Every single person who has ever lived will be forgotten. Every name carved in stone, every monument built to outlast its maker, every civilization that believed itself eternal, will be gone. Not archived. Not remembered. Gone, as though they never existed.
Our species will go extinct. Whatever replaces us will go extinct. The stars will exhaust their fuel and go dark one by one until the universe is a cold, lightless void with nothing left to witness its own emptiness. No heat. No light. No memory. The universe itself will die.
Your question assumes legacy is the measure of a life. But legacy requires someone to remember it. And in the end, there is no one. There is nothing. The question of what you've given to society dissolves into a universe that will eventually have no society, no record, and no one left to care.
So what does my life mean? Exactly as much as yours. Which is to say, whatever we decide it means, right now, before the lights go out.
So no one remembers Einstein Da Vinci John Locke, Rousseau Moses? The measure of a life is what it means What does your life mean?
Frankl’s Existential Theory
Frankl’s philosophical background is grounded in existentialism and his theory has been placed in the tradition of existential philosophy (
Klingberg, 2001;
Pytell, 2015). He described a situation at the age of 13 that would become a central tenet of his theory (
Frankl, 2000;
Klingberg, 2001;
Pytell, 2015;
Redsand, 2006). When a teacher told Frankl’s class that life is processes of combustion and oxidation, Frankl asked: “Professor Fritz, if this is the case, what meaning then does life have?” (
Redsand, 2006, p. 18). Later Frankl described reductionism “as today’s nihilism” (
Frankl, 2000, p. 60). Frankl believed that reductionism failed to grasp the uniqueness of humanness by describing human beings as mere machines, as opposed to possessing the ability to transcend beyond their unique physicality (
Frankl, 1988,
2006,
2014).
Frankl (2010,
2011,
2014) maintained that the search for meaning is not a secondary thought process to instincts, but rather the primary motivation in life. His theory (2010, 2011, 2012, 2014) highlighted the need to acquire the tools necessary to find meaning, rather than to view a person as a two-dimensional machine with separate parts. A person’s ability to transcend their environment was a central component of Frankl’s existential theory.
Frankl (2004,
2006,
2014) stated that the individual is the only one to decide about the meaning of their life and that the individual has to take responsibility for creating and deciding its unique meaning. Furthermore, the ability to decide the meaning of a situation has the power to create a positive outcome from the worst of situations, as
Frankl (2000) explained:
I can see beyond the misery of the situation to the potential for discovering a meaning behind it, and thus to turn an apparently meaningless suffering into a genuine human achievement. I am convinced that, in the final analysis, there is no situation that does not contain within it the seed of meaning. To a great extent, this conviction is the basis of Logotherapy. (p. 53)
Noö-Dynamics
Frankl (2006) asserted that mental well-being is not about achieving emotional equilibrium, but rather “the existential dynamics in a polar field of tension where one pole is represented by the meaning that is to be fulfilled and the other pole by the man who has to fulfil it” (p. 110). This is a foundational concept of Frankl’s existential theory, which is based on a person’s drive to achieve purpose in life.
Frankl (2004) referred to this tension between a person’s end goal and where a person is currently as noö-dynamics. The term noödynamics is derived from noetics which was a central feature of the Austrian philosophical-psychological tradition to which Frankl was a part. The origin of the term stems from the Greek word noös meaning mind or spirit (
Hatt, 1965). Hence, the noölogical dimension according to Frankl refers to the uniquely human experience of transcending one’s environment and entering into the dimension of noetic phenomena (or the noölogical dimension;
Frankl, 1988). According to
Frankl (2004), human beings should aim to create this tension in order to re-orientate themselves towards their meaning in life. This constant tension provides a person with a sense of drive and purpose (
Frankl, 2006,
2014). Frankl stated that working towards a sense of emotional homeostasis is mentally healthy and that tension aroused by a goal that needs to be fulfilled is what makes a person live in this world with purpose.
Frankl (2004), therefore, maintained that noö-dynamics is a healthy state for a person to be in and while a state of emotional homeostasis is naturally comforting, noö-dynamics is what one should aim to create in one’s life.
