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1. Thinking about Human Life. Who am I? What will I become?

Anthropology - the study or science of "man" [1] - is a relatively modern term. Certain scientific usages restrict it to the study of primitive man and/or contemporary societies that live in a primitive state. The anthropology presented in these pages centers on "man" in himself, and focuses not on distant or early and elementary expressions of humanity, but on the human life that is present and seeks to develop in each one of us. It is less interested in man's external behavior, or even certain aspects of his inner life (which may be the more particular concern of law, sociology, psychology or ethics), than in his "structure" and growth as a living, thinking and willing being [2].

But, is this a possible scientific enterprise? It is evident that men exist, and that each one can be an object of study: individual after individual. But does a "science of man" exist? In other words, do men have something in common, from the study of which valid norms can be drawn for the positive development of both individual and social human life? Rather than proposing the point for debate (which one certainly can do), we take it here as a necessary presupposition of anthropology. If there is nothing in common among men, then no logical discourse is possible on the subject of "man".

What is "man"? We can state a few obvious things that help pin down his identity. In the first place, he is not an inert object or a piece of dead matter, but a living and changing being. Moreover, he is a living-changing being who thinks: this is evident. Otherwise neither would I have written these lines nor would you be following them. It is likewise evident that man is a being who wills. It is by an act of the will that I have written and that you are reading - and can stop reading at any moment.

We are used to assessing change in economic or social affairs in terms of "development", whether positive or negative. If man's life is a sequence of changes, it seems we ought to be able to measure positive human or personal development, in which possibilities of improvement or growth are achieved; and equally to distinguish lack of human development (under-development), implying that certain possibilities have not been realized or have been poorly realized. All education, after all, is based on the supposition that the human being can develop toward a more complete or fulfilled form; and moreover that the absence of education places him at a disadvantage for his development.

What does human development consist in? What peculiarities does it show, as distinct from the development of other living beings? Which principles govern this development? Does it arrive at its culminating moment? Is it possible to speak of human "completion" or fulfillment? Does man, after perhaps reaching a peak in his development, go into decline? Is such decline inevitable? What does it mean to say "Life ends"? What meaning is to be attributed to death? Is it absolutely the final point to the history of each individual? Anthropology can and should ask these questions, including the last one - although going beyond it may not be within its competence.

In any case, it is clear that human development, fulfillment, or "realization" is a main issue that any study or science of man must examine.

Controlled or free?

We have said that man thinks and wills. That will be readily admitted. The issue most debated here is not whether man thinks or wills, but whether he is free in doing so. Is man free? One cannot present any rational anthropology without taking a clear position on this question. Two answers can be offered, and they involve two fundamentally opposed ideas of man: on the one hand, man conceived as a being dominated by forces beyond his control; on the other, man conceived as a free being able to shape his own destiny and fulfillment.

According to the first view, man does not have his own proper and personal fulfillment, but is just one more element inserted into a cosmic or historical or economic order - or perhaps disorder. Anthropology, so conceived, becomes practically absorbed in economy, sociology, historical cosmology, etc.

In this perspective, either man is not free or his freedom is an element of little importance, almost an illusion, since he remains controlled by more powerful and more important processes and realities than he can ever establish himself. Each individual exists for these greater realities - the world, history, society - , but his life has no further purpose, he has no destiny in or for himself. To accept such a philosophy radically diminishes man in his own estimation and self-awareness, because it tells him that he has no personal dignity, that he is not free, or that whatever freedom he appears to possess is without real purpose as far as he is concerned.

Within this deterministic approach we could make these distinctions:

1) Biological, psychological, or environmental determinism:

a) Determinism "ab intra": we do not govern ourselves, but are governed or controlled by internal forces - inheritance, genetic elements, sexual impulses, phobias ... - which mold and form our "psyche";

b) Determinism "ab extra": our lot and destiny are imposed on us by environment, circumstances, education, society (other people), government ...

2) Economic or political semi-determinism:

a) Market determinism (consumerism): the individual as a pawn in a huge game of economic forces. He can believe he is free, it is even good that he does believe it. Advertising can encourage him to think that freedom is a purchasable commodity: "Buy this Land Cruiser and you will have acquired freedom". In fact, however, his "freedom" can do nothing against the real powers that manage his life [3]. Further, his value consists almost exclusively in his power of acquisition. Whoever possesses nothing is worth nothing: he is reduced to a valueless being.

