Frankls Descartesian Approach To Meaning Essay Research

Frankls Descartesian Approach To Meaning Essay, Research Paper

Viktor Frankl’s Descartesian Search for Meaning

In his autobiography “Man’s search for Meaning”, Viktor Frankl describes his experiences as a prisoner in the Nazi Concentration Camps during World War II. He depicted situations and places that showed little regard for humanity. People were dehumanized through techniques of slave labor, torture and loss of identity through identification numbers. As a whole, people in the camp were treated without regard to their mental or physical well being. How could anyone find knowledge in these horrible conditions. According to rationalistic philosophies, people possess knowledge about the cosmos and their meanings inside them. These inner ideas are waiting for the environment to shape them and give them meaning. Rene Descartes, a seventieth century philosopher, devised four epistemological rules in which a human could deduce knowledge of the cosmos. Viktor Frankl searched for meaning in the atrocities the Holocaust. He uncovered meaning for his life, for his pain and most of all for his suffering by using techniques that paralleled Descartes’ rules in acquiring knowledge. Frankl determined his distinct inner idea and then built an epistemology from his most understandable idea by deducing reason from insanity.

Rationalists like Descartes believe that every human has innate ideas that serve as the building blocks in developing an understanding of the world around them. These incorruptible ideas are always present in humans and are essential to understanding Descartes’ epistemology. According to his philosophy, people have meaning in their being somewhere, even if they are incarcerated unjustly like the prisoners of the camps. Their underlying meanings are simply waiting for the right time to arise and be formed by the environment. Frankl used this concept to describe why each person has a meaning; people have a special quality that should allow them to persevere through any circumstances. For example, he remembered learning of two men, one man had a young child waiting for him in another country and another man had important scientific work to complete. Frankl himself had his dear wife to remember (Frankl 79). All of responsibilities gave meaning to that particular individual. Frankl continually states that if a person had a “why” to live, then that should outweigh any “how” (Frankl 101). Frankl portrays his feelings of this concept in his thoughts concerning human responsibility.

When the impossibility of replacing a person is realized, it allows the responsibility which a man has for his existence and its continuance to appear in all its magnitude. A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never throw his life away. (Frankl 101)

Frankl reveals his belief that humans have inner qualities that make each individual unique; the affection of a father, the responsibility to the scientific world and the love of a husband are all irreplaceable. These concepts that are all intrinsically right in people and give them a meaning in their lives. After establishing that these human prisoners had an inner meaning to survive, Descartes’ then uses this mathematical approach to deduce knowledge, which can be applied to the manner in which Frankl found knowledge in the camps.

Descartes first rule of epistemology demands people not to accept anything to be true which is not clearly recognized as true and to believe only those things that are “clear and distinct” (Hakim 319, 325). In the context of the concentration camps, the only thing that was certain in the daily routine of the prisoners was that nothing was certain. Assurance of one’s physical and mental safety was virtually shrouded by the consistent deception of the camps. Even though the daily life of the people was unpredictable, the inner strengths that each human possessed remained a beacon for salvation. The love for his wife enabled Frankl to transcend his daily pain and suffering. Even the fact that she was not present with him in the camps did not matter as long as he was able to hold onto the love, which they each shared. It also was of no consequence whether his wife was dead or a live; the fact that their love was incorruptible and immutable by the conditions of the camp gave him courage and will to survive the duration of the pain. The love of a husband for his wife went “beyond the physical person of the beloved” (Frankl 58). Guards could beat him, humiliate him, and even try to kill him but they could not corrupt his feelings of love for his wife. The clear and distinct love that bonded them enabled him to deduce all the other truths in the camp. Regardless of how much he loved her, his feelings of love were often obscured by other emotions concerning the camp. Each prisoner was perplexed by the many emotions that raged inside them. The way to defeat this surfeit of emotion was to progress through the second rule of Descartes.

Divide up each difficulty into as many parts as possible was the second Descartesian rule of epistemology. Prisoners constantly struggled with multiple emotions while enslaved in the camps. Guilt, suffering, confusion and love confused many of the inmates of the camps. One of the most complex emotions was trying to find an explanation for their suffer