The paper aims to present two selected perspectives of an anti-nihilistic critique, both of which rest on philosophy: Viktor Frankl’s logotherapy and Eugene Rose’s Orthodox thought, the former being also a school of psychotherapy, and the latter drawing on Christian and, specifically, Eastern Orthodox theology.
Frankl’s logotherapy, or therapy through meaning, which he had developed as a neurologist, psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, views man as a being whose spiritual dimension requires a self-discovery of meaning, referring to both their existence and every single event and experience that happens to them. Logotherapy rejects meaninglessness and nihilism and considers them a harmful philosophy which is the malady of the contemporary civilization, depriving man of the most important awareness: that their life is meaningful under all circumstances.
Rose’s critique of nihilism emerges from his personal experience of hedonism, atheism, nihilism, beatnik culture, and later on Buddhism, and his desperate search for spiritual values which was completed with his discovery of the teaching of the Eastern Orthodox Church. He wrote his major philosophical work ‘Nihilism: The Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age’ in 1962, in the year when he was received into the Orthodox Church in San Francisco, some 15 years before he was ordained a hieromonk, adopted the name of Father Seraphim, and co-set up an ascetic monastery in Platina, California.
Both Frankl ( 1905-1997) and Rose (1934-1982) argue that spirituality and religiousness provide a remedy for existential emptiness. Frankl, himself a Jew, who experienced the hell of the Holocuast, appreciates the meaning-oriented philosophy of a religious system as its strongest manifestation, although his philosophy does not advocate any religion. Rose, who experienced the hell of addiction and nihilistic life in the US after WW2, turns against the philosophy he himself used to espouse, and exposes its traps and hazards, which had barely survived.
The paper is meant to be a conceptual oral presentation, on-site or online, and if there is a symposium on (anti)nihilism, it could be a part of that.