The first standard by which a society should be tested is whether it answers real human needs. It is only when people can achieve what they need, not just what they want, that their lives can progressively become humanly fulfilled. The advertising/consumer society, where people are programatically conditioned to want what the Controllers of society think they should want, creates "an illusion of meaning" for their lives [4], but no sense of deeper achievement or genuine and ultimate purpose. The lives of those who let themselves be uncritically integrated into such a society are likely not just to remain humanly underdeveloped but to be subjected to a process of gradual dehumanization.

b) Collectivism: the individual as a "piece" of an immense social reality which surpasses him, or of a huge historical or cosmic movement where the personal history of each one is totally subordinated to collective history, having practically no importance or value in itself. The individual does not have his history - a life-story endowed with meaning; history is something which belongs only to the cosmos or to the collectivity.

It is not possible to build any real anthropology on a deterministic basis.

In the other view, man is conceived as a free being, in some way in control of his personal existence: open to possibilities, able to choose, capable of fulfillment. It is not enough to be. In order to be truly a man or a woman, one has to become one. There is a potential to be realized. Each individual can and should regard his humanity as a job to be completed by means of his own free efforts. Here also two fundamental and very different formulations are to be noticed: (1) man is a free and autonomous subject; (2) man is a free subject, but is not autonomous.

These formulations are of more interest to us, and call for an examination in greater depth.

Free and autonomous? [5].

According to this view, man is self-sufficient, in the sense that he can make or fulfill himself from within. Life and the world are his to mold. He has no need to come out of self, but can simply reach out from within himself and pick whatever he chooses, using it as he likes as raw material for building his own life.

In this hypothesis, then, man is a subject capable of self-fulfillment [6] without the need to follow given norms or laws, simply expressing himself from within.

Here man identifies himself in complete freedom; he is a subject of "self-identification" or "self-definition". This is a dominant principle underlying much of modern popular psychology. It tends to permeate education, and is reflected at the highest level of contemporary civil jurisprudence, being set forth as a basic principle of the majority judgment in the 1992 U.S. Supreme Court case, Planned Parenthood v. Casey: "At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life" [7]. It follows that every individual is his own project: also in the sense that in designing himself there are no given norms to follow. He builds from scratch, as he chooses, freely using the materials and situations of life so as to achieve his project.

This view of man coincides with, or leads to, the philosophy of individualism [8]. Over the past centuries, individualism has become the dominant mindset of the Western world. My interests, my satisfaction, my happiness is the individualist's goal - to which he or she tends (even if at times unconsciously) to subordinate all else: things, events and persons. Individualism is never so powerful or so destructive as when the happiness it proposes to seek is also declaredly self-defined: "I have the right to my happiness - as I understand it; and no one can question that right or the type of happiness I seek".

For many people today, to "be happy on one's own terms" is a right and a sacred principle of living. But life itself does not always respect a person's own terms. Practical experience can hint at what may then happen. Ernest Hemingway, Nobel Prize winner and one of the great American writers of the 20th century, lived that principle out to the end. In June 1961, A.E. Hotchner, a friend and biographer of his, visited him in an attempt to pull him out of his depression and delusions. Hemingway is not quite sane; but not (at least yet) quite mad either. He can express the issue very clearly, terribly clearly, when Hotchner asks him why he wants to kill himself: "Hotch, if I can't exist on my own terms, then existence is impossible. Do you understand? That is how I've lived, and that is how I must live - or not live". A month later Hemingway shot himself [9].

His terms were to be on top of life: writing, hunting, drinking, women ... When he found himself, at 62, with waning powers and the prospect of nothing (of this) to live for, his mind - and his will to live - went. Happiness on his own terms had not proved possible.

Easily achieved self-fulfillment, necessarily involving a basic self-contentedness, appears as the ideal or purpose (and even the "right") of contemporary man. Such a load of subjectivism tends to engender a "soft" anthropology. Self-contentment is a dead end for man [10]. The person who is happy with himself ceases to grow; he does not try to progress, to do better; and it seems that man is always made for more. The contented self is so often synonymous with the stagnant self.

"Soft" anthropologies have the effect of reducing man. This is true also in the hypothesis of extreme individualism which seems to leave man with the maximum freedom whose exercise is apparently not limited by any given norm and law. Personal freedom and life are reduced even in such a case, since they remain closed in on one's self. Reaching out "beyond" the self, to a happiness or fulfillment that lies "higher", is a possibility or a need that is scarcely considered.

