Meaning: We are meaning-making machines with agency.

What is the four-fold meaning of meaning? A primer, and an exploration of meaning IN life. Hear a story of Viktor Frankl, the contemporary of Freud and Adler who bucked the trend, and explore meaning through his lens.

What comes up in this episode:

~  Logotherapy ~

~  Objective vs Interpretive Meaning ~

~  Bicycles ~

~  Meaning OF life vs meaning IN life ~

~  Challenge in the Korean BBQ ~

Referenced or mentioned:

~  Irving Yalom ~

~  Marcus Aurelius ~

~  Jean-Paul Sartre  ~

~  William James ~

~  Laura A. King ~

~  Joshua A. Hicks ~

~  Samwise Gamgee’s thoughts on potatoes ~

Dope quotes in this episode: 
~  Irving Yalom: advice on finding meaning in life is “simply to live fully, to retain one's astonishment at the miracle of life, to plunge oneself into the natural rhythm of life, to search for pleasure at the deepest possible sense.” 

~  Marcus Aurelius: "The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way."

~  Jean-Paul Sartre: “Life has no meaning, life is an opportunity to create meaning.” 

~  Viktor Frankl:  “What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal.”  

~  William James: “The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes.” 

Credits / Links:

~  So, You’re A Philosopher’s homepage: ponderpus.com  ~

~  The Science of Meaning in Life ~

~  Text or leave a voicemail for Chris : 469.626.7355 ~

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

So you're a philosopher?

