Tue - March 8, 2005

Alas, despite months of soul searching, I haven't answered these questions. But this weekend I discovered a slim volume called "Man's Search For Meaning" that casts the inquiry in a new light. Its author, Viktor Frankl, survived the four Nazi concentration camps that killed his wife, his parents, and his only brother. Cut off from the outside world, tagged with a number and stripped of all personal identity, beaten daily, worked to the point of physical collapse, and powerless to avoid further suffering in a world without apparent meaning, in a prison sentence without apparent end, Frankl watched helplessly as malnutrition, illness, and abuse slew hundreds of fellow inmates. Yet as a professor trained in neurology and psychiatry he also observed something clinically remarkable: that otherwise healthy prisoners died quickly if they lost hope that they had something to live for and that sickly inmates clung to life if they believed their existence held a purpose.

Frankl concluded that man's deepest need is for meaning and purpose. How men frame their own existence has as much to do with their emotional survival as good nutrition does with their physical well-being. Prisoners who used external cues such as wealth and education to define their status lost critical parts of their identity in the depersonalizing and dehumanizing environment of the camps. Those who learned to find meaning in life even when confronted with a hopeless situation, when facing a fate that could not be changed, transformed personal tragedy into triumph. Although they could not end their suffering, these prisoners resolved to suffer with dignity and thereby turned their senseless predicament into a series of small daily personal achievements that cumulatively made survival possible.

"Even though conditions such as lack of sleep, insufficient food and various mental stresses may suggest that the inmates were bound to react in certain ways, in the final analysis it becomes clear that the sort of person the prisoner became was the result of an inner decision, and not the result of camp influence alone. Fundamentally, therefore, any man can, even under such circumstances, decide what shall become of him—mentally and spiritually. He may retain his human dignity even in a concentration camp."

In the end, it seems, the lasting measure of a man is not what society thinks of him but what his actions teach him that he is. We forge our own destinies, take our own measures, and cannot face hardships or seek the meaning of life without by degrees becoming whatever we expect to find.