Is this for real?
...he moment one inquires about the sense or value of life, one is sick.' But I think that, rather than exhibiting mental illness, someone worrying about the meaning of life is proving his humanness. One need not be a neurotic to be concerned with the quest for a meaning to life, but one does need to be a truly human being. After all, as I have pointed out, the search for meaning is a distinctive characteristic of being human. No other animal has ever cared whether or not there is a meaning to life, not even Konrad Lorenz' grey geese. But man does."(28-9) "It is precisely this will to meaning that remains unfulfilled by today's society--and disregarded by today's psychology. Current motivation theories see man as a being who is either reacting to stimuli or abreacting his impulses. They do not consider that actually, rather than reacting or abreacting, man is responding--responding to questions that life is asking him, and in that way fulfilling the meanings that life is offering."(29) "The message (of the concentration camps)--the legacy--is that survival depended on the direction to a `what for,' or a `whom for.' In a word, existence was dependent on `self-transcendence'.....I thereby understand the primordial anthropological fact that being human is beings always directed, and pointing, to something or someone other than oneself: to a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter, a cause to serve or a person to love. Only to the extent that someone is living out this self-transcendence of human existence, is he truly human or does he become his true self. He becomes so, not by concerning himself with his self's actualization, but by forgetting himself and giving himself, overlooking himself and focusing outward. Consider the eye...When, apart from looking in a mirror, does the eye see anything of itself? An eye with a cataract may see something like a cloud, which is its cataract; an eye with glaucoma may see its glaucoma as a rainbow halo around the lights. A healthy eye sees nothing of itself--it is self-transcendent." (35) "What is called self-actualization is, and must remain, the unintended effect of self-transcendence; it is ruinous and self-defeating to make it the target of intention. And what is true of self-actualization also holds for identity and happiness. It is the very `pursuit of happiness' that obviates happiness. The more we make it a target, the more widely we miss. This is most conspicuous when it comes to sexual happiness, to sexual `pleasure-seeking.' Sexual neuroses are the result. The more a male patient wishes to demonstrate his potency, the more surely he is doomed to failure. The more a female patient wishes to demonstrate to herself that she is capable of orgasm, the more likely she is to wind up with frigidity."(36) "The nihilism of yesterday taught nothingness. Reductionism now is preaching `nothing-but-ness.' Man is said to be nothing but a computer or a `naked ape.' It is perfectly legitimate to use the computer as a model, say, for the functioning of our central nervous system. The analogia entis extends and is valid down to the computer. However, there are also dimensional differences which are disregarded and neglected by reductionism. Consider, for example, the typically reductionist theory of conscience according to which this uniquely human phenomenon is nothing but the result of conditioning processes....The devastating impact of an indoctrination along the lines of reductionism must not be underrated. Here I confine myself to quoting from a study by R.N. Gray and associates on 64 physicians, 11 of them psychiatrists. The study showed that during medical school cynicism as a rule increases while humanitarianism decreases. Only after completion of medical studies is this trend reversed, but unfortunately not in all subjects. Ironically, the author of the paper which reports these results himself defines man as `an adaptive control system' and values as `homeostatic restraints in a stimulus-response process.' According to another reductionist definition, values are nothing but reaction formations and defense mechanisms. Such interpretations are likely to undermine and erode the appreciation of values."(55-57) "One cannot speak of human sex without speaking of love. When speaking of love, however, we should remember that it is a specifically human phenomenon. And we must see to it that it is preserved in its humanness, rather than treated in a reductionistic way. What precisely is reductionism? I would define it as pseudo-scientific procedure that takes human phenomena and either reduces them to or deduces them from subhuman phenomena. Love, for example, would be interpreted as the sublimation of sexual drives and instincts which man shares with the other animals. Such an understanding can only block a true understanding of the human phenomenon. "Love is really one aspect of a more encompassing human phenomenon which I have come to call self-transcendence.(emphasis not in original) Man is not, as the predominant motivation theories would like us to believe, basically concerned with gratifying his needs and satisfying his drives and instincts, and thereby maintaining, or restoring, homeostasis, i.e., the inner equilibrium. Rather, man is--by virtue of the self-transcendent quality of the human reality--basically concerned with reaching out beyond himself, be it toward a meaning to fulfill, or toward another human being lovingly to encounter. "Loving encounter, however, definitely precludes regarding or using another human being as a mere means to an end--as a tool for reducing the tensions created by libidinal, or aggressive, drives and instincts. This would amount to masturbation, and in fact that is how many of our sexually neurotic patients speak of the way they treat their par...