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Hmm. Let's start with a story. A tale about a man who endured hell on earth, who had everything of meaning stripped from him, and discovered insights into human nature that would benefit the world. It's mid-summer 1942, Austria, and Viktor Frankel is 37 years old. Newly married, a man of science and faith, he's traveling from his shift at Rothschild Hospital, a Jewish hospital, where he's been assigned to provide psychiatric care. Victor is also Jewish, and he and his elderly parents and his wife have been living under Nazi occupation in Vienna for four years, watching the slow strip mining of humanity transform the city. He rides a tram on tracks that runs straight through Vienna, and will stop to visit his parents before continuing on to his tilly, where he might finally be able to exhale. He stands in the Jewish section, surrounded by citizens who are a mix of blank stares and furtive glances, the car quiet except for the rhythm of the tracks. Normally this journey would be spent wrestling with yet another day of caring for people, who might be forcibly taken away by the order police. Relocated for labor to help the war effort, it was said. But everyone in this car harbored fears that, perhaps, worse things awaited those taken. On this day, Victor could not keep his mind off the letter tucked safely in the pages of his manuscript. Both nestled in the briefcase he held. The letter from the United States of America. His visa request had been granted. He until he could leave Vienna and live in America, to be free to pursue happiness. He thought of the manuscript, his life's work, nearly complete. Logotherapy, he called it. He truly believed he was on to something important, an alternative to Freud and Adler, a theory that man was driven not by frustrated reactions to unconscious desires, but by a hunger for purpose, significance. He could finish it there, in America. The letter was a magic scroll. If he used it, it could change the destination of these tracks stretching out ahead of him, currently carrying this tram full of Jews towards an uncertain, foreboding future. But it would only work for him and for Tilly, not for anyone else in this tram, and not for his parents. His joy at receiving the letter was infected with worry and duty. He could not decide what to do. He got off at his parents' stop and barely registered the long black banners draping the buildings around him, or the notices posted on apartment doors that he passed as he climbed the stairs in his parents' building. His mother led him in with a smile and sent him to see his father while she saw to the coffee, the watered down ration coffee. His father was beaming over a crude chunk of marble sitting on the table. The National Socialists had burned down the largest synagogue in Vienna, and his father had found this marble in the rubble. There was only one letter on the fragment, a gilded Hebrew letter. T It stands for one of the Ten Commandments, he said. Which one? Victor asked. When he heard the answer, he felt the magic leave the letter in the briefcase he still held. Felt the tracks of his future lock into place. Honor thy father and thy mother, his father had responded. That thy days may be long upon the land. T It's late winter, at the start of 1943, southern Poland, and Viktor Frankel is moments away from disaster. The last year has been one of deprivation and uncertainty, and in this moment, as the train pulls in, the rhythmic clacking of the tracks steadily slowing, Victor swings wildly between worry and gratitude. Pressed on all sides by unwashed, malnourished bodies, at least he has been able to share this harrowing journey from the last camp with Tilly. He feels the manuscript, hidden in the lining of his coat, pressed between them as the clacking stops and the whistles and shouts begin outside. The four of them had started together at Theresenstadt, but his mother had been shipped east, and his father had died in that camp. Now the two things that meant the most to him and all the world were held in his embrace, providing comfort that fought with the fear of their destination. The names spoken of in terrified whispers of what happened to those sent east. Auschwitz. Too soon they are outside the car, and as they are ripped apart, their eyes hold the embrace as long as they can. In the previous camp, chance encounters had stoked hope, and Victor holds on to that memory as he's shoved into a line heading away from his wife. He had been through this before at Theresenstadt, but the first of many differences happens next. The guards demand their clothing. He watches those ahead of him stripped naked and picked through a pile of ratty uniforms to dress. As he tosses his clothing onto the pile growing on a wagon, he asks a guard if they'll get them back when the war is over, and is answered with a shove toward the uniforms on the ground. As he dresses, he watches the wagon trundle toward the smokestacks. He feels hollow. He knows the manuscript, hidden from the guards for over a year, won't survive what comes next. He only hopes Tilly and he can. It's early summer, 1945, Vienna, Austria, and Viktor Frankel is a free man. Inside a modest apartment, there's a basket of food on the kitchen counter. In one corner of the main room are a pair of sitting chairs and a coffee table, a lamp. There's also a table and chair across from the entry, positioned to catch the light from the wide windows, through which can be heard street sounds, cheerful voices, the faint rhythmic clacking of a tram passing by on its tracks. A typewriter is on the table, along with a tray of paper. A key turns in the lock, and the door opens to reveal a round-faced man sporting heavy black glasses and a beaming expression. This is Bruno Pitterman, who in 1957 will become Vice Chancellor of Austria. But today he is simply Victor's friend and benefactor. He steps aside, and a scarily thin, winded Victor crosses the threshold holding his hat, a large trunk in the hallway behind. His recovery is coming along. In the months since liberation he's carefully added weight, but the recovery of his spirit is harder to see. He suffered greatly when he learned that his mother, his brother, and his Tilly had not survived. Bruno and other friends have rallied around Victor, showing him that he is not alone, finding him help, a job, and now this apartment. Victor tears his eyes from the typewriter across the room and takes in the apartment. And modest though it is, it feels palatial to one who has spent three years in the camps. Luxurious. He takes in a breath, takes off his coat, and hangs this in his hat on the rack by the door. He lets out the breath. Bruno holds out the keys, which Victor accepts, then embraces his friend tightly. Bruno looks pleased if a touch uncomfortable. He was spared the camps after all. Well, Victor, he says, you have a new start. What will you do with it? Victor's eyes go directly to the typewriter. I will write, he says, as he looks back to his friend. It's important that I continue my work. This is how I imagine those pivotal moments in the life of Victor Frankl. His book, Man's Search for Meaning, is the evolution of the manuscript he started in 1940, the same one he smuggled into the concentration camps, originally titled The Doctor and the Soul. As a Viennese psychoanalyst, he knew Sigmund Freud, and he knew Alfred Adler, and he too wanted to discover what drove humanity, what fueled our motivations, our dreams, what mysteries of the mind moved us. But unlike Freud's focus on desire, or Adler's on power, Frankel focused on purpose and significance. He called this approach logotherapy, and when he was sent to the camps, he became the most powerful test subject in the most intense possible conditions. At first he didn't want to write about his time in the camps, didn't want to sensationalize this experience to sell a book, but his friends encouraged him, and soon he saw the wisdom of including enough of the experiences to provide a clarifying look at a world designed to dehumanize, to torture, to kill hope, and how in even such a world humanity's will to meaning was untouchable. Victor discovered something that supported his theories and saw evidence not only in himself but in many, many others over and over again. Even if a person has everything taken from them possessions, status, dignity, loved ones, one thing remains: the freedom to choose how to respond. Victor was an eminent psychoanalyst, an author, a Holocaust survivor, and every inch of him a philosopher. And so are you.

