in your work you you quote Nietzsche
quite a bit his a line "he who has a why to live for can bear almost any how". What do you think he meant by that? What I think that..? What you think he meant by that? The same as
I'm intended to convey to my readers and students: that the vision of a meaning
ahead of someone, a meaning in wait for someone to be fulfilled by someone, that
this contributes most than anything else under equal other circumstances for
survival. Meaning is the most important thing in our lives? Certainly because a
what I call a "will to meaning" - the wish to find and to fulfill meaning is the
basic motivation in human beings. This certainly runs counter to much of
the determinist notions that are being bandied around these days that
man is a machine man is a computer man is a product of instincts. Man is
something like a rat in experiments psychological experiments. Of course you
are right but not only against the so called deterministic concepts of man but
also regarding the motivational theories of certain psychotherapeutic systems.
Let's talk for a minute about logotherapy
which arose out of this notion of a search for meaning. Logotherapy, as one
among other types of psychotherapy, is we may say a "meaning centered" psychotherapy
in as much particularly as logotherapy sees a human being not predominantly
determined, not to say dominated by the will to pleasure as you were mentioning, nor by the will to power along the lines of
Adlerian teachings, but basically fundamentally by a will to meaning.
That is to say the desire, the impulse to find to discover in life or better to
say in each life situation, concrete life situation confronting someone, the desire
to find a meaning therein and to go on to fulfill it. I was very
intrigued one of the most surprising things I've read recently was that you
said that when you talk to European students only 40 percent said they had
suffered this sort of inner void and yet eighty-one percent of American students
experience the same thing. We think of it just the opposite,
we think of the Europeans as being buried under this existential dread and
sense of purposelessness and Americans is being optimistic and upbeat.
However it might be, whether the ones or the others are suffering more
or less respectively from this existential vacuum, the ones who seem to
suffer less should not look at the others with contempt but look at the
others with compassion and look for anything possible to help the others. Now
this void manifests itself as in apathy in boredom, lack of initiative,
lack of interest - interest in the world or initiative in changing something
within the world for the better. This frustration is a a proof of the
existence of a will to meaning. Unless we were imbued by a will to meaning by the
wish to find meaning and discuss discover and fulfill meaning in life
we never would be able to experience an inner
void so this is in a way also something positive.
Now you've listed three types of values creative values, experiential values and
attitudinal variants. You may find a meaning the "average" man, the man on the
street or the woman on the street may find a meaning day by day in doing a
deed in creating a work and - that's the creative - creative and in experiencing
something. The beauty. The truth as a researcher, or the good in dealing with
people as a teacher or whatsoever. There's an extraordinary moment in "man's search for
meaning" when you talk about being in one of the one of the Nazi camps and all of
you going out to look at a sunset. Is that experiential? Exactly this is a paradigm of
experiential values, of finding a meaning in experiencing without doing anything
without achieving or accomplishing anything but just in giving oneself the
immediate experience of something say beautiful going on in the world. This is
the second avenue but there is also another aspect of experiential
values. Excuse me, not only experiencing something but also experiencing someone.
More than that, experiencing another human being in his
or her very uniqueness and it is the main attribute of a human being that he
is a person in contrast to any animal he is a person a person is always something
absolutely unique irreparable in the evolution of the cosmos as is we are
incomparable with any other human being and this uniqueness can be got hold of
solely by a loving person, Because he not only sees the essence but also the
potentials in the beloved person thereby as I put it before promoting him
alleviating it to reach out to attain this potential and to fulfill and
thereby actualize also himself but not by preaching self-actualization. It's
nonsense self-actualization can only fall into
your lap automatically once that you have fulfilled a concrete meaning, done
the best of a situation. Then you actualize yourself as a by-product. Let's talk
about the third set of values which is the attitudinal, the idea of choosing how
to respond to suffering. Choosing the attitude - yes. If there is no
possibility in a given situation to fulfill the meaning of a situation by
giving oneself to the experience of beauty and so forth. Nor if you have lost the capability to do your job to do your
work even then there is an ultimate possibility to find and
fulfill meaning - not only the ultimate it is even the potential to fulfill the
deepest meaning, to attain the highest values: by your approach to the given situation, a tragic or trist situation confronting you. You said
that in part of the initial shock of being put in a death camp was there was
was ultimately an acceptance that we knew we had nothing to lose
except our ridiculously naked lives is that the situation that they're in? - In
a way - Is this when you make the choice of how you go into..
your last value choices how to react to the situation? You stand there, you stood
there naked with nothing you could have had but all the more what counted and
the mattered was what you were - "being" rather than "having",
possessing anything. So what counted was what you make out of this
situation, what attitude you adopt in the given situation and there is a
multitude a wealth of possible attitudes to how to approach it. So we have to
decide. The ultimate I would take it attitudinal value challenge that we all share
is how we're going to face death. How do you prepare people for that? How do you
prepare yourself for that? I couldn't prepare anyone else unless I would have prepared myself because if you are a psychiatrist
your patients feel exactly whether or not you are really convinced of what you
are teaching and telling them. Now I'm convinced that in contrast to the usual
aspect or be it sound aspect to life and more specifically to the
past, to life's transitoriness and this includes that we approach, each of us are
approaching death, in contrast to that I maintain that in the past nothing is
lost but right on the contrary everything is stored forever.
It is not annihilated by transitoriness but on the contrary it has been, it is
becoming preserved forever. Something you have done can never be undone. Something
you have experienced something you have even experienced in a negative sense
going through suffering and if for instance you suffered, gone through this
suffering honestly courageously and with dignity
who in the world, what what in the world can deny it,
can annihilate this? What you have done has been done forever
in both ways in a negative as in a positive way, it cannot be
undone. And the past is a storehouse of what you have done what you have
experienced what you have gone through and what you have done out of all the
negative and tragic aspects as even encountered within your life. I want to
thank you for being on the show and I want to thank you at home for
watching.
