What Am I Here For: Längle'Fourth Fundamental Motivation.

When I can be in the world, when I like life, and when I also manage to find myself within it, the conditions are in place for the final question. It is not enough to be in the world and to have found oneself. Our presence here is also meant for us to go beyond ourselves, so that we do not remain trapped only in our own needs, wishes and goals.

Längle uses an image that makes this clear. If we stay shut up in what is ours, it would be like living in a house that nobody ever comes to visit. It may be well built, comfortable and even beautiful, but it lacks the thing that makes it worth having. To this we must add another fact we cannot dodge, which is that existence passes. And that transience places us before the question of meaning.

The guiding question of this fourth motivation is easy to put and hard to answer. I am here, what is this good for? Or to say it another way, what is my life for, what is it that I have to do?

The three conditions for being able to experience meaning

For someone to experience meaning, and not merely to think about it as an abstract idea, three things are needed. A field of action, a web of relationships and a value in the future. Each one answers a concrete question worth asking yourself.

Do I have somewhere I am needed, where I can be productive? Do I see and experience myself within a larger context that gives my life structure and orientation? Is there something in my life that has still to come about?

When these conditions are missing, what appears is emptiness, frustration with life, even despair, and often some form of addiction. When they are present, a person finds their way towards giving themselves and towards action. And the sum of those experiences is what constitutes the meaning of a life.

The field of action, where I am needed

The field of action is the ground where a person can do something that matters. A good part of it is taken up by the everyday tasks of sustaining one's own life and the life of the family. Another large part is taken up by work, social activity, projects, interests and pastimes.

What is decisive is not the activity itself but something that happens within it. When a person is called upon in this way, when they are needed, when the world speaks to them and asks something of them, points of orientation appear in their life. And their activity then stops being mere occupation and becomes meaningful, because it gives rise to a work or to a deed.

Frankl described this field through three categories of values, which he liked to call the three main avenues for finding meaning.

Creative values are realised when a person brings something into the world and actively enriches it. Working, cooking, tending the garden, standing up for someone. Experiential values consist in being able to experience something beautiful or good that is already there. Nature, music, art, the relationship with other people, a conversation, love. And attitudinal values appear when someone no longer has any room for action to determine their own fate, because even then a small remnant of freedom is left to them, which is choosing how they want to face what they cannot change.

A story about attitudinal values

That last point sounds abstract until you see it working. Längle recounts a case told by David Spiegel, of Stanford University.

Spiegel was called in as a psychiatrist to see a seventy-year-old Chinese patient with an incurable cancer and a prognosis that had already been explained to him. There was an acute risk of suicide. When he entered the room there was hardly space for anyone else, because three generations of the family had gathered and everyone was weeping. The head of the family was sitting in a wheelchair in the middle of the room.

Spiegel thought for a moment about what he could do. He knew what family means in the Chinese tradition, and he recalled a story of Viktor Frankl's about existential meaning. So he told the patient that he knew he was going to die soon, that everyone present knew it too, and that everyone there would have to die at some point. And he added that they were all now looking to him to see how he did it, because they wanted to learn something from him.

The room fell completely silent. The psychiatrist said goodbye until the following day, with doubts about his intervention, and intending to examine him properly and prescribe him something once the visitors had gone. It was not necessary. The patient was freed from his depressive state and his suicidal ideation, and needed no psychiatric medication.

What had happened was that Spiegel called reality by its name and showed the patient what his existential task was within the context of his family and his medical condition, which pulled him out of helplessness and despair. That same day he began giving his children errands as he had always done, telling his son to repair the air conditioning in the house and his daughter to buy a washing machine. He took up his position as head of the family in the Chinese tradition once again. He lived two more weeks just as he had always lived, reconciled with a life that was worth living in his own way in those last two weeks as well.

The case shows clearly what is at stake in this motivation. Nothing about the medical situation changed. What changed was that the man once again had something to do that only he could do, and someone to do it for.

The web of relationships, being part of something larger

The second condition is the structural relationships a person finds themselves in, in their family, at their work, and with whatever they value and love, such as nature, art or friends. Those relationships form a network of ties within which what a person can do, and what is asked of them, is defined.

Something worth noticing happens here, because it works in both directions. Through that network a person becomes valuable and significant to others, and also through others. You matter because there is someone to whom you matter.

When someone sees those connections, takes their place within them and widens them, their existence moves to another level, more complex and integrated into a larger whole, and it stops being shut up in the purely individual. Human beings are run through with ties in such a way that a person only becomes intelligible when looked at within a wider frame. This is why we say that human existence is set within a context, a context in which we inevitably find ourselves and into which we place ourselves with each of our acts.