In theory, such extreme individualism seems to offer man the possibility of dominating the world; for man alone is lord. In practice, however, the world does not let itself be so easily dominated; it proves more powerful than man. On the social plane, moreover, individualism turns life into a competition - or a war - between would-be lords. And among those in history who have seemed to be lords of their times, it is hard to find one whose life reflects any all-round fulfilment. This individualism centers the person more and more on himself. To have no worthwhile reference points outside oneself, or not to be able to follow them, involves the danger of remaining ultimately closed in on an inner core of self too poor in resources for the deeper potential of personal life.

No adequate anthropological analysis can be built around the concept of man as an autonomous or self-sufficient being. Any hypothesis of "self-sufficiency" is contradicted by the numberless needs that each person experiences in the life of both body and spirit: air, water, food, light, friendship, appreciation, love ... At a deeper level still "self-sufficiency" does not even remotely offer a key to the sense of mystery that man naturally possesses regarding life, the conviction that the world or personal life is not an absurdity, a non-sense, inevitably headed for nothingness. There is something in the normal human make-up that revolts at the idea. We are ready to laugh at absurdity or nonsense when it is presented to us as a matter of entertainment. But we have a natural repulsion toward the idea of nothingness in itself, particularly when it is offered as an explanation of the world or of personal existence. If nature, according to Spinoza, abhors a vacuum, this is even truer of man; no one likes to verify his own total or ultimate emptiness.

It is inbuilt in us to want more than the present offers. We always tend to go beyond the immediate reality, either along the easy street of imagination (wandering in dreams or in "virtual reality"); or by the more strenuous way of ambition - that challenges us to the formulation and fulfillment of practical projects.

Happiness, Evolution, Progress

We have mentioned the modern tendency to claim happiness as "a right". It is not clear that the claim is well-grounded. Among the more fundamental human rights enunciated by the United States Declaration of Independence is a right not to happiness itself, but rather to its pursuit [11]. This corresponds better to what can be considered one of the constants of human history, which is the desire and indeed the not easily abandoned expectation of attaining happiness - if one pursues it. Is this a mere illusion, however generalized? Or should one suppose that this longing indicates a purpose that can actually be attained by everyone?

Happiness escapes adequate definition - just as, however constantly pursued, it seems to evade a firm human grasp. Most people will readily admit to not yet being happy, or not fully so. Whatever happiness consists in, it would seem to be a good that is not achieved in any easy or automatic way [12]. Otherwise it would be impossible to explain the presence in the world of so many people who, if not unhappy, at least have the impression that the happiness they have so long desired continually escapes them. It is human nature to look for and pursue happiness. Are we progressing toward it?

A word here about evolution and progress. From a strict anthropological viewpoint, evolution, or rather "evolutionism" [13], sells man short; it allows too little space for his life and outlook. If man (also in his spirit) is only the fruit of the unfolding of matter, he is indeed placed at the top of the visible world which surrounds him. True; but that world itself remains small. Such an evolutionary view closes man's personal horizons.

Peculiarly or not, this applies also to the belief in constant progress which, at least up to very recently, has been part of the modern mind; the conviction that humanity is always rising to higher levels; the persuasion that one is involved in an irreversible, though at the same time predominantly mechanical or impersonal [14], process of improvement or growth, of a material, economic, or cosmic nature.

The idea of "progress" - that the future can be and will be better - is a strongly rooted idea of the 19th and early 20th centuries, which is being carried forward into the 21st century, though with a number of not insignificant reservations. Despite these, the philosophy of continual progress in many ways still dominates the modern conception of life. If accepted, it produces the curious result that one can be harassed by the regret of having been born - of living - in too early a stage of this upward process, since any stage previous to the final and definitive one is necessarily premature in the sense that it has not yet attained plenitude. The fullness of being human escapes every individual man of every epoch. It is not for him, but is reserved for the privileged ones who will be born in the last and perfect stage of the whole process [15].

It is natural to hold, in opposition to this, that progress toward fullness should be a possibility for each one; otherwise, he or she is condemned to frustration. If the conditions for human fulfillment can be finally achieved only in some eventual future, then no one is offered the possibility of present or actual self-realization.

That was the psychological error of Marxism, with its message to people that it is worthwhile to live with five-year plans - for the tomorrow that will inaugurate the perfect society. But when tomorrow arrived, and the perfect society did not accompany it ... Not that the panorama in the Western world is necessarily more satisfactory. After so many decades of developed materialist liberalism, the signs are there that society may not hold together. Much is made of the greater sexual freedom that has been achieved; yet it is very debatable whether it has led to greater happiness. The freedom that depends on and originates from mutual trust and esteem, from respect and fidelity, survives in the family - in some families - or in isolated groups of friends. The freedom to pursue happiness is still there, but people are less and less sure about how to attain the object of that pursuit.

