Understanding Love
Love is a theme that runs through Viktor Frankl's scientific masterpiece, Ärztliche Seelsorge. Frankl distinguishes other types of love from the highest, real love, based on the spiritual connection between loving persons. He also emphasizes that love lies within every human person and is connected to the absolute value of love in transcendence, the realm of values (for secular people) or the Absolute itself (for believers). It is therefore also obvious that when a person is looking for a worthwhile and meaningful content for his life, love is the most valuable issue he can strive for.
It can therefore be concluded that logotherapy is in effect love therapy, carried out with love and directed towards love.
When Frankl defines love as a value, he is also confronting Sigmund Freud, for whom love meant only the satisfaction of sexual desire and the pursuit of a feeling of pleasure. In any case, real love is not about wanting, but giving, not about being loved, but ultimately loving others selflessly. At its most refined, it is about unconditional love, which means no conditions are set for respecting and loving someone. Everyone is allowed the opportunity to develop spiritually and ethically, and is given support in their efforts according to their possibilities to grow and develop. In contrast to respect and love, appreciation must be earned through one's valuable and meaningful actions, by which they are promoting the common good.
Love thus encompasses everything in the world, including everything other than humans insofar as and to the extent that it is about a creature, thing or phenomenon which is inherently valuable. Many have beloved animals as family members, such as we, four cats and two dogs. They are just as unique and irreplaceable as people. Losing them also causes sorrow and grief as does losing human persons. However, beautiful memories of all loved ones remain forever, despite the length of lives lived together. Real love continues to exist even after death and may never die.
One of the most interesting concepts in Max Scheler's philosophy of values, on which Frankl also based his value thinking, is the Ordo amoris. It is a particularly valuable perspective in logotherapy concerning the actualization of the will to meaning and the discovery of one's calling. Scheler meant by this concept a kind of inner script for a person's life, a ranking of the things and phenomena that a person could truly love and on which he should focus in life to achieve existential fulfillment.
Frankl's special contribution to value philosophy, related to the practicalization of values, are three main routes to discovering meanings, which he sometimes (but by no means always) also called values, which caused much confusion. However, these are only general principles about different ways an individual can search for values and valuable meanings in the moments of his life.
I especially enjoy speaking about love in logotherapy trainings, it is my favorite topic. My lecture on the Concept of love in logotheory has always been the most popular, especially in Croatia and Ukraine. In the latter, it has been the starting module of my so-called spring course for the third year.
I also have a book in the making called Understanding Love. I hope to have it ready by the end of the summer, and I have also promised that it can then be translated and published in Ukrainian. The book's title does not mean that I understand all or even most of the mystery of love. My reflections on the significance, essence and manifestation of love, that greatest value of all, meander along the contours of love in as many ways as love itself. I have planned the book to have 11 chapters. The most extensive chapters will be "We are all loving beings" and "Love between two human persons".
The pursuit of ethics in its highest manner, through love and its spread to the world, are more important than ever in our time, when in many Western democracies it is no longer even attempted.
Still, great people cultivate love, while only the spiritually poor cherish hatred and hold nothing as sacred. Erich Fromm emphasizes that love is the only sensible and satisfying answer to the problem of human existence. That means that love is the ultimate answer to all human problems if only we gave love the chance.
Because love exists deep within all people, it is also a universal language everyone can understand and that can unite us with others. It just has to be found within oneself and allowed to flow into the world and connect with the rest of the world. Scheler states that people can elevate each other through mutual love to the extreme of their existence, thereby toward existential fulfillment.
Timo Purjo
President of the Viktor Frankl Institute, Finland