This series of three newspaper columns by Olavo de Carvalho was collected in this order in the book “The Minimum You Need To Know So As Not To Be An Idiot”.
“Vocations and Misconceptions” discusses the concept of vocation and its omission in the question of whether people engage in activities for money or pleasure. The author explores the idea that someone can be dedicated to something wholeheartedly, driven by a higher calling or purpose, rather than solely driven by economic need or pleasure. The article also highlights the lack of emphasis on vocation in Brazilian culture, contrasting it with Protestant and Catholic traditions. It points out the materialistic immediacy of some individuals and the vocational disorientation of others in Brazilian society.
“The Message of Viktor Frankl” pays tribute to Viktor Frankl, an Austrian Jewish doctor and psychiatrist. Frankl’s experiences in concentration camps during World War II led him to discover the importance of finding meaning in life. He emphasized that love is the ultimate and highest goal that humans can aspire to, and he developed the concept of logotherapy, a form of therapy that focuses on helping individuals find meaning in their lives. The article discusses Frankl’s insights into the human search for meaning and his critique of materialistic and dehumanizing ideologies. It praises his courage in standing up against the intellectual currents of his time and his contribution to both clinical psychology and cultural criticism.
“Rediscovering the Meaning of Life” discusses the insights of Viktor Frankl, a psychiatrist who experienced the horrors of a concentration camp during World War II. While Freud believed that extreme deprivation would reveal the animalistic nature of humans, Frankl disagreed. He discovered in the camp that even in conditions of misery and fear, individuals could rise above and demonstrate acts of extraordinary generosity and self-sacrifice. Frankl identified a fundamental human motivation called the “will to meaning,” stating that the soul can endure anything as long as life has a purpose. He developed logotherapy, a psychotherapeutic technique that focuses on helping individuals find meaning and purpose in life. The text also highlights the concept of cognitive parallax, the disconnect between theoretical constructions and personal experience in modern thought. Despite the influence of Frankl’s book “Man’s Search for Meaning,” the academic establishment has not fully recognized his work due to cognitive parallax.
Vocations and Misconceptions
Bravo!, February 2000
If you write, or paint, or preach in church, or play music, or ride horses, or take photos, or do anything else that seems interesting, you have probably heard the question a thousand times: “Do you do it for money or for pleasure?” This formula is infinitely repeatable and must reveal some deep and enduring trait of the Brazilian way of seeing things - a commonplace or topos of our daily rhetoric.
Now, every commonplace is a selection that emphasizes certain aspects of reality to momentarily give the impression that others do not exist. Therefore, to understand it, one must ask, above all, what it omits.
What is omitted in the above question is the possibility that someone may dedicate themselves wholeheartedly to something without it being out of economic necessity or pleasure - or worse, that they continue to dedicate themselves to it as if it were the most important thing in the world even when it only brings loss and headaches. What is omitted in this question - and in the Brazilian way of seeing things - is what is called vocation.
Vocation comes from the Latin verb “voco, vocare,” which means “to call.” Those who do something out of vocation feel called to it by the voice of a higher entity - God, humanity, history, or, as Viktor Frankl would say, the meaning of life.
Considerations of profit or pleasure are left out or only enter as subordinate elements that do not determine decisions or form the basis of evaluations.
In the Protestant, Germanic world, there is a whole culture and mystique of vocation, and the search for authentic vocation is indeed the theme of the main German novel, Goethe’s “Wilhelm Meister.” In Catholic countries, the religious importance of vocation, consolidated in the scholastic ethic of the “duty of state” (for example, the duty of parents, merchants, soldiers, etc.), lost its relevance after the Renaissance, creating an increasingly deep divide between the priesthood and “worldly” activities, which became devoid of meaning insofar as only the former is considered vocational in an eminent sense. In Brazil, to worsen things, the population was mainly composed of three kinds of people: Portuguese who came in the hope of getting rich and could not return, forcibly enslaved Africans, and indigenous peoples who had nothing to do with history and suddenly found themselves poorly integrated into a society they did not understand. It is easy to understand from this the materialistic immediatism of the first group (which, when frustrated, turns into envy and bitterness that deprecates everything, and which easily disguises itself as moral indignation against corruption and “social injustices”), and even more so the total vocational disorientation of the second and third groups, brutally deprived of the meaning of life and therefore easily inclined to feel marginalized even when they no longer are.
A trace of the ethics of vocation still exists among us thanks to the influence of immigrants, especially Germans, Arabs, and Jews, but it exists tacitly, implicitly, never consecrated as a conscious value of our culture, much less valued by schools and governments.
