Is there a will to meaning?

How would you answer this question?

What is the meaning of life? Usually, this is the sort of question that is dismissed out of hand by serious academics as, well, meaningless. It is certainly not something you want to ask any modern professional philosopher, if you do not want to be laughed at or looked at with a mixture of disdain and horror. And yet, quite obviously, this is indeed a fundamental question that all thinking human beings probably ask themselves, at one point or another, during their existence. I will provide two complementary answers later on, but for now let me tackle the phrase will to meaning. It was made famous by Viktor Frankl, a neurologist and psychiatrist who is associated with the so-called third Viennese school of psychotherapy. Briefly, Freud’s approach (first school) was focused on the will to pleasure, Adler (initially a member of Freud’s circle, and then the founder of the second school) articulated a Nietzschean take, based on the will to power, while Frankl built on Kierkegaard’s notion of will to meaning.

Frankl’s book, The Will to Meaning: Foundations and Applications of Logotherapy, established logotherapy as one of the three major schools of modern cognitive-based therapy (the other two, which are now far more practiced than Frankl’s version, are rational emotive behavior therapy, established by Albert Ellis, and the growing family of cognitive behavioral therapies, begun by people like Aaron Beck). The idea is that the most fundamental drive in human endeavors is neither pleasure (Freud) nor power (Adler) but rather the search for meaning. Even a life of utmost pleasure, or of unlimited power, is not worth it if the person who lives it does not find it meaningful.

I think Frankl got it right, by and large. Even though, very clearly, human beings are inordinately fond also of both pleasure and power, it does seem like our ability to reflect on things, coupled with our conscious awareness of our own mortality, generate a powerful drive to seek meaning — to the point of making it up where it clearly does not exist. One place where people often look for meaning is “out there,” meaning in the cosmos at large, often stemming from a god who allegedly created the universe. That is a major (though not the only) reason for the existence and persistence of religions: they provide people both with comfort about death — as many, though not all, of them invent…