SPEAKER_01 9:38

So you're a philosopher?

SPEAKER_02 9:42

Let me think.

SPEAKER_00 9:46

My name is Chris, and I believe you have a philosopher inside you. They may be hiding or have a small voice, but they are there. And I'd like to introduce you. What do you mean when you say meaning? When you encounter a new word and you ask, what does this mean? When you miss your train and later find out that train was in an accident, you wonder if that means something. When you're looking at 30 years in the world of work and you look around and say, what is the point of all this? When you look heavenward and ask, what does it mean when a natural disaster wipes out the guilty and the innocent alike? Are you asking the same question every time? Yes. And no, which you'll find I say a lot on this podcast. There is differentiation in the different kinds of meaning, and I think they're all important to consider. Knowing what kind of meaning you're chasing can help you get there. At the top level, the word meaning all points in the same direction. An attempt to interpret what a thing is in relation to everything else. What is its significance? What is its impact? How might it affect me? And this thing could be a bicycle, or it could be the way a song makes you cry. All of these things have meaning, and most of them have at least some element of subjectivity to them. In other words, meaning is, much of the time, personal. It is also biologically and sociologically wired into your control panel. You can't help but search for meaning, and humanity's obsession with the word has led us to some very interesting places. When I started researching this, I wanted to break it down in order to help me understand the different ways the word is used. I think this is needed in order to ensure clarity when discussing it. So here's the fourfold meaning of meaning. You have objective meaning, interpretive meaning, the meaning of life, and the meaning in life. In this episode, we'll touch on all four, but really zero in on that last one, the meaning in life. The first fold is objective. Objective meaning is the bicycle. When I say bicycle, you know what I mean, as long as you understand the language. And a bicycle remains a bicycle even if you switch languages. If my Italian friend says una bicicleta, and I say, what's that mean? And he says a bicycle, my brain goes, got it, bicicleta means bicycle. It's a neat trick language. Note, however, that it's still an invented meaning. Someone along the way cobbled together the world's first bike and said, That, my friends, is a bicycle. And there you go. Objective meaning in action. The second fold is interpretive meaning. Here's where things get a little dicey. This is when a thing means something to you, specifically, and it might not mean the same thing to someone else. For a lot of years there was a tandem bicycle in the backyard of my childhood home, and that meant a lot to me. When I would see it parked against the fence with the weeds growing through the spokes, I remembered a lot of wobbly, speedy adventures. A lot of laughter. To the neighbors, it meant that we were too lazy to park it in a garage, which is fair. Both things could be true. The third fold is the dreaded meaning of life. This shifts gears in a pretty big way. Moving from smaller things into the biggest of things. Why is well that's the question, isn't it? Why is? Welcome to the question that's ignited many an existential crisis. It's also kicked off a lot of existential inquiry that's led to a lot of fascinating and humanity-impacting results. There are many systems out there that seek to answer this question, and many claim to have answered it in full. In some ways, these systems operate as kind of an objective truth to the adherent of the system. If your system has explicit explanations for why reality exists, why humans are here, and what is the point of it all, then you can have some existential comfort. Not only in the fact that there are answers to hand, but also that there are so many other people pointing and nodding at the same thing. We do like to belong. The fourth fold is an important distinction, the meaning in life. Where the third fold asks, why does humanity exist? The search for meaning in life asks, is there something I'm supposed to be doing with this life? There are important overlaps in these two folds, but when you start to ask big questions, it's worthwhile to understand what exactly you're asking. If you take the classic midlife crisis, it might kick off thanks to the third fold. Holy shit, I'm mortal. Time is running out. But it will quickly move up to the fourth fold. What am I doing with my life? What's the point of all of this? So that's our fourfold meaning of meaning. The first two, objective and interpretive, are more mechanical than aspirational, in the way that they speak to the way that we deal with more singular things we encounter in life. The latter two are more