Existential Therapy: Meaning
From Irvin Yalom’s Existential PsychoTherapy
Secular Examples of meaning
Altruism - “Leaving the world a better place to live, in, serving others, participation in charity (the greatest virtue of all).”
Dedication to a Cause - “Many kinds of cause may suffice … But the important thing is that “it must, if it is to give life meaning, lift the individual out of himself, and make him a cooperating part of a vaster scheme.”
Creativity - “To create something new, something that rings with novelty or beauty and harmony is a powerful antidote to a sense of meaninglessness.”
Hedonism - “The purpose of life is, in this view, simply to live fully, to retain one’s sense of astonishment at the miracle of life, to plunge oneself into the natural rhythm of life, to search for pleasure in the deepest possible sense.”
Self-Actualization - “Maslow thus answers the question What do we live for? by stating that we live in order to fulfill our potential. He answers the trailer question What do we live by? by claiming that the good values are, in essence, built into the human organism and that, if one only trusts one’s organismic wisdom, one will discover them intuitively.
Self-Transcendence - “Buber notes that, though human beings should begin with themselves (searching their own hearts, integrating themselves, finding meaning), they should not end with themselves. It is only necessary, Buber states, to ask the question “What for? What am I to find my particular way for? What am I to unify my being for?” The answer is: “Not for my own sake.””
Concept Overview
Yalom argues human beings naturally look for patterns and purpose to give structure to their lives. Like Viktor Frankl, author of Man’s Search for Meaning, Yalom argues a lack of meaning is intolerable and can have profoundly negative effects on a person’s well-being, even undermining their will to persevere altogether.
However, there’s a tension for Yalom in that he views the universe as indifferent. He does not believe there is a grand design or an already-determined meta-narrative. So in his view, each person is tasked with the responsibility of constructing his/her own system of meaning or choosing one that has already been articulated. But even in the case of the latter, the individual must recognize they are making the choice and that it is ultimately the meaning of THEIR life, not THE meaning of life. Furthermore, he emphasizes meaning can and should be a fluid thing throughout one’s life.
Yalom doesn’t disparage religious perspectives and shows how even the likes of Camus and Sartre end up creating a framework of meaning and values. (Meaning is the why; values are the how.) He argues religious and secular thinkers alike arrive at a place of calling humans to fully give themselves to something transcendent. Happiness, according to Yalom and Frankl, cannot be the main pursuit. If happiness comes, it will be the bi-product of giving oneself to something bigger.
Ultimately, Yalom emphasizes the importance of engagement. Meaning cannot just be an intellectual exercise. One must act. One must do. Don’t wait until you have it figured out. Jump in and start working toward something.
Deep Dive
Yalom argues “we experience dysphoria in the face of an indifferent, unpatterned world and search for patterns, explanations, and the meaning of existence.” Put more strongly, Yalom argues a lack of meaning can be associated with numerous pathologies, “considerable distress”, and “in severe form it may lead to the decision to end one’s life.”
But this leads to a dilemma. According to Yalom, “an existential position holds that the world is contingent—that is, everything that is could as well have been otherwise; that human beings constitute themselves, their world, and their situation within that world; that there exists no meaning, no grand design in the universe, no guidelines for living other than those the individual creates.”
So, in Yalom’s framework, “one meaning of meaning is that it is an anxiety emollient: it comes into being to relieve the anxiety that comes from facing a life and a world without an ordained, comforting structure.”
Yalom goes on to distinguish between cosmic meaning, or “what is the meaning of human life?”, and terrestrial meaning, which is “what is the meaning of MY life?” This is connected to earlier themes of freedom and isolation.
Yalom argues that from every meaning construct (why), and set of values naturally follows (how). He discusses how values help us, “place possible ways of behaving into some approval-disapproval hierarchy,” which makes life easier to navigate. But values also allow for social life by adding a layer of predictability. Yalom states, “A shared belief system not only tells individuals what they ought to do but what others probably will do as well.”
