Viktor Frankl

Austrian psychiatrist invoked in Faith is Not Blind as a witness to the twentieth-century collapse of inherited meaning. The Hafens quote Frankl, writing from his years in a Nazi concentration camp, that “the traditions which buttressed [man’s] behavior are now rapidly diminishing. No instinct tells him what he has to do, and no tradition tells him what he ought to do” — soon he will not even know “what he wishes to do,” and will instead be governed by “what other people wish him to do.” In the book’s “life / my life” frame, Frankl marks the moment the outer “life” box dissolves alongside Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and relativism. The Hafens credit Frankl with the constructive response — that the modern vacuum of meaning is an opportunity for each person to define a meaningful life — while arguing it is “difficult, perhaps impossible, to infer general cosmic meaning from purely personal preferences,” the gap the Restoration’s “big box” is meant to fill.

Context: Viktor Frankl (1905–1997) was an Austrian neurologist, psychiatrist, and Holocaust survivor, founder of logotherapy and author of Man’s Search for Meaning, which argues that the primary human drive is the search for meaning.

Where this appears

• Faith is Not Blind — quoted on the collapse of tradition-given meaning and the modern “vacuum of meaning”