Viktor Frankl’s philosophy stands on an important philosophical conviction: we have free will, and that is what makes us different from other species on this planet. It is not a self-evident philosophical position: there is a surprisingly strong materialist and deterministic conception of human beings that vehemently denies free will and regards it as an illusion.
While I disagree with Frankl’s sharp distinction between us and other species in noetic capacity, I appreciate his firm stance on the question of free will, because the philosophical discussion around it is a dance of abstraction rather than something that corresponds to everyday experience. Frankl is true in all of his philosophy to lived experience, and academic argumentation, while important, is secondary to being practical and usable in grappling with life.
So, if you, like me, are frustrated with the theoretical discourse around free will, and simply know intuitively it is a fact of human life, you are right at home with Viktor Frankl, who sees free will as foundational.
But free will for Frankl is not the radical freedom that French existentialism sometimes espouses. Rather, Viktor Frankl notes that our freedom is always limited in some way: by our life situation, by our current noetic capacity, by fate. But his point is that, even in the most harrowing circumstances, we still retain some free will. There is always some wiggle room.
If nothing else, we can choose our attitude towards unavoidable fate. In Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl writes: “We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread”. They used their free will to turn towards true values of goodness and love in a time where their life situation was shrunk to something deeply inhuman. And so they retained their humanity.
When we turn towards true values — goodness, beauty, truth and love — we self-transcend, to use Frankl’s language. We overcome our limitations and selfishness and touch the world of values. Values are, in my worldview, transpersonal, perfect and eternal, but mortal beings are flawed and imperfect. But we get glimpses of the world of values by turning towards it, however little. And to be fair, most of self-transcendence is mundane everyday life: small decisions we do in daily lives keeping true values in mind when we make choices, large and small.
But are these choices — small as they often are — even real? If we were predetermined creatures, our conscious choices wouldn’t matter much: even the fact that we thought about having made a choice would be just an illusion, a comforting rationalisation after the fact. We could only ever have made that one choice.
This kind of conviction is surprisingly common. I encountered this view in a deep discussion with a highly intelligent friend: he insisted that once brain structures and processes are known well enough, everything that happens in our experience can be explained away by physical processes, to the point where, eventually, even all our future experiences and actions can be predicted.
I could not disagree more. I know through intuition and experience that this is simply not true. And intuition is nothing to shrug at. Intuition, as a noetic capacity, deserves more attention than it receives in everyday thinking, even though it is an important feature of our noetic consciousness. Finnish philosopher and psychologist Lauri Rauhala — a kindred spirit to Frankl — saw intuition as “one realiser of high-level noeticity, and its functioning presupposes a high degree of noetic development” in Tajunnan itsepuolustus (The Self-defence of Consciousness).
And experience is not trivial either: in the end, it is all we have, and the only truth we can truly share with others. That which we experience rings true to us, and phenomenology — which Frankl and Rauhala both claim to be doing — attempts to stay true to lived experience. Experience is deeper than you might think. Viktor Frankl writes in Man’s Search for Meaning:
“What is demanded of man is not, as some existential philosophers teach, to endure the meaninglessness of life, but rather to bear his incapacity to grasp its unconditional meaningfulness in rational terms. Logos is deeper than logic.”
This is the proper context for understanding our free will. It is what makes it possible to discern meaning even in the undecipherable: the meaning of life itself. Were we predetermined creatures, would we really sit and grapple with the meaning of life?
Of course, the question of the meaning of life transcends us, but it is human to sit with it, and we sit with it because we have free will. We know deep inside that our choices truly matter for our own lives and the lives of others — and even future generations. And that is why Frankl asks us to live mindfully: mindful of the consequences of our choices.
In Man’s Search for Meaning, he also notes that all humans have the capacity to be saints or swine. Which we end up being is not a function of fate, but a matter of choice. It is a result of exercising our free will.
You can read more about freedom of will, Viktor Frankl and Lauri Rauhala in my book A Good Life Despite Everything, available in online bookstores.
Arctic Search for Meaning 