False Dichotomies
We recently read the essay There Are Two Kinds of Happy People, which compares Stoic and Epicurean philosophies. The essay makes some good points (we can borrow from each other yet remain grounded in our own traditions), but essays like this create false dichotomies: you almost never hear people saying “Buddhists meditate and Christians pray, and maybe they should try each other’s techniques“. In reality, Buddhists also pray and Christians sometimes also meditate. The essay assumes that Epicureans do not seek meaning, or create meaning, and it perhaps even assumes that meaning and pleasure are mutually contradictory, but there is no reason whatsoever to think this is the case.
I want to resist the tendency to antagonize Stoics because that produces a situation where it seems like Epicureanism frustrates the search for meaning or the ability for resilience, and that is not at all true. Epicurean philosophy provides various different pathways to meaning and resilience.
He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how. – Nietzsche
As a psychoanalyst, Frankl proposes “logotherapy” (a therapy of meaning). Our Friend Nathan says:
It’s a powerful story of someone who survives grotesque circumstances. His themes seem to me to be within the existentialist genre, primarily, defining value and meaning in a violent and unforgiving world. He largely demonstrates how having an appropriate mental disposition can help people manage seemingly-hopeless circumstances.
Meaning-making is contrasted with nihilism and a depressing sense of defeat in life. This is from page 72
Regarding our “provisional existence” as unreal was in itself an important factor in causing the prisoners to lose their hold on life: everything in a way became pointless. Some people forgot that often it is just such an exceptionally difficult external situation which gives man the opportunity to grow spiritually beyond himself. Instead of taking the camp’s difficulties as a test of their inner strength, they did not take their life seriously and despised it as something of no consequence. They preferred to close their eyes and to live in the past. Life for such people became meaningless.
This other quote, from the following page (73), reminds us of our past meleta concerning Epimetheus (who only looks to the past) and his brother Prometheus (who looks to the future). To Frankl, redemption is found in the Promethean approach.
It is a peculiarity of man that he can only live by looking to the future. And this is his salvation in the most difficult moments of his existence, although he sometimes has to force his mind to the task.
… which remind me of Epicurean Saying 48:
While you are on the road, try to make the later part better than the earlier part; and be equally happy when you reach the end.
Frankl mentions laughter as a technique, and as a sign that one is healed. In Tending the Epicurean Garden, I mentioned that the Epicureans follow the lineage of the laughing philosophers, and that laughter helps us to feel superior to the thing we are laughing at / about. Frankl says this differently: being able to laugh at yourself and your situation is a sign that you have already begun to overcome.
At one point in page 130, Frankl seems to accuse materialist reductionism of producing nihilism. In Epicurean philosophy we see that that is not necessarily the case. Other materialists may be nihilists, but in our tradition we have methods of drawing values and meaning from the study of nature. Here, he attacks:
the danger inherent in the teaching that man is nothing but the result of the biological, psychological, and sociological conditions, or the product of heredity and environment … This neurotic fatalism is fostered and strengthened by a psychotherapy which denies that man is free.
I applaud that Frankl is drawing a connection between nihilism and materialism, as this is one of the main knots by which people who are suffering entangle themselves into harmful patterns of powerless thinking. To me, this accentuates the need for rejecting scientism (=the “excessive belief in the power of scientific knowledge and techniques“), and for studying philosophy as a separate and equally important field of knowledge alongside science.
“Embracing the Exile”: a Case Study
In my college years when I confided in a University social worker and mentor (whom I greatly respected and loved) concerning my struggles to reconcile my Christian upbringing with my gay sexuality, he kindly lent me the book Embracing the Exile – Healing Journeys of Gay Christians. Back then, this book had a great impact on me, since the religious and psychological abuse of homophobia were strongly imprinted in my mind and affected me in very real ways.
Embracing the Exile is my most familiar case study for logotherapy. It argued that as Christians, gay people should embrace their exile, and carry their particular cross, with acceptance. It also taught that we should love our enemies anyway, regardless of what they do to us or say about us, and it even treats Queer identities as a form of “chosenness” where we are left to make sense of our way of being different. The book meant to soften the passions of a bruised soul, and it succeeded, but in the end, Christianity was definitely not for me. Many LGBT Christians feel that they are able to lovingly engage in LGBT activism, and at the same time confront other Christians with the evil that is done in the name of their religion from inside their churches. I’m torn between my solidarity and support for the struggle of LGBT people who choose to remain Christian, and the need to address the profound epistemological errors (and cruelties) of Christianity.
Embracing the Exile might be particularly helpful for people who might be struggling with suicide ideation, or who have recently come out and who come from a Christian background and are still attached to it, or for LGBT people who wish to return to Christianity. It provides a few “technologies of the soul” for that specific population.
But the book is not without its potential dangers, even if it came from a place of love and sincerity. Church leaders are experts at softening the blows of their emotional and psychological acts of aggression and dressing things that are deeply worthy of objection in the disguise of innocence and sanctity. Furthermore, if we decide that our policy towards our abusers is to “love them anyway”, does this not risk neglecting the possibility of moral development for our abusers? It can be a difficult balance to maintain, particularly when those who are most likely to harm LGBT youth in a church are also the same people who find themselves most entangled in their ideological errors and are least likely to think they might be wrong. The idea of gays embracing Christianity reminds me of a commentary about the colorful cow in Nietzsche’s Zarathustra that I came across recently:
In the town called the Pied Cow, the people are extremely content. They exemplify the concept of decadence. As Nietzsche says in Thus Spake Zarathustra to a citizen of the town of Pied Cow: “thy cow, affliction, milkedst thou—now drinketh thou the sweet milk of her udder.” His language shows that the cow’s milk is pleasurable and sweet, but it is an affliction that causes us to forget our real purpose. It is analogous to soma in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, an orgasmically pleasurable drug that causes the citizens of a fascist regime to forget their suffering and keep working.