foundational to quality of life. They're big drivers and big questions that can destabilize a life, or set one on course, or both. And, of course, they're all rooted in biology. If you look at the way our brains are wired for narrative story, for analysis of stimulus, and specifically how that stimulus relates to or impacts us, what does it mean if the cougar is slowly creeping up on me? What does it mean if my tribe stops laughing at my jokes and won't look me in the eye? Probably nothing good. We move through our day operating as kind of meaning-making machines on an unconscious level. We feel good and life becomes simpler when we can lock something down. This root vegetable is a potato, and potatoes are safe to eat. Later, if you're hungry and you come across potatoes, you know what you can do with them. You can boil them, you can mash them, you can stick them in a stew. Apologies. So objective meaning works to make sense of the world. And you can process interpretive meaning on the fly, often unconsciously. Oh, that woman across the bar held eye contact and then moved her hair over her ear when she looked away. You find yourself smiling and considering talking to her before you remember your crippling social anxiety and cry in your beer. But those same mechanisms that operate to try to keep you safe can spin upward into grander questions about meaning. Yes, you need to know how to feel safe and move effectively through interacting with your environment and your tribe, but what about society at large? Is your city a safe place for you? Your country? Humanity? As a human, you're naturally going to extrapolate questions outward in an attempt to understand the world and your place in it. Something philosophy is precisely designed to help you with. There are philosophical takes on these various folds of meaning. Lots of overlap between them, but some are fairly focused. Objective meaning has the philosophy of language, where words and symbols and the way they share and communicate meaning are studied. This is all about definition and structure. If you've ever had someone dismiss your point and claim you're arguing semantics, take a bow. You're engaging in the philosophy of language. For the second fold, interpretive meaning, you have phenomenology. A word which, when I can get it to come out right, makes my mouth feel like it's dancing on beat. Phenomenology is examining life from a first-person perspective, what things mean to the individual who is experiencing the things. On the third fold, meaning of life, you have classic metaphysics, the ultimate study of why is. Metaphysics is cosmic territory, which can be terrifying or exhilarating. Or both. Philosophy of religion weighs in heavily here as well, as most, if not all, religions have answers to this question. And finally, fold 4, meaning in life. Broadly, you have existentialism. Earlier, when I mentioned existential crisis, that's a crisis having to do with existence. Not in a natural philosophy or metaphysics kind of way, but in a personal existence kind of way. It's studying how humans live meaningfully, especially when you may not have an answer to that third fold. This is meaning cultivated, chosen. Lots of questions of why brought down to the human level. Side note, both nihilism and absurdism are more or less subcategories of existentialism, and both more or less state that life has no ultimate purpose or objective meaning, but they approach that revelation differently. Future shows. I was at a Korean barbecue place in Dallas once with five strangers, tucking into delicious meats and discussing the nature of intelligence. You know, as one does. It was a social club where gatherings centered around a central theme for discussion. Very on brand for me. This particular group happened to be made up of three women and three men, the youngest of whom was in his late twenties, I would guess. I remember a number of things about that evening, but the strongest memory was how he got so upset when I offered a quote when someone had brought up the subject of the meaning of life. The quote I used is attributed to different people, but most likely comes from Jean-Paul Sartre. And it goes like this. Life has no meaning. Life is an opportunity to create meaning. Deep, right? Clever, pithy, has the ring of truth to it. But that fellow did not like it. To be fair, that is a very strong declaration. This guy considered himself an intellectual and was very vocal about his strong Catholic upbringing, so there were a few clues about why he was upset by the idea. But I think one reason might be that the quote is addressing two folds at once. And this is well before I began studying this topic. The question asked was a thirdfold question, and I threw out a mixed response. Which is fine, but if the recipient doesn't see the distinction, it can obfuscate. Life has no meaning. That's clearly fold three, meaning of life. And it has a very strong whiff