Reclaiming Spirituality, Religion, and Meaning: A Perspective from Logotherapy.

People today, especially those of a more scientific bent, often pull back or grow suspicious the moment they hear the word spirituality. This does not happen without good reason. There is a widespread assumption that you have to belong to some group or follow an organisation or a leader, and there is no shortage of supposed spiritual guides who abuse or have abused their position betraying the very message they claim to promote.

At the same time, there is often also a dogmatic scepticism, dressed up as pseudo-scientific caution, which rejects everything spiritual a priori on the grounds that such beliefs are merely unnecessary explanations held by people who simply do not know any science. This position is a curious one, given that all the great thinkers in the history of the West, the founders of what we now call science, from Plato to Einstein by way of Newton, Kant, Descartes, Leibniz, Schrödinger and Heisenberg (just to name a few) believed that reality has some sort of spiritual dimension.

From the standpoint of a meaningful life, denying the spiritual dimension can carry serious consequences. Not always, and not for everyone, but far more often than we tend to think. A great many psychological problems diagnosed from a purely physical or psychological perspective remain unresolved, because their cause might be understood from a spiritual point of view. Making sense of the experience of meaning, that is, the experience of a deep connection with life and with what one does, requires a certain logic, a set of concepts, that is spiritual, metaphysical or religious in character, which are ignored by most psychological approaches.

Spirituality understood from the standpoint of a life with meaning is not a matter of subscribing dogmatically to one belief system or another. It simply means opening ourselves to a dimension within us, one that finds many different forms of expression in different people, where values lie, and that we can connect with in order to find meaning.

Viktor Frankl’s logotherapy, and the existential analysis Alfried Längle developed out of it, allow us to recover, from a more secular and even scientific perspective, this part of ourselves we tend to give up for lost. And this dimension we dismiss out of hand, often with good reason, is profoundly our own. Perhaps the most our own, the most intimately ours, and when we recover it the existential vacuum lifts and meaning returns.

Spirituality Is Not Necessarily What We Take It to Be

When Frankl speaks of the spiritual dimension of the human being, he speaks of religion as well, but he uses the word in a sense that depends on no belief whatsoever. The spiritual, for him, is the distinctly human dimension, the one we share with no animal, and it consists in freedom, in the capacity to orient oneself towards values and to take responsibility for them. He called it the spiritual, noetic, or religious, in order to mark it off clearly from the psychological and the physical. And he held that it belongs to every human being simply by virtue of being human.

On this reading, someone who does not consider themselves religious or spiritual has, or can perfectly well have, a spiritual life as full as any believer’s (sometimes fuller). Their spirituality shows itself every time they make a free decision rather than letting themselves be carried along, every time they answer for something that matters to them and take responsibility for it, every time they turn towards something beyond themselves that they hold to be valuable. Frankl called this capacity to step outside oneself self-transcendence, and he regarded it as the essence of human existence. To exist, for a human being, is already to be turned towards something beyond oneself in a free manner.

This dimension also has roots we do not always see. Against Freud, who recognised only an unconscious made up of repressed psychosomatic drives, Frankl argued that there is a spiritual unconscious as well. A deep stratum in which a person connects with values without even being aware of it. In this dimension we are unconsciously connected with values in the form of what we like, what matters to us, what presents itself as a genuine ought.

What is striking about this dimension is that the connections to value are already made, and reason and logic only arrive afterwards to try to explain them. It falls to the self, that is, to the part of us that thinks and chooses what to do, to connect with that dimension and to take up, or fail to take up, the connections that have formed there.

Meaning and the Values That Already Inhabit Us

Meaning, that is, the subjective experience of connecting with a value, is not invented but found. It is not something the subject projects onto a neutral reality, but something discovered within oneself and in the concrete situation one happens to be living. And that discovery is not, in the first place, a rational calculation. The connection with values occurs before we think them. They are felt as valuable before we can justify why they are.

The connection with values begins early. Frankl holds that from childhood onwards we are already in touch with values that exceed us. We are in touch with whatever appears to us as worthy of love, of care, of devotion, long before we have any concepts to name it. That original connection with what is valuable is not a belief we acquire, it is an unconscious bond that constitutes us and that we gradually come to recognise.

The difficulty is that contemporary life, with its logic of high-performance and its demand that everything justify itself by its usefulness, buries this most intimate dimension precisely because it fails to meet those criteria. It is denied and repressed, yet those connections go on operating.

Frankl observed that this primary relation to what transcends us can be repressed like any other deep dimension of the person. When it resurfaces, it often does so with an almost childlike simplicity, not because it is primitive but because it is bound up with the experience accumulated in those early years when the connection was alive.

Religion as Religare, Binding Back Together What Had Come Loose

Here the word religion recovers its original sense. At its root, the word religion comes from religare, to bind again, to tie back together. For Frankl, therefore, the term does not denote a belief system or membership of an institution, but the act of reconnecting with what transcends us and with what we were already bound to from the very beginning. To reconnect in this way is to tie a thread that had come loose, to restore a bond with the values of transcendence that constituted us before we were in any position to choose them.

Frankl understood religion in precisely this way, in its broadest sense. He went so far as to define it, with Einstein, as the search for ultimate meaning, and faith as trust in that meaning. Understood in these terms, religion stands in no opposition to the secular and demands no assent to any dogma. It is the movement by which a person comes back into relation with what exceeds them and gives them meaning. It may take the shape of inherited traditions, of prayers, of rites, of the example set by the historical figures who came before us, all of which Frankl saw as moulds that culture offers to be filled with lived religiousness. But the heart of it lies not in the mould. It lies in the reconnecting itself, in coming back into contact with our spiritual dimension and the values it holds. In trusting that meaning is to be found there.

That trust cannot be forced. Faith, hope and love belong to the class of things that cannot be commanded or produced at will. No one can decide to believe by an act of will, just as no one can force themselves to love. Reconnecting, if it happens at all, happens as a free and spontaneous act, never as something imposed. This is why logotherapy pushes no one towards faith and does not treat it as a goal. It recognises that the bond is there, alive in some and dormant in others, and it leaves each person to decide whether to tie that thread again.

Längle’s Fourth Motivation and the Conditions for Reconnecting

If the question is how that reconnection with what is valuable comes about, Längle’s Existential Analysis offers a precise way of thinking it through. Längle does not describe the connection with the transcendent as a leap, nor as a certainty one either has or lacks. He thinks it through its conditions of possibility, that is, through what has to be in place in a person for the connection with the dimension where values reside to occur at all. This is what his four fundamental motivations address, and the fourth in particular.

Längle set out existence in four motivations that rest one upon another. The first is being able to be in the world, to have a place and a footing. The second is being able to feel the value of life, its joy and its sorrow alike. The third is being permitted to be oneself, with one’s own authenticity. And the fourth is wanting one’s life to be oriented towards something meaningful, to be inscribed in contexts larger than oneself. Each names a condition without which the next cannot fully come about.

Read this way, the fourth motivation is not the connection with the transcendent, it is the setting out of what makes that connection possible. It asks whether the person can open themselves to the future, whether they can give themselves over to something that exceeds them, whether they find that for the sake of which it would be worth orienting their life. These are the conditions of reconnecting with values. Because in order to reconnect with the values that have constituted us since childhood, one must first be able to be, to feel, to be oneself, and only from there to want what is meaningful. The fourth motivation lays out those conditions and makes it possible to see where the bond has been broken, what it is that prevents a person from tying themselves back to what they find valuable. It does not manufacture the connection, it prepares the ground for new ones and for rediscovering those already formed.

Recovering a Dimension We Thought Was Not Ours

Many people have given up spirituality and religion alike, filing them away among the things that do not concern them because they have no faith in the conventional sense. And in doing so they have given up naming something that was theirs from the outset, the bond with values that exceed them and that was alive long before any belief.

Recovering that dimension calls for no creed. It calls for asking again what one’s life is turned towards, what one truly wants to reconnect with, which dormant values are asking to be brought back to life. These are spiritual or religious questions in the most human sense of the word, and they are also the conditions the fourth motivation brings into view. Whether the answer leads to religion in the institutional sense is something only each person can decide, and it does not alter the fact that the question, and the bond that gives rise to it, were theirs all along.

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If these questions resonate with you, my work in philosophical counseling and existential analysis offers a space for dialogue to think through how you are living and what life you want to build. If you would like to take that step, I invite you to get in touch.

References

Frankl, Viktor E. Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning. Rider (Ebury Publishing), London. Expanded edition of The Unconscious God: Psychotherapy and Theology (1975).

Frankl, Viktor E. Man’s Search for Meaning. Rider (Ebury Publishing), London.

Längle, Silvia and Wurm, Christopher (eds.). Living Your Own Life: Existential Analysis in Action. Karnac, London.

Längle, Alfried. ‘The Relationship of Immanence and Transcendence in Existential Analysis’. In Living Your Own Life, Karnac, London.