The value in the future, something that has still to come about

The third condition adds a further dimension, that of time. Being set within a web of relationships is in turn transcended when it is placed in the context of the future, in the direction towards which something is coming about.

Through this, a person's intention is directed towards values that have yet to be reached or created. Orienting oneself towards them and working in that direction is what sustains a person's continuous development, that permanent coming into being which goes together with creatively influencing one's own future.

There is a concrete human capacity behind this. In our everyday actions we can take account of, and orient ourselves towards, what has not yet been discovered, what is only still to come, what may come about in the future. That capacity to reckon with what does not yet exist belongs to the very essence of existence. And it is what allows a person to realise their possibilities and to become what, in their unfinished condition, they may come to be.

The attitude that makes all of the above possible

It is not enough to be in a field of action, to know oneself within a context and to have values in the future. What is also needed is a particular attitude, which Längle calls phenomenological and describes as the existential access to one's own existence.

It is an attitude of openness, in which the point is to let oneself be questioned by the situation. The questions that put it are these. What does this situation want from me now, what should I answer to.

This turns the usual direction of the search on its head. It is not only about what I can expect from life but, true to the dialogical character of existence, about what life wants from me, what the situation expects of me, what I can and should do now both for others and for myself. What the situation asks of me and what I can give.

And a person's active contribution within that attitude consists in bringing themselves into agreement with the situation and in examining whether what they are doing is also good, for others, for themselves, for the future and for the world they stand in. In acting accordingly, existence is fulfilled and finds its meaning.

From meaning to will

On the basis of the being able, the liking, the being allowed to be oneself and the ought, a person is at last wholly ready to act, and can develop a well founded and strong willing. Längle defines the will as a yes to a value, together with the readiness to commit oneself actively to it. It is, he says, an instruction to act that a person gives to themselves.

It is worth distinguishing, so as not to confuse them, between what is will and what is wish, because they are easily mixed up and it is a frequent theme in consultation. Both are directed towards a value. But willing means being ready to commit oneself actively and to take on the efforts and the costs, whereas in wishing a person stays passive and waits for the thing to come about on its own. Having too many wishes, such as wanting a relationship, wanting success or wanting to be happy, can let a passive attitude to life take hold, and that ends in an inner paralysis.

The active carrying out of the will leads to action. And acting is, in this sense, willed and decided conduct, unlike the other kind of conduct, which is automatic and unwilled reacting. When a person is absorbed and given over to what they are doing, that can be experienced as a lift and lead to an experience of flow.

Try this. Faced with a situation that worries you, change the question. Instead of asking what you expect from it, ask what it is asking of you. What does this hour, this moment, this context want from me. What should I answer to. It is a small turn that tends to show things the other question does not show.

Try this as well. Go over something you say you want and check whether it is will or wish. The difference lies in whether you are ready to take on the effort and the cost it involves, or whether you are waiting for it to happen. If it is the latter, the useful question is not how to have more willpower, but what value is there that you have not yet come to feel. Do you want something simply to happen, or do you want to make it happen yourself?

This closes the circle

The four motivations hold one another up. Being able to be here gives the ground. Liking life gives the warmth. Being able to be oneself gives one's own shape. And meaning gives the direction, that towards which everything before it is set in motion.

If you notice that you have carried a sense of emptiness for some time, that you get through your tasks without anything having any weight, or that you struggle to find where to go, it is worth looking at these three conditions. Where you are needed, what you are part of, and what is still waiting to come about in your life.

Perhaps you recognise a sense of emptiness that does not go away, the impression of getting through things without anything having any weight, or the difficulty of knowing where you want to go. If any of this resonated with you, I want you to know that you do not have to walk that path alone. In my practice I accompany these processes through existentially oriented counselling and therapy and through philosophical consultation, two complementary ways of exploring, calmly and without rushing, the questions that truly matter. I work both in person and through online sessions, so that distance need not be an obstacle. If you would like to take a first step, I would be glad to welcome you.

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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

This article is based on the work of Alfried Längle, Existenzanalyse und Logotherapie (Existential Analysis and Logotherapy), Stuttgart, Verlag W. Kohlhammer, 2021, and Lehrbuch zur Existenzanalyse. Grundlagen (Textbook of Existential Analysis. Foundations), Vienna, Facultas, 2013. The three categories of values come from Viktor Frankl. The clinical case was recounted by David Spiegel, of Stanford University, and collected by Längle. Translations are my own.