Living a Purposeful Life. Kalman J. Kaplan

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СКАЧАТЬ life and death is not always ours. As Immanuel Kant said, we are awoken from our “dogmatic slumber.” The choice of life and death is not ultimately ours, as much as we may try to take it into our own hands. In whose hands is it then? The Greek moira (fate)? Luck? Destiny? Or is our life and death in God’s hands, expressed through scientific and medical knowledge. These are weighty questions which suddenly have become immediate. As we will illustrate in chapter 4, Zeno the Stoic overinterprets, indeed catastrophizes, a minor mishap, that is, stubbing or perhaps wrenching his toe, as a sign from the gods that he should depart. The biblical Job has no need for such a destructive search for meaning. He has a purpose. To live his life simply. And to do what he can to live his life purposively in the face of great upheaval that has befallen him.

      This is what we are all facing now that we are confronted with a calamity. Prior to this, we as a society have been behaving like Zeno, exaggerating slights, catastrophizing people’s utterances, and generally behaving like overindulged, shall we say spoiled, brats. We see now that the question of life and death is always what it has been, ultimately not in human control in any simple way. Our choice is how to respond to these assaults. Will we, like Zeno, be incapable of facing adversity, even minor inconveniences; or we will, like Job, fight the plague that has fallen on us with all our strength and all our might?

      I pray (yes, pray) and hope that by the time this book comes into print, this assault on our lives will have lifted, and that we will have behaved like the biblical Job rather than like Zeno the Stoic. And that we will learn from this.

      Acknowledgments

      The author would like to acknowledge his indebtedness to Matthew B. Schwartz, Michael Shapiro, and Paul Cantz for their many profound insights and their historical acumen, and to Daniel Algom, David Goldberg, Isabelle Proton, and Michael Zimmerman for giving me the opportunity to bounce ideas off of them.

      And of course to my colleagues, Shlomo Shoham of the Buchmann School of Law and Amiram Raviv of the Psychology Department, both of Tel Aviv University, and Anand Kumar and Martin Harrow of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Illinois College of Medicine, for providing me an academic home over the past fifteen years and for my illuminating conversations with them.

      Thank you.

      Introduction

Three of the most influential books over the last century have focused on meaning, the search for it or the lack of it. The 1942 book The Stranger, by the French existentialist Albert Camus, stresses the essential meaninglessness of life because of the inevitability of death. The protagonist, Meursault, is psychologically detached from the world around him. Seemingly significant events for most people, such as his mother’s death or an upcoming marriage, have no meaning for him. Because Meursault seems unable to grieve, he is seen as an outsider, a threat, even a monster. At his subsequent trial for a senseless murder he has committed, the fact that he had no reaction to his mother’s death seems to tarnish his image even more than his taking of a life.1

In Camus’s second book, The Myth of Sisyphus, in this same year, he writes about the Greek character Sisyphus, who was assigned the task of pushing a rock up a mountain. Upon reaching the top, the rock would roll down again, leaving Sisyphus to start over. Camus sees Sisyphus as the absurd hero who is condemned to a meaningless task, the central concern of The Myth of Sisyphus.2

      Camus claims that there is a fundamental conflict between what we want from the universe (whether it be meaning, order, or reason) and what we find in the universe (formless chaos). We will never find in life itself the meaning that we want to find. Either we will discover that meaning through a leap of faith or we will conclude that life is meaningless. Camus asks if coming to the conclusion that life is meaningless necessarily leads one to commit suicide. If life has no meaning, does that mean life is not worth living? If that were the case, are all faced with a choice of making a leap of faith or killing ourselves? Camus suggests a third possibility: that we can accept and live in a world devoid of meaning, hardly an attractive option. It should be pointed out that Camus wrote both of these books from Nazi-occupied France during World War II. This was a very pessimistic period in France as Germany had invaded in May of 1940.

Man’s Search for Meaning was published somewhat later, in 1959, by Viktor Frankl, who writes that he developed his logotherapy out of his experiences in Nazi concentration camps in Nazi-occupied Poland. Frankl argues that man’s search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life and not a secondary rationalization of instinctual drives. Frankl on the surface seems less philosophically pessimistic than Camus. But as the title of his book clearly states, meaning is something that must be searched for. It is not intrinsic in one’s personality.3

However, is this really true? Or does it represent an attempt by a therapist to impose a meaning structure on an individual? This is a criticism levied at logotherapy in 1960 by no less than Rollo May, one of the founders of existential psychology.4 In May’s view, Frankl applied (perhaps even imposed) a specific meaning structure on a patient when he/she did not have a particular goal. May thus feels despite its advantages, Frankl’s logotherapy “hovers close to authoritarianism.”

Suicide is rampant in today’s world, and many people report feeling that their lives are without purpose. Yet a search for meaning can actually be quite destructive. Consider the murders committed by Charles Manson’s Helter Skelter gang as the tumultuous 1960s were coming to an end. Manson often spoke to the members of his “family” about “Helter Skelter” in the months leading up to the murders of Sharon Tate and Leno and Rosemary LaBianca in August 1969. “Helter Skelter” referred to an apocalyptic war arising from racial tensions between blacks and whites and referred specifically to songs in an album by the Beatles entitled The White Album, and to the book of Revelation in the Christian New Testament. Manson and his followers were convicted of the murders on the basis of the theory by the prosecution that they were part of a plan to trigger the Helter Skelter scenario.5 Yet, were they not searching for meaning?

In direct contrast to these books is a more recent very popular work, The Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren, published in 2002. Warren is pastor of a megachurch in sunny Southern California, a very different place than the gray Nazi-occupied Europe, and indeed the death camps themselves in Frankl’s case. What is important for Warren is not searching for meaning but living one’s life purposively.6 A similar stance is taken by Kay Warren in her very positive 2012 book, Choose Joy, Because Happiness Is Not Enough.7 While both books are written in a specific christological framework, their thoughts express a more general biblical view of life. Could the fact that the Warrens are writing in sunny California rather than a grey, cloudy European context explain the difference in their views. Yet, this difference in locale alone cannot explain this difference; after all, the previously discussed horrific murders committed by the Manson gang occurred in sunny Southern California. It is thus possible to be destructively obsessed with a search for meaning—even in “sunny Southern California.”

      So what is the difference? What is the difference between searching for meaning and living purposely, and where does this difference come from? Perhaps it lies in the observations of the French writer Alexis de Tocqueville in his classic work Democracy in America. He puts it this way with regard to how his experience in America altered his view of religion.

In France I had always seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom pursuing courses diametrically opposed to each other; but in America I found that they were intimately united, and they reigned in common over the same country.8

      While Camus’ and Frankl’s thought do not seem to be emerging from a biblical worldview, the Warrens’ view does, and it is grounded firmly in biblical thought. Three separate biblical verses record the Israelites’ acceptance of the obligations that the Hebrew Scriptures (Torah) impose on them.

When Moses first ascends Mount Sinai, God commands him to tell the people that if they accept the covenant, God will make them a “kingdom СКАЧАТЬ