The higher fulfillment of man in vocation is then replaced by mere job seeking, seen only as a means of subsistence and without any inherent importance regarding content. Conformist adaptation to a mediocre and futureless job is considered the height of realism, the perfection of human maturity. Everything else is devalued (and therefore hypervalued and eagerly desired) as “entertainment.” Thus, between forced labor and obsessive entertainment (of which Carnival is the most significant example), envy1 accumulates in the soul of Brazilians and a silent revolt against all those who lead a great, brilliant, and meaningful life, over whom, even when poor, the suspicion of being usurpers and thieves hangs, at least thieves of luck. Hence Tom Jobim’s famous observation: “In Brazil, success is a personal insult.” Yes, in this environment, the only loyalty understood is the camaraderie of the failures, around a bar table, pouring beer down their throats and gossiping about the world. This is a country of people who are on the wrong path, doing what they don’t want, seeking relief in childish and despicable entertainments, and sometimes even in depressingly depraved ones.
Our social science, bound by Marxist blinders and blind to the most obvious psychological realities of our daily life, has never realized the immense vocational tragedy of Brazil, which condemns millions of people to live imprisoned like animals, between inevitable pain and impossible pleasure.
The explosive accumulation of infamous passions, inevitable in this situation, is the ideal breeding ground for the germination of political resentments. And a social science reduced to an auxiliary instrument of demagoguery does not want to shed light on the confused darkness from which demagoguery feeds.
Viktor Frankl’s Message
Bravo!, November 1997
On September 2, a truly great man of this century died at the age of 92. I just wrote this and already I have a doubt: I don’t know if the Austrian Jewish doctor Viktor Frankl truly belonged to this century. Because he lived only to give back to men what the 20th century had taken from them - and he could not do it if he were not, in an era when everyone prides themselves on being “men of their time,” someone much greater than the century.
Viktor Emil Frankl, born in Vienna on March 26, 1905, was great in the three dimensions by which one man can measure another: intelligence, courage, and love for others. But he was even greater in that dimension that only God can measure: faithfulness to the meaning of existence, to the mission of human beings on Earth.
A man of science, a neurologist and psychiatrist, it was not study that revealed this meaning to him. It was the fearsome experience of the concentration camp. Millions went through that experience, but Frankl did not emerge from it laden with resentment and bitterness. He came out of the hell of Theresienstadt carrying with him the most beautiful message of hope that the science of the soul has given to men of this century.
What enabled this unique miracle was the timely confluence of a personal decision and the surrounding facts. The personal decision: Frankl entered the camp firmly determined to preserve the integrity of his soul, to not let his spirit be crushed by the executioners of his body. The surrounding facts: Frankl observed that of all the prisoners, those who best preserved self-control and sanity were those who had a strong sense of duty, mission, and obligation. The obligation could be towards a religious faith: the believing prisoner, with his eyes fixed on divine judgment, rose above the miseries of the moment. It could be towards a political, social, or cultural cause: the humiliations and torments became steps on the path to victory. It could be, above all, towards an individual human being, the object of love and care: those who had relatives outside the camp were kept alive by the hope of reunion. Whatever the mission to be fulfilled, it transfigured the situation, giving meaning to the nonsense of the present. This sense of duty was the concrete manifestation of love - the love by which a man frees himself from his external and internal prison, moving toward what makes him greater than himself.
The meaning of life, Frankl concluded, was the secret of the strength of some men, while others, deprived of a reason to endure external suffering, were tormented from within by a tyrant even more perfidious than Hitler - the feeling of living a senseless futility.2
Frankl had three reasons to live: his faith, his vocation, and the hope of reuniting with his wife. Where so many lost everything, Frankl not only regained life but something greater than life. After liberation, he also found his wife and his profession as the director of the Vienna Polyclinic Hospital.
Thus, in his book “Man’s Search for Meaning,” he records one of the inner experiences that led him to the discovery of the meaning of life:
A thought crossed my mind: for the first time in my life, I saw the truth as it is sung by so many poets, proclaimed as the ultimate truth by so many thinkers. The truth that love is the ultimate and highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought have to transmit: the salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world may still know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a state of deep despair, when a man can no longer express positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way - an honorable way - in such a state, a man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, find fulfillment. For the first time in my life, I was able to understand the words: ‘The angels are immersed in the perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory.’
Frankl turned this discovery into a scientific concept: that of noogenic diseases. Noogenic means “coming from the spirit.” In addition to the somatic and psychic causes of human suffering, it was necessary to recognize a suffering of truly spiritual origin, born from the experience of absurdity, the loss of the meaning of life: “Man,” he said, “can endure anything except the lack of meaning.”
From Frankl’s reflections on the experience of absurdity came one of the most impressive therapeutic systems created in the century of psychologists: logotherapy, or speech therapy - a set of logical schemes used to dismantle the subterfuges with which the diseased mind seeks to evade the decisive question: the search for meaning.
But meaning would have no healing power if it were merely an invented hope. The mind could not find within itself the solution to its ills, for the simple reason that its ailment consists of being closed within itself, without openness to what is superior to it. Instead of creating meaning, the mind must submit to it once it is found. Meaning does not have to be shaped by the mind, but the mind by meaning. The meaning of life, Frankl emphasizes, is an ontological reality, not a cultural creation. Frankl does not provide any philosophical proof of this assertion, but the very path of logotherapeutic healing provides each patient with unequivocal evidence of the objectivity of the meaning of their life. The meaning of life simply exists: it is only a matter of finding it.
Universal in its value, individual in its content, the meaning of life is found through diligent inquiry in which the patient, with the help of the therapist, seeks an answer to the following question: What is it that I must do that cannot be done by anyone, absolutely anyone, except myself? The immanent duty of each life then emerges as an imposition of the very structure of human existence. No one invents the meaning of their life: each person is, so to speak, surrounded and cornered by the meaning of their own life. It demarcates and fixes, at a specific point in space and time, the center of their personal reality, from whose vision emerges, clear and inexorable, but visible only from within, the duty to fulfill.
Instead of dissolving human individuality into its elements through tedious analyses that risk getting lost in irrelevant details, logotherapy seeks to immediately consolidate and fix the patient at the central point of their being, which is also the highest point, not coincidentally. That is why it is pointless to seek theoretical proofs of the meaning of life: it is not a uniform maxim valid for all - it is the immanent obligation that each person has to transcend themselves. Discussing the meaning of life without realizing it would be to deny it, and once we begin to realize it, it is no longer necessary to discuss it because it imposes itself with evidence that even the most cynical mind would be ashamed to deny.
Logotherapy has an impressive record of clinical success. However, perhaps more significant than its medical applications is the role it has played and continues to play - the mission it fulfills - in the panorama of modern culture. In a century that did everything to devalue the worth of human consciousness, reducing it to an epiphenomenon of social, biological, linguistic causes, etc., Frankl swam against the current, and no one could stop him. No one: neither the camp guards nor the countless hosts of his intellectual antipodes - the enemies of consciousness. Frankl placed his bet on the meaning of life and the cognitive power of the individual mind. He bet on the two underdogs of the philosophical race of the 20th century, scorned by psychoanalysts, Marxists, pragmatists, semioticians, structuralists, deconstructionists - by the pompous procession of blind guides leading other blinds to the abyss. He bet and he won. The theory of logotherapy bravely withstood all objections, and its practice established itself in numerous countries as the only admissible treatment for the many cases in which the human soul is not oppressed by childish fantasies but by the reality of life. For this reason, Frankl’s cultural critique, an integral part of a work where the doctor and the thinker never separate for a moment, has a deeper impact than all its competitors. From his privileged observation post, he was able to see what no intellectual of this century wanted to see: the secret alliance between materialistic, progressive, democratic, scientific culture and Nazi barbarism. An alliance, yes: would it be just a coincidence that the century most committed to denying in theory the autonomy and value of consciousness was also the most committed to creating mechanisms to control, oppress, and annihilate it in practice? Addressing an American university audience, Viktor Frankl pronounced these words, where lucidity is coupled with an extraordinary intellectual courage:
It was not only a few ministries in Berlin that invented the gas chambers of Maidanek, Auschwitz, Treblinka: they were prepared in the offices and classrooms of nihilistic scientists and philosophers, among whom were and are some Anglo-Saxon thinkers laureate with the Nobel Prize. If human life is nothing more than the insignificant accidental product of some protein molecules, it matters little that a psychopath be eliminated as useless and that a few more inferior peoples be added to the psychopath: all this is nothing but logical and consistent reasoning.3
With statements like these, he grabbed the proud intellectual denouncers of barbarism by the throat and returned their accusatory discourse, unmasking the suicidal futility of theories that do not assume responsibility for their historical consequences. For the evil of the world does not come only from below, from economic, political, and military causes that the academic alliance of pedantry with simplism has consecrated as explanations for everything. It comes from above, from the human spirit that accepts or rejects the meaning of life and thus determines, sometimes with tragic inconsequence, the destiny of future generations.
Frankl was Jewish, just as some of the creators of those materialistic and dehumanizing doctrines that inadvertently paved the way for Auschwitz and Treblinka were Jewish. If he could see what they did not see, it was because he remained faithful to the inner freedom that is the old message of Meaning in search of man: “IF YOU ACCEPT ME, Israel, I am Your God.”
Rediscovering the Meaning of Life
First Reading, November 2005
Freud asserted that when reduced to extreme deprivation, human beings would shed their spiritual shell and reveal their true nature, behaving like animals. Viktor Emil Frankl, a psychiatrist, Jewish and Austrian like Freud, did not believe this, but he did not have to invent an answer to his colleague; he found it ready-made in the Theresienstadt concentration camp during World War II. There, under conditions of misery and terror that the father of psychoanalysis in his Viennese office could never have imagined, ordinarily mediocre men and women rose to the level of saints and heroes, demonstrating the capacity for extreme generosity and self-sacrifice without the hope of any reward other than the conviction of doing what was right. Deprivation stripped them of the mask of biological selfishness that had been imposed upon them by a frivolous cultural fashion, and it revealed the true nature of the human being: the ability to transcend oneself, the inexhaustible power to go beyond the limits of one’s vital interests in search of meaning, of a moral justification for existence.