One of the principal parameters of progress is life expectancy. Every life-program - every aspect of human progress - seems definitively limited by the fact of death. Man is not immortal and yet would like to be. If he succeeded in defeating death, it would be the greatest progress in the whole of history, a new stage of humanity. But even then it is not sure that human fulfillment or happiness would be reached. In Rider Haggard's novel She, the mysterious African queen has discovered the flame that constantly renews life, but it brings her less and less happiness, and in the end, destruction.

The increasing number of suicides among young people seems to suggest that in the absence of lasting happiness or of the hope of reaching it, life for many is not acceptable, much less immortality. Immortality without happiness is hell. Today more and more unhappy persons feel they cannot endure life. But are they sure, do they have any guarantee, that putting an end to life - by suicide or voluntary euthanasia - also puts an end to unhappiness? It is not possible to find a certain answer to this question.

The importance of meaning

Since the 1960s, modern society has fallen deeply under the sway of so-called humanistic psychology or psychologism. One of its concerns is to free us from the "historic Western compulsion" of looking for a meaning to personal life. Existence, it is said, is not to be explained but to be used, and its only purpose is "an intensely private sense of well-being to be generated in the living of life itself" [16]. If at times we 'feel bad', psychological therapy is there to help us 'feel good' again.

But can we feel good about life if we cannot make sense of it? The Viennese psychiatrist, Viktor Frankl, holds that an absolutely indispensable human need is to find a meaning to one's life. If this life has no real meaning, it becomes reduced to an ultimate absurdity. Frankl speaks of "the existential vacuum which is the mass neurosis of the present time" [17]. Man is distinctive in his ability and need to "challenge" the meaning of life. As Frankl writes elsewhere, "it is reserved for man alone to find his very existence questionable, to experience the whole dubiousness of being" [18]. The meaning and purpose of life - the origin and destiny of man - is a question that every thinking person must face. Only two alternatives exist:

1) man and life as absurdities, driven by instincts which lead nowhere. A world dominated by fate, or, rather, by chance, since fate implies a certain predetermined order; or

2) man and life directed toward some higher goal: toward ideas or realities which lead a person above the material or instinctive level. Order in the world, and meaning in personal and social life. Meaning too in freedom itself since, through it, man can personally aim for and achieve his goal - or fail to do so. Awareness therefore of the risk of freedom, for one cannot really believe in any true personal freedom without introducing the sense of risk into one's life. I am free; I can choose between alternatives. I can choose well - or badly; attain my goal or miss it. In the next chapter we will examine this further.

Free, but not autonomous

This is the second way of conceiving human freedom. Man is a free subject, capable of fulfillment. He is free, but he is neither self-sufficient nor autonomous - in the sense of being a law to himself, totally independent of other laws. The fundamental parameters - the possibilities and limits of his being or his becoming - are a given reality. His "definition" therefore already appears as a challenge. Everyone is born as a human being; not everyone becomes a man or a woman in the full sense. Every person, from birth, begins to develop an image that over the years acquires (or loses) substance, clarity, definition, in which one recognizes - or fails to recognize - a truly human image. From its beginning every individual life is endowed with a basic program, but it is a program yet to be executed; it can succeed or fail.

The outline of human fulfillment which we will present rests on this premise. Man appears as a being with the inner resources to freely fulfill himself. At the same time nothing suggests that his fulfillment is an automatic process, or one that he can achieve by simply "expressing" whatever he finds inside himself [19]; for not all the possible modes of self-expression are necessarily human or humanizing.

Anthropology remains a superficial science if it is content to study the question of man's "being", without at the same time examining that of his "becoming". An anthropology of freedom, such as is proposed in these pages, must consider both; and consider moreover right and wrong ways of "being man", and especially right and wrong ways of "becoming man". It should be clear that the two concepts of "being free", on the one hand, and "becoming human", on the other, stand in delicate balance. If one is free, one may or may not become human, i.e. achieve the fullness of one's human potential. There may be many ways of reaching the goal of "fulfilled" humanity, but there are certainly some ways by which it will not be reached. This is the sense in which we use "right" and "wrong" in our anthropological study.