One of the main dangers of the logotherapy approach is that, by choosing a false refuge or a false sense of meaning, we may end up harming ourselves and wasting opportunities for moral reform, freedom, creativity, and true happiness. Meaning must therefore be secondary to our impulse towards truth and towards the sober pleasure that Epicurus mentions in his Epistle to Menoeceus.
Some Epicurean Ideas
Life is not obligated to make sense to us. We are the ones who seek to make sense of it willfully, using our creativity and resources, our art of living (techne biou), and with the help of the study of nature. In this, Lucretius, Epicurus, and others are role models to us.
We are able to create meaning through the process of hedonic calculus: by choosing and rejecting in a manner consistent with our values, our pains or sufferings are redeemed and made valuable by the greater pleasures that they gain.
When I recently shared 3 Brain Systems That Control Your Behavior: Reptilian, Limbic, Neo Cortex, by Robert Sapolsky, our Friend Nathan commented that these three parts of the brain reminded him of “sensations, feelings, and preconceptions”–the three sets of faculties that exist within the Epicurean canon, which are our connection with nature.
The video makes the argument that the most primitive part of the brain (the reptilian part) involves the most basic instincts. This includes the senses, but also the sense of time, the circadian rhythm–a set of faculties that require that animals attune themselves to the day and night cycles, and require cold-blooded animals to regulate their body temperature by various means. Then, our ancestors evolved the mammalian brain, which involved complex fight-or-flight mechanisms, panic instincts, and other powers that Nathan associates with the canonical faculties involved in feelings. The final evolutionary stage is where animals evolved the cortex of the brain that facilitates complex thinking and language. Of all the highest animals (mostly the primates), the humans are the ones who have evolved the most complex “prolepsis” cortex. The parallels noted between the canonical faculties and the layers of brain cortex are interesting, and it had never occurred to me to think of it this way.
I am particularly interested in this third set of faculties in our discussion of meaning because the prolepsis faculty facilitates language, and it seems to me that our discussion of meaning is a discussion of language, and that the creation of meaning is therefore mainly a function of the prolepsis faculty. We are perhaps translating our experiences into something that our rational brains may apprehend, and doing so helps us to process our ideas and emotions.
Seen this way, the thirst for meaning becomes an impulse toward naming our own narratives, our lives, our selves, our relations, our life cycles, the projects that “give” our lives “meaning”, our technologies of the soul, etc. How else do we create meaning? Nietzsche suggested (and I agree) that we may do this through art, poetry, dance, ritual. The technique of relabeling (as we’ve discussed before) is another method for this.
In the search for meaning, it often seems like self-expression has been frustrated and seeks an outlet. The prolepsis of self-expression (Self-Ex-Pression) reminds me of a process of pressing-out parts of the self into some external form. The faculty of prolepsis allows us to clearly conceive an idea, which is necessary in the first place if we are to “press it out” of our psyche. Prolepsis helps us to conceive, which reminds us of seeds, of germination. Conceiving an idea carries creative potential.
Conclusion
Some people say Frankl’s Man’s Search of Meaning is a Stoic book, but it’s more nuanced than that. Yes, Man’s Search for Meaning has a strong Stoic influence. It teaches that the “only” thing that others can’t take away is how we respond to a situation, and focuses on the realm of possible therapies available to someone who is powerless to change their fate. But it also elsewhere criticizes key aspects of Stoicism. In page 56, we find:
The camp inmate was frightened of making decisions and of taking any sort of initiative whatsoever. This was the result of a strong feeling that fate was one’s master, and that one must not try to influence it in any way, but instead let it take its own course. In addition, there was a great apathy, which contributed in no small part to the feelings of the prisoner.
The book is a bit depressing, but this is not necessarily a bad thing, as suffering does have the power to make us better people. My recent anecdote on this has to do with a particular co-worker who for many months did not greet me, or smile at me, or acknowledge me at all at work. Some people (particularly people who have money or power) can afford to be quite stand-offish; others are simply introverted by nature. This co-worker was a cancer survivor and, upon getting a second diagnosis of cancer, he changed. Perhaps he realized that life is short and shifted his conception of the things that matter. He began to greet me with a smile. He became more personal. I think his suffering as a result of his health, and his sense of vulnerability, is what made him a better, gentler, more caring person.
This anecdote confirms, to me, the power of suffering to purify our character–even if we rebel against the idealization and sacralizing of suffering that we see, for instance, in Catholicism.
Frakl says “man is ultimately self determining”, meaning that we are subjects, not objects or machines. One of the main virtues of this book is that Frankl humanizes his patients. He at all times refuses to diminish or humiliate or mistreat his patients. His years of suffering during World War II make Frankl a wounded healer: he had been through hell, and could now help others in a similar situation. For this reason, many people who are experiencing great suffering and who are truly powerless in their situation would benefit from critically engaging the insights of this book.
Further Reading:
