Tom Lindholtz wrote to Abet, on October 20, 2006:
I have a question I want to ask of a bunch of pastors. (How do I subscribe
to abet?)
Specifically: I've been reading "Man's Search For Meaning", by Viktor E. Frankl, the Holocaust survivor/psychiatrist. And I've been planning a possible study of John for our small group. I happened to read something last night that made me wonder if there was another application for John 1:1-2 that I'd never heard before. If you know any other languages, then you know how certain concepts may be more difficult for one language group
to translate than for another. We think in English terms; here is something from someone who thought in German terms. It has a couple facets.
Frankl offers the familiar quote:
He who has a 'why' to live can bear almost any 'how'.
- Friedrich Nietzsche
And in Frankl's context he uses it in regard to the question, How can people survive such horriffic experiences? But more broadly, it speaks to the vital need to have a sense of meaning (dare I say 'purpose'?) in life. And, if PDL is any evidence at all, it suggests that the need is no less real today than it was at Dachau or Bukenwald or Auschwitz 63 years ago.
But then Frankl talks about his theory: "Let me explain why I have employed the term: 'logotherapy' as the name for my theory. Logos is a Greek word which denotes 'meaning.' Logotherapy .
focuses on the meaning of human existence as well as on man's search for such a meaning. According to logotherapy, this striving to find a meaning in one's life is the primary motivational force in man. That is why I speak of a will to meaning in contrast to the pleasure principle (or as we could
also term it, the will to pleasure) which Freudian psychoanalysis is centered, as well as in contrast to the will to power on which Adlerian psychology, using the term "striving for superiority, is focused.
Man's search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life and not a "secondary rationalization" of instinctual drives. This meaning is unique and specific in that it must and can be fulfilled by him alone; only then does it achieve a significance which will satisfy his own will to meaning. There are some authors who contend that meanings and values are 'nothing but
defense mechanisms, reaction formations and sublimations.' But as for myself, I would not be willing to live merely for the sake of my "defense mechanisms," nor would I be ready to die merely for the sake of my 'reaction formations.' Man, however, is able to live and even to die for the sake of his ideals and values!
- Man's Search For Meaning, Viktor E. Frankl
Here is where I wonder if, assuming Frankl's translation of 'Logos' is correct or at least an acceptable alternative meaning, we have been done a disservice by the theologs who've given us "word" as a translation. Because to English speakers "word" doesn't carry the rich contextual information that it does (apparently) in Greek. Consider an alternative reading of John
1:1-2: "In the beginning was the Meaning, and the Meaning was with God, and the Meaning was God. He was with God in the beginning." Or even, "In the beginning was the Meaning of life, and the Meaning of life was with God, and the Meaning of life was God." Sadly, while I think that is the essence of
Christianity, I don't think that message is very often caught by the unbelievers out there.
All I can say is, I hope it makes sense from a linguistic standpoint, because I love the way it enriches my understanding. It is not to say that 'word' is a bad translation. Rather, it is to say that 'word' is a much more impoverished word in English than it was in Greek, and that 'meaning' may, in fact, convey the original meaning more accurately or more thoroughly. After all, what do we use words for if not to convey meaning of something that is otherwise abstract?
All comments, additions, deletion, corrections appreciated.
Tom Lindholtz
Here's my response:
Hi Tom!
What a great question. And Ann, I can't wait to see how you answer this. You're our resident Greek scholar!
Coming at it from another angle, I am fascinated by the way certain words get replaced by other words, as a result of changing worldviews. For example, people used to call things "right or wrong," "good or bad." Now they say "appropriate or inappropriate." Similarly, people used to search for truth. Now they search for meaning.
In both cases, the shift of usage corresponds to the shift from a realist to a subjectivist metaphysic and epistemology. That is, once upon a time before Descartes, truth was a relational matter of knowing between an existing thing and the being who knew it. All creation was held to be intelligible, and moreover able to be understood in a variety of ways: through intuition, through discursive reason, through imagination. Finally, there were always two beings involved in knowing a thing: God, by whom all things were created, and sustained in their being, and the human knower. Everything-- insofar as it exists--was seen to be true (and good, and one). From this perspective, evil is the privation of being; the absence of goodness and truth. We have a vague memory of this whenever we say things like, "Now that's a real Labrador retriever" or "Abe turned out to be a false friend" or even "Here is a true Israelite, in whom there is nothing false."
But ever since Kant, "knowing" has been trimmed to mean just discursive, inductive/deductive forms of reason, and similarly the domain of "truth" has been narrowed to refer to only that which is measurable and predictable--i.e. the stuff of science. Now as wonderful as science is, people need more than just that to be fulfilled as human beings. Post-Kantian worldviews, despairing of any truth outside of science, thus settle instead for meaning--as in, "If I can't have truth, at least I can have meaning!" Religious discourse and sometimes even ethical discourse, have been considered outside the realm of science and truth, and so they are seen as domains of "meaning."
Thus we get folks like Stephen Jay Gould who say science and religion do not conflict because science is about truth claims, while religion is not. IMO this is damnation by marginalization. Richard Dawkins, on the other hand, is an atheist with no patience for Christians, but at least he appreciates that evangelical Christians, traditional Catholics and the orthodox aren't just saying their faith is something that makes them feel better or gives them a sense of purpose. He sees that we are making truth claims about God, the world and humanity, about the way things are objectively, and not only subjectively.
There are thus two sides to the "why?" question: the subjective meaning a thing elicits from me, and the objective truth, corresponding to some reality independent of my construction. I would suggest that if "Logos" is understood as "meaning" it is only because it first and foremost refers to Him who is the Way, the Truth and the life. From my finite, human, and premodern point of view, meaning is thus contingent upon truth. So here's another way to put it: before I was, He is, so that in the beginning was the Truth.
Blessings in Christ,
Beth
P.S. The Perseus Project has quite a workup on the word, "logos" from the Liddell-Scott lexicon. See http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0057%3Aentry%3D%2363773
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