Guide to
Meaning and Identity
Viktor Frankl survived four concentration camps and came out with a theory of human motivation built on a single observation: meaning is not found, it is made — and the capacity to make it survives almost any external circumstance.
He was not the first to notice this. The Stoics had built the same insight into their practice two thousand years earlier. Marcus Aurelius, governing an empire in a state of near-constant war, was asking the same question Frankl would ask in Auschwitz: what remains in my power when everything external has been stripped away?
Their answers were not identical. But they converged on something important — that identity, properly understood, is not what happens to you. It is the orientation you bring to what happens to you.
What This Pillar Covers
The articles here examine the question of meaning from two directions: the ancient philosophical tradition that treated it as a practical problem, and the twentieth-century clinical tradition that was forced to address it under conditions that could not be argued away.
Neither tradition produces comfortable answers. Both produce useful ones.
The Evening Review
The practice of examining what you made of the day — what you treated as meaningful, what you let slip by unexamined — is the simplest implementation of both traditions.