While humanity is a datum, something "given" to each one of us, it is, we repeat, also a challenge, something to be constructed by each one. Just as architecture, in studying the right ways of building a house, implicitly or explicitly indicates the wrong ways, so any anthropology that takes account of man's freedom cannot evade the issue of right and wrong ways of building a truly human life: ways by which one reinforces one's basic humanity and constructs its fullness, and ways by which one weakens and undermines it. Our humanity has a double aspect. It is not only a common foundation on which each one's life rests, but also an individual building erected by each which becomes in the end a personalized and genuine embodiment of fulfilled human living. Or a half-finished and rickety structure. Or a disfigured ruin.

So, while this is intended to be a work of anthropology and not of ethics, we do propose what we regard as a "right" approach to human living, and consequently consider certain approaches to be "wrong" (anthropologically rather than morally speaking), in the sense that they just don't work; rather than humanizing they dehumanize personal life.

Man is a being with a destiny, that is with a project or program to develop, a personal history to trace: the unique history of his life, for which he alone is responsible. He is given a set purpose to turn into reality [20], or to reduce to failure. Man is a free subject, capable of attaining self-realization; but not by orbiting around himself, or "expanding" himself in just any way. He does not "program" himself; he is, rather, programmed - to be human. Only he, however, can execute the program properly. If he does so, he gives to his humanity a totally unique and fulfilled expression. Anthropology seeks to study man, so as to trace out what the program of being human - of becoming fulfilledly human - means.

But man's freedom also makes him capable of self-frustration - that is, of ending up as something less (perhaps much less) than human. Should we dismiss as totally groundless the fears of some people that certain contemporary scientific endeavors run the danger of dehumanizing humanity? Yet the greater danger is that individuals will dehumanize themselves.

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We have traced out some major parameters for our study. Distinguishing between a determinist anthropology and one which considers man to be free, we rejected the determinist point of view. True human growth posits the exercise of personal freedom. So far as the principles that govern this process of development are concerned, we also maintain that it is not a matter of "self-definition", nor can it consist just in a simple "response to self". It is to given realities which lie outside himself or higher than himself, that man must respond. On this depends his fully human development. He needs to "open" himself and rise "above" himself. We will try to show what this can mean.

In short, we have differentiated between a closed and reductive anthropology and one that is open. The former, despite attributing to man a freedom apparently without limits, leaves him in fact imprisoned in a life of narrow horizons. The latter, by conceiving freedom in relation with values, opens up the horizons of life. We note, without surprise, the importance which the two themes of freedom and of values possess within this anthropological analysis.

If one asks whether the differences noted here are between an optimistic anthropological view and a pessimistic one, the answer has to be carefully qualified. The view of man as an autonomous being actually turns out to be pessimistic. Its apparent optimism - man standing higher than law and open to limitless possibilities - is immediately proved false in practical life. The man who tries to fulfill himself, without laws or standards to be respected, destroys himself. He indeed places himself at the center of a "great" world - great to his imagination, ambition or selfishness - but which is really a jail whose walls ultimately close in on him. This oppressive twilight, at the end of a life lived without respect for higher values, is usually more evident in the man of action (Napoleon, for instance, or Hitler). It may be more difficult to verify in persons of less exceptional external action, or in those whose activity is mainly intellectual. Yet it can be noted in the last days of not a few artists and thinkers (Vincent van Gogh, Stefan Zweig, Arthur Koestler ...); and more and more today in the general acceptance, as a licit personal option, of having oneself euthanized - which is simply a mode of suicide. If a person takes his own life, it is because he no longer sees any motive for living, any value in what surrounds him.

The central theme of Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina - one of the great novels of all time - illustrates how to follow "one's right to be happy" can lead to despair and self-destruction. Anna is a woman of passionate and sensitive heart; but her love is emotional, no more, and fundamentally self-seeking. She feels she can do anything for love, but not without it. She looks after an abandoned child, but admits "my heart is not big enough" to care for a whole orphanage of dirty children. While she is deeply attached to her own son, this is not enough to keep her faithful to her husband for whom she no longer feels any love. She gradually yields to the passionate attraction of a young officer; but her infidelity to her husband and son leads to a revulsion of feeling - against her love, her lover, and herself. The whole world becomes intolerable to her, existence is now hateful and she kills herself.

The mental attitude of the suicide is perfectly depicted in Anna's last thoughts and judgments: everyone (and everything) takes on a petty and senseless character, the people she sees around her seem mean and contemptible as never before; despising each other, filling their lives with empty activity, pointless interests, and stupid laughter: "Why do they speak. Why do they laugh? Everything is just lies, everything is falsehood, everything is deception, everything is evil ... I will escape from everybody and from my own self" [21].

