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Salient. Victoria University Student Newspaper. Volume 33 No. 11. 22 July 1970

Interpretation and Meaning

Interpretation and Meaning

One could go on quoting such diametrically opposed conclusions drawn by different scientists from the same body of data. For example, one could hardly expect neurophysiologists to belittle the important of brain mechanisms in mental life, and many of them do indeed hold that mental life is nothing but brain mechanism. And yet Sherrington was an unashamed dualist; he wrote: "That our being should consist of two fundamental elements offers, I suppose, no greater inherent improbability than that it should rest on one only". And the great Canadian brain surgeon. Wilder Penfield, said at an interdisciplinary symposium on "Control of the Mind" at which we both participated "To declare that these two things [brain and mind] are one does not make them so, but it does block the progress of research".

I quote this, not because I am a Cartesian dualist-which I am not-but to emphasise that the neurophysiologist's precise data can be interpreted in diverse ways. In other words, it is not true that the data which science provides must automatically lead to the conclusion that life is meaningless, nothing but Brownian motion imparted by the random drift of cosmic weather. We should rather say that the Zeitgeist has a tendency towards the devaluation of values and the elimination of meaning from the world around us and the world inside us. The result is an existential vacuum.

At this point I would like to quote again Viktor Frankl, founder of what has become known as the Third Viennese School of Psychiatry. He postulates that besides Freud's Pleasure Principle and Adler's Will to Power, there exists a "Will to Meaning" as an equally fundamental human drive:

"It is an inherent tendency in man to reach out for meanings to fulfil and for values to actualise. In contrast to animals, man is not told by his instincts what he must do. And in contrast to man in former times, he is no longer told by his traditions and values what he ought to do . . . Thousands and thousands of young students are exposed to an indoctrination along the lines of a reductionist concept of life which denies the existence of values. The result is a world-wide phenomenon-more and more patients are crowding our clinics with the complaint of an inner emptiness, the sense of a total and ultimate meaninglessness of life."

He calls this type of neurosis "noogenic", as distinct from sexual and other types of neuroses, and he claims that about 20 per cent. of all cases at the Vienna Psychiatry Clinic (of which he is the head) are of noogenic origin. He further claims that this figure is doubled among student patients of Central Furopean origin; and that it soars to 80 per cent. among students in the United States.

I should mention that I know next to nothing about the therapeutic methods of this school—it is called Logotherapy—and that 1 have no means of judging its efficacity. But there exists a considerable literature on the subject, and I brought it up because the philosophy behind it seems to me relevant to our theme. However that may be, the term "existential vacuum", caused by the frustration of the will to meaning, seems to be a fitting description of the world-wide mood of infectious restlessness, particularly among the young and among intellectuals.

It may be of some interest to compare this mood with that of the Pink Decade, the 1930s, when the Western world was convulsed by economic depression, unemployment and hunger marches and the so-called Great Socialist Experiment initiated by the Russian Revolution seemed to be the only hopeful ideal to a great mass of youthful idealists, including the present writer. In The God That Failed, I wrote about that period:

"Devotion to pure Utopia and rebellion against a polluted society are the two poles which provide the tension of all militant creeds. To ask which of the two makes the current flow-attraction by the ideal or repulsion by the social environment—is to ask the old question whether the hen was first, or the egg".

Compare this with the present mood. Today the repellent forces are more powerful than ever, but the attraction of the ideal is missing, since what we thought to be Utopia turned out to be a cynical fraud. The egg is there, but no hen to hatch it. Rebellion is freewheeling in a vacuum.

Another comparison comes to mind-another historic situation, in which the traditional values of a culture were destroyed, without new values taking their place. I mean the fatal impact of the European conquerors on the native civilisations of American Indians and Pacific Islanders. In our case, the shattering impact was not caused by the greed, rapacity and missionary zeal of foreign invaders. The invasion has come from within, in the guise of an ideology which claims to be scientific and is in fact a new version of Nihilism in its denial of values, purpose and meaning. But the results in both cases are comparable: like the natives who were left without traditions and beliefs in a spiritual vacuum, we, too, seem to wander about in a bemused trance.