Finding Meaning in Suffering
Patrick Testa on the extraordinary hope offered by Viktor Frankl.
A second way Frankl believed we could find meaning is through love, whether it’s love of another person, or of art or nature.
Over and again, however, from my frame of mind, words like “love” can mean many different things to many different people. There’s the dictionary definition – “an intense feeling of deep affection” – and there are all of the at times conflicting things that men and women actually feel deep affection for. In other words, morally, politically and spiritually what or who you love dearly others might hate dearly. The part I root existentially in dasein, but the part others root instead in one or another One True Path. The part that revolves around as the song says “love my way”.
Or else.
I certainly do agree that in regard to the lives we live from day to day and our interactions with others, meaning is bursting at the seams. It’s everywhere. On the other hand, what if we live in a world where there is no essential meaning – purpose, dignity – applicable to words like love?
I might be completely wrong about this, but I suspect those like Frankl who have experienced great suffering or have been around it on a mass scale, find themselves in a situation where they are either able to provide themselves with something in the way of a meaningful antidote or it all collapses into an essentially meaningless world in which “shit happens”.