In his last post for 2013, literature teacher Jeffrey McMahon raises two questions on Viktor Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning.
Question:
“…So in Frankl’s vision of humanity there are two races of people, those that choose to waste their life on vanity, self-pity, and entitlement (always resulting in nihilism and despair) and those who choose to be “worthy of their suffering,” embracing suffering with courage and dignity and living their life in such a way that death cannot take away the meaning of it.
Some of my best student essays have been written by those students who love Viktor Frankl and find his book fascinating but disagree with his binary vision. Some of my students argue in their essays that there is an “in-between” world where people can live with a modicum of self-interest but still have meaningful connections with their friends and family even while accepting the essential meaninglessness of life.
Two areas of dispute with Frankl that arise in some of my best essays are Frankl’s vision of only two kinds of people, those animated by a diseased or a healthy spirit, and secondly his argument that we “choose” our attitude. This latter assertion speaks to the age-old debate about free will: Did Frankl choose to be good and courageous in the concentration camps or was he hard-wired to be good and courageous?
I’m still struggling with these questions with a decade of teaching this book.”
To restate the writer’s two questions:
1) How can Frankl claim there are only two “races” of people, the decent and the indecent, when we actually experience many grey areas in between?
2) How can Frankl insist that we choose our attitude? Wasn’t Frankl himself, for example, just “hard-wired” to be good and courageous?
Answer to question #1
Frankl wrote the following about two “races” of men: “I remember how one day a foreman secretly gave me a piece of bread which I knew he must have saved from his breakfast ration. It was far more than the small piece of bread which moved me to tears at that time. It was the human “something” which this man also gave to me – the word and look which accompanied the gift. From all this we may learn that there are two races of men in this world, but only these two – the “race” of the decent man and the “race” of the indecent man. Both are found everywhere…Life in a concentration camp tore open the human soul and exposed its depths. Is it surprising that in those depths we again found only human qualities which in their very nature were a mixture of good and evil?” (Man’s Search for Meaning, p. 108)
I agree with your students that there are many positions in between on the spectrum but Frankl’s binary presentation doesn’t bother me because it presents the two poles of a healthy or diseased spirit and as such it gives us a measure by which to see where we are on the scale.
More importantly, Frankl making a point about the nature of human beings. The foreman, who belonged to the group that was perpetrating evil, in this instance displayed compassion. To Frankl this was evidence that as human beings we all have the capacity to either access our higher humane side or our darker side. Frankl was a great equalizer. Rather than dividing people into races, he provided a measure of human decency, the one measure that should interest us.
Answer to question #2
Even if we say that Frankl was hard-wired to be good and courageous, not everyone in the concentration camps who acted altruistically or courageously was born that way. There’s no denying the evidence that people are capable of rising above their conditions and their hard-wiring. Because we are human beings and not computers, our hard-wiring is not frozen in place but malleable.
There always remains an area of choice, no matter how small. So while everyone has different struggles and starts off with a different set of inborn tendencies, what’s important is not how many things we are capable of doing at which level, but knowing that we are fundamentally capable of changing and of surprising ourselves.