An ex-student of mine from Princeton turned up this week - someone I'd somehow managed to convince to major in religious studies rather than economics, but who had since graduating gone into finance after all (even did subprime mortgages for a time). Now he was back because a course he's taking at a prominent New York business school brought back questions from my course on the problem of evil. The course is on "Personal Leadership." What had him knocking at my door again was the first reading (the only book on the syllabus, it looks like), Viktor E. Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning; the syllabus quoted Wikipedia: According to a survey conducted by the Book-of-the-Month Club and the Library of Congress, Man's Search For Meaning belongs to a list of "the ten most influential books in [the United States]." (New York Times, November 20, 1991). Influential or not, he was troubled by the book's appearance in a class exploring whether you live for your values or for your goals. It was good to see him!There is indeed something disturbingly trivializing about this - the book recounts Frankl's experiences as an inmate in Nazi concentration camps! What's it doing in a business school class on leadership? One of my colleagues in Lang's advising office observed, Wow. There's nothing like business school in its capacity to trivialize and to remove real meaning from just about everything.
Imagine what they could do with the Diary of Anne Frank - they could talk about it as a great example of being a "self-starter."Appalled but also curious (business school is part of how the other half lives for me), I took this as an occasion to reread Frankl. The book's effective history from KZ testimonial to favorite of a culture of therapy is actually fascinating - but still disturbing - to contemplate. Called Ein Psycholog erlebt das Konzentrationslager when it appeared in Vienna in 1946, the first English edition of Man's Search for Meaning was called From Death Camp to Existentialism and included a brief overview of "logotherapy," Frankl's brand of psychotherapy. (Logotherapy attends not to drives and neuroses but to the search for meaning - a reason to live - and the "existential frustration" arising from a life which appears not to allow people to attain this purpose.)
By the time this edition appeared in 1962, the outline of logotherapy had been extended, changing the center of gravity of the book. A memoir followed by a postscript had become a manual preceded by an extended autobiographical introduction. Things Frankl learned among the prisoners in Auschwitz and another camp near Dachau (notably: everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to
choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way. (trans. Ilse Lasch (Boston: Beacon, 1962), 65]) were operationalized as ways of dealing with the existential challenges of more ordinary lives - if this works in a KZ, it'll work anywhere!This was par for the course in the age of existentialism, where MAD meant even getting up in the morning could be construed as a heroic reinvention of man. (This was the same time that Eliade's conception of religion as a "thirst for being" experienced its success.) But there's still something grossly wrong about claiming to learn from the Holocaust this way, like using a funerary urn as a doorstop.
You can see the story of the book's growing cultural influence in the different cover I found and post here - 1960s, the original, 1980s, and two revealingly different contemporary ones. (I've not had a chance to look at the new preface and the essay on "Tragic Optimism" added to the third edition. But you'll notice that on the cover below it's all sweetness and light, except for the black lettering of his name.) The new German edition, now with a title from a song composed in Buchenwald, ...trotzdem Ja zum Leben sagen, apparently ends not with a digest of logotherapy but with a piece of theater where Socrates, Kant and Spinoza find themselves in a concentration camp and are unable to help the inmates find meaning, something each must do for himself. To Germans, at least, a KZ is just a KZ.
In any case, I was rereading Man's Search for Meaning, now as part of the culture of a business school class "designed to help you gain greater success in both your professional and your personal life." Read in this context it gave me chills, no longer because of the misuse of the experiences of the victims of the Shoah, but because of the lives these students must lead or expect to lead, an univers concentrationnaire of
corporate capitalism? Read these passages with that readership in mind:It is easy for the outsider to get the wrong conception of camp life, a conception mingled with sentiment and pity. Little does he know the hard fight for existence which raged among the prisoners. This was an unrelenting struggle for daily bread and for life itself, for one’s own sake or for that of a good friend. ¶ Let us take the case of a transport which was officially announced to transfer a certain number of prisoners to another camp; but it was a fairly safe guess that its final destination would be the gas chambers. A selection of sick or feeble prisoners incapable of work would be sent to one of the big central camps which were fitted with gas chambers and crematoriums. The selection process was the signal for a free fight among all the prisoners, or of group against group. All that mattered was that one’s own name and that of one’s friend were crossed off the list of victims, though everyone knew that for each man saved another victim had to be found. (2)
I mentioned earlier how everything that was not connected with the immediate task of keeping oneself and one’s closest friends alive lost its value. Everything was sacrificed to this end. A man’s character became involved at the point that he was caught in a mental turmoil which threatened all the values he held and threw them into doubt. Under the influence of a world which no longer recognized the value of human life and human dignity, which had robbed man of his will and had made him an object to be exterminated (having planned, however, to make full use of him first—to the last ounce of his physical resources)—under this influence the personal ego finally suffered a loss of values. (49)
[in a talk to fellow camp inmates] we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking abut the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—daily and hourly. … When a man finds that it is his destiny to suffer,
he will have to accept his suffering as his task; his single and unique task. He will have to acknowledge the fact that even in suffering he is unique and alone in the universe. No one can relieve him of his suffering or suffer in his place. His unique opportunity lies in the way in which he bears his burden. (77-78)Capitalism isn't a concentration camp - obscene thought - but can it be that it makes those at its top feel they are somehow in one? (Sometimes you need to move beyond indignation that people make some horrifying mistake to trying to understand how they could be making it.) Can this help us understand how the business leadership class could have got us into the present economic crisis?