Does it follow, then, that the alternative view of man - as a free but not autonomous being - deserves to be called an optimistic anthropology? It might be more accurate to call it realistic. It tends to a basic optimism, but without neglecting the presence of powerful negative elements or factors in man which can destroy him. It is an anthropology which takes into consideration both the dignity and the greatness of man - his potentiality toward everything - , and his misery: his tendency toward nothing. This is the quality of true anthropology; it always offers a dramatic vision of man, never one that is banal.

We have considered distinct views of man: conceived as a being under the control of impersonal forces; or as a free being, also with the varieties that this possibility offers. We have concluded that he is free, but not autonomous. He is not capable of fulfilling himself from within, of searching, finding, creating his own standards of development with a sovereign freedom that is bound by no given limits. On the contrary, his fulfillment calls for a free response to objective values that lie outside him and above him. To fulfill himself, man, in possession and exercise of his freedom, must therefore be open to values outside himself, and be prepared to respond and to rise to them. This is the line of thought we mean to develop in the pages that follow.

Notes
[1] "Man" is understood here in a genderless sense; i.e. it covers both sexes indiscriminately. It is used in the same general sense throughout the present work, except in cases that will be obvious from the context.
[2] "No period like the present has had so many and such varied notions on man. None has succeeded like ours in presenting its knowledge about man so effectively and fascinatingly, and in communicating it so rapidly and easily. It is also true however that no period has known less than ours what man is. Man has never assumed such a problematic aspect as in our days": M. Heidegger, Kant e il problema della metafisica, Genoa, 1962, pp. 275-276.
[3] The more you control people's freedom, the more you guarantee your market. Nothing is so profitable and reassuring as a captive consumer public.
[4] Cf. C. S. Lewis: The Abolition of Man, p. 79.
[5] Here we use the term "autonomous" in its literal sense, as implying that man, at least in his spiritual faculties, is subject to no law outside himself.
[6] "The idea of self-realization is peculiar to modern philosophy": Leonardo Polo, Presente y Futuro del Hombre, Madrid, 1993, p. 193. If the idea is taken in an immanent sense, if man is "causa sui", it would follow that he has his own fulfillment within himself.
[7] 112 S. Ct. 2791, 2807 [1992].
[8] It also leads individualism to its necessary and ultimate consequence, which is to eliminate any basis for a cohesive society; cf. Appendix II.
[9] A. E. Hotchner: Papa Hemingway, p. 328. Was there perhaps some element of anticipatory obsession in Hemingway's love for guns? In an early novel he had written of them, precisely in the context of failed lives: "those admirable American instruments so easily carried, so sure of effect, so well designed to end the American dream when it becomes a nightmare" (To Have and Have Not (1937), Ch. 24).
[10] "'Am I happy with myself?' ... this sort of moral puberty" (Emmanuel Mounier: Oeuvres, II, 525). And the more contented the self, the less it grows out of its puberty.
[11] "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that man was endowed by his Creator with certain inalienable rights; and that chief among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness".
[12] In our individualistic consumer society the ideas that happiness can either be bought (hard cash will automatically bring you happiness) or be procured by calculation (if you are smart enough you will be happy), die hard; but many who try them out find them dead.
[13] By "evolutionism" we wish to designate the restrictive and more ideological versions of evolutionary theory, which make the development of the world a necessary and immanent process.
[14] Christopher Dawson brings out the point that when progress is conceived as an inevitable or "mechanical" process, man himself comes to be seen as merely "part of the machine" (Progress and Religion (1929), Ch. 9).
[15] Evolution: the fullness of existence escapes me; it lies not in the attainable present, but in a (for me) unattainable future. The dignity of "man" is not achieved fully; he is always in a process of becoming, in a state of maturation. Therefore each individual person still is and always will be "immature".
[16] Philip Rieff: The Triumph of the Therapeutic, p. 261.
[17] Man's Search for Meaning, p. 131.
[18] The Doctor and the Soul, p. 21.
[19] Frankl holds that meaning is found not through mere "self-expression", or as something simply emerging from existence, but, rather, by a confronting of existence. He rejects the existentialist thesis (of Sartre and others) that "man invents himself, designs his own 'essence' ... The meaning of our existence is not invented by ourselves, but rather detected": Man's Search ..., pp. 100-101.
[20] "Obvious paradox: man's essence and end reside in us, not as an acquired good, but as a promise, a hope, a chance ..." G. Thibon: Retour au Réel, Paris, 1946, p. 224.
[21] Anna Karenina, Part VII, Ch. 31.