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From RicPolansky.com Articles to Ponder THE MEANING TO LIFE ... dies. By Ric Polansky ©
If you were scanning newspapers on September 2nd 1997 you´d have missed any notice of him. Flipped by because he wasn’t there. Obituaries are not everyone’s favorite column to read these days. And even if you did give it a glance, he wasn’t there anyway. A sage for the ages ….. and not mentioned in any of the pages.
He was one of the modern and important voices of the nuclear era. A best selling author, his book THE MEANING TO LIFE (written in just nine days) translated into twenty three different languages and logged nine million sales world wide ….. so far. It is still on the top ten best selling books of all time in America. His name will go down with Freud, (his personal friend) and Adler (his neighbor and life long intimate). A founder of his own school of psychotherapy his mellow words and soft intent brought him adulation from Presidents, heads of state and more the thirty honorary degrees. And yet, no mention of him anywhere in the press. Great Britain knew him not. It used to be his own private joke that “souls searched for meaning to their lives almost everywhere ….. except in Great Britain”, no one bought his books. His name was Viktor Frankl. He authored some twenty-five books. His thoughts and reminisces did give meaning and direction to millions throughout the world. He died on September 2nd 1997 at the age of ninety-two.
Popular and well known before World War II Frankl already had an established career treating specialized suicide patients. The irony of his life was that when the Nazi´s came to power they would take his patients away and leave no doubt about their ending. Frankl, forewarned of the dangers refused to leave. He applied and was granted a Visa for the states but stayed and risked certain death to complete his mission ……. to help those that needed him. Arrested he was contiguously banished to a series of concentration camps starting with Theresienstadt (where he saw the body of his father being carted out to be slung into a hole) and finally ending in Auschwitz where he formulated his famed theory of “logotherapy.” Taking a page out of Nietzche’s notebook: “He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how.” Frankl’s death camp internment presented to him the irrational, horrific and inconceivable BUT assisted in formulating his world philosophy: “the human body could be stripped bare and humiliated but the soul, the internal spirit still remained untouched”. Therefore the attitude that one kept during such perversity became their most important helping/healing factor in adjusting to the circumstances. The cards are dealt, in many cases we might not have much to play with, but the attitude with which we enact are endeavors illustrates our strength of character. “We must never forget,” said Frankl, “that we may find meaning in life, even when confronted with a hopeless situation. They can take your freedom away. But if suffering is unavoidable and inescapable, they can never take away your inner freedom to face it with courage and dignity.” In Auschwitz his life was miraculously saved ….. daily. Sometimes by being the 51st in line when only fifty were needed to “go to the showers” or once when the truck broke. Throughout it all, his temperament never changed nor did his devoted assistance to those without a reasoned why to their malady. Quietly he confronted his hideous situation until freedom finally came through the Allies liberation. He then began life again, alone-- his entire family had been exterminated. Frankl never became the darling of the academic community, being one of the first mind doctors like Freud who explained our drives as emanating strictly from sexual ambitions; nor the prophet of power, like Jung who insisted that man was basically a “power orientated animal.” For Viktor Frankl the ordinary soul on the street was simply existential …. looking for a meaningful existence. Frankl often hinted at the evident number of growing religious sects and secretive organizations as fulfilling the “tribal bonding” suggested by Marshall McLuhan. Modern man was drifting away from recognized institutions and founding small cults that would aid them to survive in a world bereft of conscientious factored being; doctrine and belief, having been eroded away by frenzied living habits. Frankl’s thoughts were the last pronouncements uttered in dispensation to a roller coaster unreasoned existence. Soon Christian communities world-wide picked up on his optimism and espoused his beliefs: you didn´t have to sing in the rain, but had to at least acknowledge the wet and live within a recognized realism during the downpour.
"Everything can be taken away from man but one thing ….. to choose one's attitude in a given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way." The sane are those who accept this charge and do not expect happiness by right. “Thus Frankl's own "logotherapy," which views suffering not as an obstacle to happiness but often the necessary means to it, less a pathology than a path” writes critic Matthew Scully, a former Literary Editor for National Review.
Frankl summarized the cultural/economic gaps by suggesting that “an active life serves the purpose of giving man the opportunity to realize values in creative work, while a passive life of enjoyment afford him the opportunity to obtain fulfillment in experiencing beauty, art of nature. But there is also purpose in that life which is almost barren of both creation and enjoyment, and which admits of but one possibility of high moral behavior, namely, in man’s attitude in his existence, an existence restricted by external forces...The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross gives him ample opportunity ……. even under the most difficult of circumstances …… to add a deeper meaning to his life.”
Viktor Frankl constantly provided answers to a silent generation hell bent on earning and then once having arrived at the golden pinnacle ….. never knew how to spend their money (except on self analysis). With Frankl you didn´t lie on a couch and tell of a troubled childhood. You sat in a chair and listened to a wizened man discuss the reality of the present hurt and how you had to live with it. Schopenhauer might have scribbled that “mankind was apparently doomed to vacillate eternally between the two extremes of distress and boredom.” With Frankl no matter how bad the predicament or condition you still had to find meaning and BE so with a definitive attitude. The times might have been difficult, but when you spoke, Frankl would have asked you to be like John Wayne sayin’ : “smile when you say that Kincaid.”
Frankl could well have been the last of the epoch’s teachers that never sought personal fame nor following. But, he did provide answers. He lived his life the way he instructed so many others: quietly and with singular purpose.
Viktor Frankl well proved the maxim of Nietzche’s: “Was micht nicht umbringer, macht mich stärker (that which doesn’t kill me, makes me stronger).”
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