into faith (although it rests on no sounder argument either), but a leap into “engagement”
- He assumes a Christlike burden
- Later, in defiance of Zeus, Orestes decides to kill Aegistheus, he chooses justice, freedom and dignity and indicates that he knows what is “right” in life”
- And he is glad to have found his freedom, mission, path
- Then Orestes finds another meaning, important for Sartre, about being alone and having to create his own meaning
- Orestes proposes to open the eyes of the townspeople, but Zeus protests that if Orestes tears the veils from their eyes, they will see their lives as they are, as foul and futile. But Orestes maintains that they are free, that it is their right to face despair, and utters the famous existential manifesto
“Human life begins on the far side of despair.”
- One final purpose emerges when Orestes takes his sister’s hand to begin their journey. “Whither?” asks Electra.
“Toward ourselves. Beyond the river and mountains are an Orestes and Electra waiting for us, and we must make our patient way towards them.”
Conclusion of Camus and Sartre
Thus, important for Camus and Sartre is that human beings recognize that one must invent one’s own meaning (rather than discover God’s or nature’s meaning) and commit oneself fully to fulfilling that meaning.
- This requires that one be, as Gordon Allport put it, “half-sure and whole-hearted”
Altruism
Leaving the world a better place to live in, serving others, participation in charity - all these have provided meaning for people
Both Camus’s Dr. Rieux and Sartre’s Orestes fulfilled themselves through services (the latter through opening the eyes of others to dignity, freedom, and blessed despair)
Examples of patients who turned to altruism after confrontation with death
Sal
Eve
Sal was a 33-year-old patient who developed a bone cancer and was in a full body cast
- He spent his last two years of life touring high schools and talking to students about their life
- “You want to destroy your body with nicotine or alcohol or heroin? You want to smash it up in autos? You’re depressed and want to throw it off the Golden Gate bridge? Then give me your body! Let me have it! I want it! I’ll take it! I want to live!”
Eve, a patient who died from ovarian cancer in her 50s
- She volunteered on a hospital ward for terminally ill children
- She closely examined a number of charitable organizations to decide how to donate her estate
- She systematically approached friends who had withdrawed after they found out about her diagnosis and told each one of them that she understands and bears no grudge, but that it might be helpful to talk about how they face their own death
- After persistence and openness she managed to get her last oncologist, the steel-spectacled Dr. L. to open up to him
Altruism as a psychotherapist
Altruism constitutes an important source of meaning for all psychotherapists, not just through their patients but also through the ripple effect whereby many others who touch on that patient’s life are benefited
- This applies of course especially to teachers, physicians, writers, employers, executives, other therapists etc
However, “In my own work I try with every patient to make this an explicit area of inquiry - I explore with them what they want from others and what they contribute to the lives of others.”