of nihilism, which can be a turnoff. Life is an opportunity to create meaning. That's fold four, meaning in life. And that's where I'd like to focus for the rest of the show. Fold three is a great question, but ultimately you're either going to figure out an answer that pleases you or accept what one system or another tells you the answer is, and there you go. In fact, there are modern philosophers who don't even bother with metaphysics anymore, figuring the point is moot. But meaning in life, this is much more directly impacting to your quality of life, the choices you make. It's about your experience across the span of your life and in your day-to-day living. As we explore the fourth fold, I'm going to be pulling from a variety of sources, but one very rich one I want to highlight. This is the work of Laura A. King, a professor of psychology at the University of Missouri, and Joshua A. Hicks, a professor at Texas AM. They collaborated on a paper called The Science of Meaning in Life, which is linked in the show notes and is a very, very interesting read. If I sound like an expert as I dig into this, just know I'm standing on their shoulders. First, the title of the article is awesome. It told me two things I didn't know when I started out. That meaning in life is a category of its own, which of course makes sense if you take two seconds to think about it. And next is that it it's a field of research, the science of. Tripartite is just a fancy word that means consisting of three parts, which are coherence, purpose, and significance. Coherence is the feeling that things make sense. When you have a general idea of How people, objects, and other things are all connected, then your life makes sense. You get it. Having a strong sense of coherence feels good, feels stable. If you can look across the span of your life and say that things make sense, how it all shakes out, then you have a strong sense of comprehension of life. Coherence. Purpose is, for most people, what they mean when they say, What is my meaning in life? Purpose centralizes meaning and incorporates goals, objectives, and motivation. If your purpose in life is to teach, then that idea will guide your life choices and how you interpret things. If your purpose in life is to acquire the most toys, then same. Significance can also be thought of as existential mattering. What you mean to existence. What value do you specifically have? What do you feel about how your life counts? When it comes to the study of meaning in life, this tripartite is how scientists are able to categorize their studies in order to see how these different elements all impact the total sense of meaning to individuals. Uh yeah, Eddie here. I'm the studio editor, and sorry to interrupt, but Chris does like to go on with his terms and concepts and such. I thought you could use a breather. Look, you don't need to memorize all this stuff. The four folds and the tripartite and the fourth fold, blah blah blah. The point is, it's valuable to understand. There's these different ways to think about meaning. Especially when you're in search mode or where you're talking about meaning with someone else. It's always healthy to define your terms. Philosophy of language. Alright, Chris, back to you. But maybe cool it with a vocabulist and get to those choice morsels you were talking about. Morsel the first is something called positive effect. I know, I know, it's a new term, but stick with me. It's just the way psychologists refer to your meta-mood. Someone who generally takes life in with feelings of excitement, joy, happiness, is experiencing life with a positive effect. Studies have shown some evidence that one indicator of if a person feels like their life is meaningful is daily mood. And what's really cool about this, the fact that positive effect has a big influence on the sense of significance, purpose, and coherence, is that it seems to be universally true. Touching back to Frankel, in his psychoanalytic practice, he spoke to many people who'd been dealt really shitty hands by life. People who had lost a limb or were living with a terminal illness, that sort of thing. Not to mention his own experience of living with death and fear every day for three years in four different concentration camps. He found, time after time, that people still find that if their daily mood is generally good, they generally have a sense that there is meaning in their life. And the Science of Meaning in Life paper reports on studies that show the same thing. Then there's William James. You psychology fans out there know him as the father of American psychology. He said this. But let's take a beat here. I don't want this to come across as dismissive. I'm not waving my hand and telling you to pull yourself up by your emotional bootstraps. If you're struggling with depression and life circumstances that keep you in a negative effect, I get it. You're not failing at the meaning game. You're