To Know Ourselves is to Forget Ourselves

Most of us have read Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search of Meaning.  I remembered it as his finding some reason to survive Auschwitz, to emerge looking not at it but beyond it.  I confess that I found in him a break with a kind fixation on the Holocaust of many who wrote of it, as many do today of 9/11, for looking at it rather than beyond it, too. 

I return from a fourth morning of walking up and down the roads on the silent, snowy hills in the still-dark listening to his final  book, Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning.  I realize that what I had learned from that first book was perhaps his basic message, but it refers not to the prison of Auschwitz, but to the prison of self.

Conscience, he says, is the “wisdom of the heart” that calls us to look at ourselves so that in following our true desire we might look beyond ourselves.  He said that this is like Aquinas’s idea of virtue.  Through effort we practice some good act until it becomes habitual, and we eventually do it without thinking.  It becomes “second nature” to us.  We become virtuous. 

Consciousness, he says, is the awareness of what is while conscience calls us to what is not, but ought to be.  This brings to mind the Examen, the call to find in our day what in the world moved us, what drew us, pulled us from beyond ourselves.  And it brings to mind the seemingly paradoxical statement of Jesus, “He who loses his life will find it”.  And the whole idea of being born to new life seems not religious psycho-babble but good sense.