Lessons from Frankl – Man’s Search for Meaning (Part 3)

Nietzsche: “he who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how.”

…the majority of the prisoners had lived in the naïve hope that they would be home again by Christmas. As the time drew near and there was noencouraging news, the prisoners lost courage and disappointment overcame them. This had a dangerous influence on their powers of resistance and a great number of them died.

As we said before, any attempt to restore a man’s inner strength in the camp had first to succeed in showing him some future goal.

– Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, on the disappointment of false (unrealistic) hopes

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The folly here is that when suffering, a man sets his soul for ultimate self-destruction. Resistance can always be heightened, as Nietzsche writes, and even indomitable for a time. But where one sets the endpoint for suffering, the expections by which suffering will end can be easily disappointed, and if so then even time itself can bear the fatal attack on his shoulders.

Lessons from Frankl – Man’s Search for Meaning (Part 1)

To draw an analogy: a man’s suffering is similar to the behaviour of gas. If a certain quantity of gas is pumped into an empty chamber, it will fill the chamber completely and evenly, no matter how big the chamber [or how concentrated the suffering is itself]. Thus suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little. Therefore the “size” of human suffering is absolutely relative…it also follows that a very trifling thing can cause the greatest of joys.

- Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, on Suffering

 

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Human nature will cause us to wallow in what we interpret as suffering, such that we will subjectively construe this suffering as much more severe than justified on a scale of absolute human tolerance. It remains a noted ability of the human mind to distort the limits of “tolerance,” unfairly stretching or truncating this moral continuum, by use of its framing ability.

If such a diametric opposition of “happiness” and “suffering” does exist in any absolute statistical sense, then this analogy only fits by connecting the two along a single, linear dimension of human tolerance (as opposed to what is surely a multidimensional view of the human experience).

What is the point of objectivity here, of even understanding this distinction? Frankl’s intention was clearly subjective, for the reader to understand and take comfort that whatever one might feel as “suffering” is not truly unbearable in any absolute sense; it is simply the mask of human subjectivity that prevents one from understanding that survival of the living mind CAN be appreciated.

Such a scale can exist in theory, but a scientific charting of subjective determinations of suffering cannot be proven and ethically, never should be. What form might this take, if one could paint an accurate picture of what is in a person’s mind? On a large sample, perhaps a statistical charting of what, by and large, will terminate the living mind. What, more often than not, will eradicate a person’s will to live or, by extension beyond that, what will push the living mind to adopt those self-destructive patterns of foolishness that inexorably pushes the ultimate downfall of the individual.

But I cannot, in striving for objectivity, neglect the individual within this milieu. Each data point on a normative curve, on a scatterplot, is a narrative; each is a lifetime construction of an enduring story that is preserved not by any record, but in that absolute instance of time after which the spark of consciousness no longer exists. We must suffer first before we can ask questions to be objective, lest the distinctions fall to the merely academic.