just being human. I've been there many times, and I still cycle through that. We'll do a show dedicated to depression and negative effect, but the takeaway here is this. You can influence meaning in life. And hopefully that light will help in the tunnels of despair. The fact that it's possible. Next morsel. The fact that a search for meaning can lead to a sense of meaning. This is wild, but it actually makes a lot of sense. So their studies showed that people who were engaged with a desire to find meaning in their life often suffered from rumination and neuroticism. Wait, I'm not done, because that isn't very encouraging. They also found that further down the road, those same people expressed a solid sense of meaning in their lives. To me, this has a lovely connotation. The people who are struggling to find meaning eventually do find it. The search feeds the thing it searches for. That appeals to my inner poet. Also, I think they may pull my philosophy podcast license if I don't quote Marcus Aurelius here. The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way. Dope. And here's another dope quote for you. This one from our guide Victor, who said the following What man actually needs is not a tensionless state, but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal. This tells us that the search itself stabilizes, and that attention towards meaning is natural and healthy. Okay, one more morsel. At one point, the writers of the paper start gathering their thoughts, bringing it all together, and making some observations. And the biggest of which is this. By and large, more people express a sense that their life has meaning than you might expect. Because the search for meaning is so high profile, from philosophy itself through pop psychology and pithy media representation and Hallmark movies, it might leave a general impression that meaning is some kind of esoteric prize to be won by only the most enlightened. The old monk on the mountaintop or ivory tower scholar types. But, truth be told, between friendships, community, religious practices, that sort of thing, not to mention positive effect, there are a lot of structures in our world that can provide a scaffolding to meaning. The story that I opened with was pretty heavy, so you might have expected a bit more on logotherapy in this show. I will be doing an episode on that, but the book Man Search for Meaning isn't a deep dive into the practice of logotherapy. It's more of an origin story and a lens. I'm researching more, and I'll circle back. That being said, it is a very enriching read on multiple levels. Meaning is less something to be discovered, and more something created. It isn't an artifact held and waiting for you to be worthy. It's something alive, Protean, and deeply personal. You do find meaning in things, and it can be said you discover meaning. But to me, only in the sense of being present when you make a connection that resonates with you, often in many parts of you. One aspect of meaning is that it can change. What meant something to you at ten years old will probably mean something different to you at twenty. Like so many other things in life, the quest for meaning does not have an ultimate resolution. It's the quest itself that drives us, and the cultivation of that drive is something to be protected and understood and nurtured. When we make connections with something inside of us or outside of us, and our soul recognizes it as meaning, you experience a delicious, awesome reward. Take that jewel, put it in your treasure chest. But when you revisit it and notice that it's now cut green glass and not an emerald, don't fret. Meanings change because you change, and the world changes, and that is the way of things. You'll soon enough uncover more treasures because you are built for meaning. Co-creating meaning is your joy and your privilege. So, suck it, guy from the Korean barbecue place. I leveraged a lot of dope quotes in this episode, so I'm gonna put them all in the show notes. You're welcome. I had a bit of a struggle finding a good one to rap with. Frankel would make the most sense, but instead, I want to quote Irving Yalum. He's an American psychologist and author who deeply studied meaning, and he suggests an approach to experiencing meaning that I find accurate and beautiful. He said the approach is simply to live fully, to retain one's astonishment at the miracle of life, to plunge oneself into the natural rhythm of life, to search for pleasure at the deepest possible sense. The next time you feel a little twinge, and you look at your life, and you look outside your daily rhythms, and you wonder what it's all about, you wonder why you're here. Do me a favor. Say hi to your inner philosopher for me.

SPEAKER_01 30:37

So you're a philosopher? Yes.

SPEAKER_00 30:40

I think very deeply. The bicycle. A bicycle. A bicycle, bicycle, e a bicycle. It's a bicycle, a tandem bicycle. That, my friends, is a bicycle.