MEANING OF LIFE: The meaning of life differs from person to person, from day to day, and from hour to hour. What matters it not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person's life at a given moment. Everyone has his own specific mission in life; everyone must carry out a concrete assignment that demands fulfillment. Each person's task is as unique as is his specific opportunity to implement it. It is the individual's responsibility to come to an understanding of the meaning of his or her life. This emphasis on responsibleness is reflected in this saying, "So live as if your were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as your are about to ace now." This invites man to imagine first that the present is past and second that as the present is changed so is the past. Such a precept confronts the individual with life's finiteness and the finality of what he makes out of both his life and himself. Logotherapy attempts to make the individual fully aware of his own responsibility, but must leave to him the option for what, to what or to whom he understands to be responsible. The Logotherapist's role consists in widening and broadening the visual field of the patient so that the spectrum of meaning and values becomes conscious and visible to him. Meaning of life may change, but it never ceases to be. We can discover the meaning of life through CREATIVE VALUES, EXPERIENCE VALUES, AND ATTITUDINAL VALUES. To put this in different words, meaning can come through what we give to life (creative values), by what we take from the world (experience values) such as listening to music, reading a book, etc., and through the stand we take toward a fate we no longer can change (attitudinal values) such as the lose of a loved one to death, the lose of an arm, etc. Even when one's activities are very limited because of an illness or injury, life still offers an opportunity for the realization of attitudinal values. What is the significant is the person's attitude toward his unalterable fate. The way in which he accepts, what courage he manifest in suffering and the dignity he displays in doom and disaster is the measure of his human fulfillment. A person's life retains its meaning up to the last, until he draws his last breath. As long as a person remains conscious, he is under obligations to realize values, even if those are only be attitudinal values. An individual needs some content for their lives and Frankl said, "If we can help them find an aim and a purpose in their existence, in other words, if they can be shown the task before them. 'Whoever has a reason for living endures almost any mode of life.' says Nietzsche. The conviction that one has a task before him has enormous psychotherapeutic values." Frankl does not claim to have an answer for the individual's meaning to life. Meaning must be found but it cannot be given. The individual must find it spontaneously. The Logotherapist is convinced, and if need be persuades his patients, which there is a meaning to fulfill, but he does not pretend to know what the meaning is. Along with the freedom of will and the will to meaning, there is meaning to life: a meaning for which man has been in search all along and also that man has the freedom to embark on the fulfillment of that meaning.
Quote Details: A. J. Liebling: People everywhere confuse what... - The Quotations Page
People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with news. A. J. Liebling (1904 - 1963)
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