Yalom quotes multiple philosophers who believe humans create their own meaning. But he ultimately agrees that every human must pick something and give themselves to it wholeheartedly. “What is important for both Camus and Sartre is that human beings recognize that one must invent one’s own meaning (rather than discover God’s or nature’s meaning) and then commit oneself fully to fulfilling that meaning. This requires that one be, as Gordon Allport put it, “half-sure and whole-hearted”—not an easy feat. On this one point most Western theological and atheistic existential systems agree: it is good and right to immerse oneself in the stream of life.”
Unsurprisingly, Yalom leans on the work of Viktor Frankl, who says, human beings need “not a tensionless state but rather a striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him.” Frankl criticizes the Freudian pleasure principle as limited and self-defeating. For Frankl, humans must have something to strive for outside of the self, something transcendent. Frankl adds the notion that happiness cannot be the goal because, “happiness ensues; it cannot be pursued.” In other words, if you aim for meaning you get happiness, but if you aim for happiness you get neither.
But can self-constructed meaning really hold up? Yalom wonders. “One finds a purpose and clings to it for dear life. Yet the purpose one creates does not relieve discomfort effectively if one continues to remember that one forged it. (Frankl compares the belief in personally constructed, or invented, life meanings to climbing a fakir’s rope that one has oneself thrown into the air.) It is far more comforting to believe that the meaning is “out there,” and that one has discovered it.”
Yalom zooms out to consider different perspectives. First, humans living in a different time. He writes, “Citizens of the pre-industrialized world had other meaning-providing activities in their everyday life. They lived close to the earth, felt a part of nature, fulfilled nature’s purpose in plowing the ground, sowing, reaping, cooking, and naturally and unself-consciously thrusting themselves into the future by begetting and raising children. Their everyday work was creative as they shared in the creation of life amongst their livestock and seed and grain. They had a strong sense of belonging to a larger unit; they were an integral part of a family and community and, in that context, were provided scripts and roles. Moreover, their work was intrinsically worthwhile. Who, after all, can challenge the task of growing food with the question What for? Growing food is an endeavor that is simply right beyond questioning.”
Next, he considers humans living in different cultures, stating, “The Western world has, thus, insidiously adopted a world view that there is a point, an outcome of all one’s endeavors. One strives for a goal. One’s efforts must have some end point, just as a sermon has a moral and a story, a satisfying conclusion. Everything is preparation for something else. William Butler Yeats complained: “When I think of all the books I have read, wise words heard, anxieties given to parents… of hopes I have had, all life weighed in the balance of my own life seems to me a preparation for something that never happens.” The Eastern world never assumes that there is a point to life, or that it is a problem to be solved; instead, life is a mystery to be lived. The Indian sage Bhaqway Shree Rajneesh says, “Existence has no goal. It is pure journey. The journey in life is so beautiful, who bothers for the destination?” Life just happens to be, and we just happen to be thrown into it. Life requires no reason.”
Yalom ultimately arrives at an emphasis on engagement. Meaning can’t just be an intellectual exercise. He says, “I believe that the search for meaning is similarly paradoxical: the more we rationally seek it, the less we find it; the questions that one can pose about meaning will always outlast the answers. Meaning, like pleasure, must be pursued obliquely. A sense of meaningfulness is a by-product of engagement. Engagement does not logically refute the lethal questions raised by the galactic perspective, but it causes these questions not to matter. That is the meaning of Wittgenstein’s dictum: “The solution to the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem.” Engagement is the therapeutic answer to meaninglessness regardless of the latter’s source. Wholehearted engagement in any of the infinite array of life’s activities not only disarms the galactic view but enhances the possibility of one’s completing the patterning of the events of one’s life in some coherent fashion. To find a home, to care about other individuals, about ideas or projects, to search, to create, to build—these, and all other forms of engagement, are twice rewarding: they are intrinsically enriching, and they alleviate the dysphoria that stems from being bombarded with the unassembled brute data of existence.”
Perhaps this quote from Tolstoy sums it up best: “It is possible to live only as long as life intoxicates us.”