Transcription
In your work, you quote Nietzsche quite a bit. He has a line, "He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how." What do you think he meant by that?
What I think that... What you think he meant by that? The same as I'm intended to convey to my readers and students: that the vision of a meaning ahead of someone, a meaning in wait for someone to be fulfilled by someone, that this contributes more than anything else under equal other circumstances for survival.
Meaning is the most important thing in our lives? Certainly, because what I call a "will to meaning" - the wish to find and to fulfill meaning - is the basic motivation in human beings. This certainly runs counter to much of the determinist notions that are being bandied around these days, that man is a machine, man is a computer, man is a product of instincts. Man is something like a rat in experiments, psychological experiments.
Of course, you are right, but not only against the so-called deterministic concepts of man, but also regarding the motivational theories of certain psychotherapeutic systems. Let's talk for a minute about logotherapy, which arose out of this notion of a search for meaning. Logotherapy, as one among other types of psychotherapy, is, we may say, a "meaning-centered" psychotherapy, inasmuch particularly as logotherapy sees a human being not predominantly determined, not to say dominated, by the will to pleasure, as you were mentioning, nor by the will to power along the lines of Adlerian teachings, but basically, fundamentally, by a will to meaning. That is to say, the desire, the impulse to find, to discover in life, or better to say, in each life situation, concrete life situation confronting someone, the desire to find a meaning therein and to go on to fulfill it.
I was very intrigued. One of the most surprising things I've read recently was that you said that when you talk to European students, only 40 percent said they had suffered this sort of inner void, and yet eighty-one percent of American students experience the same thing. We think of it just the opposite. We think of the Europeans as being buried under this existential dread and sense of purposelessness, and Americans as being optimistic and upbeat. However it might be, whether the ones or the others are suffering more or less respectively from this existential vacuum, the ones who seem to suffer less should not look at the others with contempt, but look at the others with compassion and look for anything possible to help the others.
Now, this void manifests itself as apathy, in boredom, lack of initiative, lack of interest - interest in the world or initiative in changing something within the world for the better. This frustration is a proof of the existence of a will to meaning. Unless we were imbued by a will to meaning, by the wish to find meaning and discover and fulfill meaning in life, we never would be able to experience an inner void. So this is, in a way, also something positive.
Now, you've listed three types of values: creative values, experiential values, and attitudinal variants. You may find a meaning. The "average" man, the man on the street, or the woman on the street may find a meaning day by day in doing a deed, in creating a work - and that's the creative - creative, and in experiencing something. The beauty. The truth, as a researcher, or the good in dealing with people as a teacher, or whatsoever.
There's an extraordinary moment in "Man's Search for Meaning" when you talk about being in one of the Nazi camps, and all of you going out to look at a sunset. Is that experiential? Exactly. This is a paradigm of experiential values, of finding a meaning in experiencing without doing anything, without achieving or accomplishing anything, but just in giving oneself the immediate experience of something, say, beautiful, going on in the world. This is the second avenue.
But there is also another aspect of experiential values. Excuse me, not only experiencing something, but also experiencing someone. More than that, experiencing another human being in his or her very uniqueness. And it is the main attribute of a human being that he is a person, in contrast to any animal. He is a person. A person is always something absolutely unique, irreparable in the evolution of the cosmos, as is we are incomparable with any other human being. And this uniqueness can be got hold of solely by a loving person, because he not only sees the essence but also the potentials in the beloved person, thereby, as I put it before, promoting him, alleviating it to reach out to attain this potential and to fulfill and thereby actualize also himself. But not by preaching self-actualization. It's nonsense. Self-actualization can only fall into your lap automatically once that you have fulfilled a concrete meaning, done the best of a situation. Then you actualize yourself as a by-product.
Let's talk about the third set of values, which is the attitudinal, the idea of choosing how to respond to suffering. Choosing the attitude - yes. If there is no possibility in a given situation to fulfill the meaning of a situation by giving oneself to the experience of beauty and so forth, nor if you have lost the capability to do your job, to do your work, even then there is an ultimate possibility to find and fulfill meaning. Not only the ultimate, it is even the potential to fulfill the deepest meaning, to attain the highest values: by your approach to the given situation, a tragic or trist situation confronting you.
You said that in part of the initial shock of being put in a death camp, there was ultimately an acceptance that "we knew we had nothing to lose except our ridiculously naked lives." Is that the situation that they're in? In a way. Is this when you make the choice of how you go into... your last value choices, how to react to the situation? You stand there, you stood there naked with nothing you could have had, but all the more what counted and mattered was what you were - "being" rather than "having," possessing anything. So what counted was what you make out of this situation, what attitude you adopt in the given situation, and there is a multitude, a wealth of possible attitudes to how to approach it.
So we have to decide. The ultimate, I would take it, attitudinal value challenge that we all share is how we're going to face death. How do you prepare people for that? How do you prepare yourself for that? I couldn't prepare anyone else unless I would have prepared myself, because if you are a psychiatrist, your patients feel exactly whether or not you are really convinced of what you are teaching and telling them. Now, I'm convinced that in contrast to the usual aspect, or be it sound aspect, to life and more specifically to the past, to life's transitoriness, and this includes that we approach, each of us are approaching death, in contrast to that, I maintain that in the past, nothing is lost, but right on the contrary, everything is stored forever. It is not annihilated by transitoriness, but on the contrary, it has been, it is becoming preserved forever. Something you have done can never be undone. Something you have experienced, something you have even experienced in a negative sense, going through suffering, and if, for instance, you suffered, gone through this suffering honestly, courageously, and with dignity, who in the world, what in the world can deny it, can annihilate this? What you have done has been done forever, in both ways, in a negative as in a positive way, it cannot be undone. And the past is a storehouse of what you have done, what you have experienced, what you have gone through, and what you have done out of all the negative and tragic aspects as even encountered within your life.
I want to thank you for being on the show, and I want to thank you at home for watching.