A recent trip to Philadelphia, where the University of Pennsylvania was celebrating the centenary of the birth of the creator of logotherapy with a series of conferences, reminded me in an uplifting way that in the history of ideas, everything happens as it does in the lives of individuals: even the extreme spiritual poverty consolidated by centuries of depressing ideas does not prevent the consciousness of the meaning of life from suddenly reemerging with a force and brilliance that seemed lost forever. The evolution of modern thought, from Machiavelli to deconstructionism, is marked by the growing presence of a phenomenon that I call “cognitive parallax”: the gap between the axis of personal experience and that of theoretical construction. Each new “maître à penser” strives to create increasingly sophisticated theories, which are blatantly contradicted by their own everyday lives. Frankl’s “existential analysis,” contrary to Heidegger’s and Sartre’s “existentialism,” which is a culmination of parallax, recovers the ability to reason from direct experience, which throughout modernity has been rejected by philosophers and has only found refuge among poets and novelists.
What Frankl discovered in Theresienstadt was that, in addition to the desire for pleasure and the will to power, there is in man an even more intense motivating force, the “will to meaning”: the human soul can endure anything except the lack of a meaning for life. On the contrary, Frankl said, “if you have a why, you can bear any how.” The deprivation of meaning gives rise to a type of neurosis that Freud and Adler had not identified, and it is the most widespread form of psychic suffering in the world today: the noogenic neurosis, that is, one of spiritual cause, marked by a sense of absurdity and emptiness. Existential analysis is the rediscovery of the logic behind absurdity, the reconquest of the human spiritual status that makes life worth living. Logotherapy is the psychotherapeutic technique that turns existential analysis into a practical tool for the healing of noogenic neuroses.
A survey conducted by the Library of Congress showed that “Man’s Search for Meaning,” the mixture of autobiography, philosophical analysis, and psychotherapeutic treatise in which Frankl presents the conclusions of his experience in the concentration camp, is one of the ten books that have most influenced the American people. If, despite this, Frankl’s work has not yet received the attention it deserves from the academic establishment, it is simply because this is the temple of cognitive parallax.4
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Editor’s note: See the chapter on Envy.↩
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Editor’s note: “An ‘ideal’ is called the synthesis in which the idea of the meaning of life and the price of its realization merge into a single form and energy: a man is said to have an ideal when he knows in which direction he must go to become what he aspires to be, and when he is firmly determined to go in that direction. (...) The ideal is, therefore, an indispensable condition for the cohesion of personality, which, without it, disperses into fortuitous aspirations and sterile efforts. Mirage and emblem, its vision dynamizes us, elevates us, ennobles us, and it is always the reminder of its call that lifts us up after each error and disillusionment.” Olavo de Carvalho, “The Abandonment of Ideals,” lecture from the Introduction to Intellectual Life course, September 1987, available at [http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/apostilas/ideais.htm].↩
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Frankl, Viktor. Man’s Search for Meaning. Translated by Henrique Elfes. São Paulo: Quadrante, 1989.↩
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Editor’s note: Viktor Frankl’s books published in Brazil: “Em busca de sentido” (Vozes-Sinodal), “Psicoterapia para todos” (Vozes), “A questão do sentido em psicoterapia” (Papirus), “Um sentido para a vida” (Santuário), “Sede de sentido” (Quadrante), “Psicoterapia e sentido da vida” (Quadrante), “A presença ignorada de Deus” (Vozes-Sinodal). It is also worth watching videos of Frankl on the internet, especially the interview on “The Discovery of Meaning in Suffering” given by him in South Africa in 1985, available with Portuguese subtitles at the following links: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cd2KANOJuU (part 1); http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBxVZTbi6q4 (part 2); http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXB85tjjJg8 (part 3). There is a complete transcription of the interview at the following link: http://www.alphaeomega.org.br/comunidade/destaques_ler.php?id=4310. [Memorable excerpt: "While we make happiness a goal, we cannot achieve it. The more we long for it, the further it eludes us. This fact is most evident in cases of sexual neurosis, for it is precisely those men who strive to demonstrate their potency who are tormented by impotence. The more a woman tries to prove, at least to herself, how capable she is of experiencing an orgasm, the more prone she is to frigidity. But when you no longer think about pleasure or satisfaction but simply surrender yourself, whether in sexual life, work, or love, when you no longer care about being happy or successful, then happiness sets in by itself."]↩
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