It has come to this. After 4,000 years of civilization and a search for meaning, finally we now have a Wikipedia page with the intrepid title “Meaning of Life“. So much for that.
In Viktor Frankl’s remarkable book Man’s Search for Meaning, the psychiatrist author recounts his early days first, as a therapist who organized probably the world’s first suicide prevention program, and later, as a prisoner in the death camps of the holocaust. In the camps, he is confronted with prisoners who seek their own end of suffering by throwing themselves against the electrified fence. In order to save them from suicide, he must give them hope, a reason to live in the face of astounding horror and probable extermination. His method is to show the prisoner, even in extremis, that in the manner of the existentialists, each human must choose to make a purpose, a meaning, in life. While Freud’s answer to the question of the meaning of life was To Love and Work (he didn’t really say quite that), Frankl’s answer is that we are compelled to find meaning in compassion, love, creativity, and an embrace of suffering. He quotes Nietzsche (in several places) in saying that if one knows why we live, one can endure any how. Nietzsche also said that to live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in suffering. Even the earliest Greek philosophers sought to find a meaning in life, particularly one that had its basis in the natural world. Thales, the original Greek philo, looked to the world itself, and my friend Diogenes sought a life based in nature and consonant with the natural human condition. And Buddha, who lived at the same time as the pre-Socratic philos, discovered by “awakening”, that all life was suffering and the way to end suffering was to unhinge oneself to the yoke of desires by mindful acceptance of the immediacy of life.
Two Strikes 