This document discusses philosophical perspectives on the human person and spirituality. It describes philosophical anthropology as examining the constitution and existence of humans holistically and normatively. Phenomenology is discussed as a method to analyze experiences and awareness. Max Scheler's view of spirit, psyche, and body as modes of human existence is presented, as is Nicolai Hartmann's division of reality into inanimate, organic, psychic, and intellectual-spiritual levels. The spiritual is described as capable of self-reflection, directionality, and sharing meanings intersubjectively. Situationality is introduced as how one relates to their world. The differences between psychic and spiritual awareness are outlined, with the spiritual described as objectifying experiences through concepts and

1. Logotheory as
Philosophical Anthropology,
Phenomenological Philosophy, and
Phenomenological Practice
THE FUTURE OF LOGOTHERAPY
2ND INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS ON
LOGOTHERAPY AND EXISTENTIAL ANALYSIS
VIENNA, MAY 15-18, 2014
Timo Purjo, PhD, Diplomate in Logotherapy
Accredited member of the International Association of
Logotherapy and Existential Analysis

2. Philosophical Anthropology
• Philosophical anthropology is a field of philosophy, that deals with
questions of the human person’s constitution
• The approach of philosophical anthropology differs distinctly from that
of e.g. psychology or medicine, which concentrate in empiric
observation and interpretation of one specific side of the human being
• Philosophy approaches the problem of humanity structurally – what is
the human constituted of, and how is he existing in the world – but also
normatively – why is the human existing, and what should he be like
• The result of philosophic-anthropological research is a holistic,
philosophical conception of the human person vs. a one-sided
psychology of the man (psychogenic approach) or pathology of the
man (pathogenic approach)
©Timo Purjo

3. The Philosophy of Spirituality
• In philosophy, practically always the spiritual has been considered as
the most important mode of existence of the human being
• René Descartes’ (1596-1650) contribution was that he proved and
stated arguments for the stance that the human soul (psychic) and
human spirit (spiritual) are elements of the human awareness
• Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) clarified the question of the spiritual by
pointing out that the foundations of thinking and knowing are not
somewhere beyond, but they are included in the operating principles
of the human awareness
• The 1900s: Phenomenology (phenomenological philosophy)
©Timo Purjo

4. The Philosophy of Spirituality
• Phenomenology in a sense of analyzing the awareness and acts of
experiencing is at least 2500 years old, but in a modern sense it has been
founded by Franz Brentano (1838-1917) and Edmund Husserl (1859-1938)
• Max Scheler (1874-1928)
The spiritual is a central factor in the individual structure of the person, the
two others are lived body and soul (psychic)
The spiritual experiencing is of high-grade and consequently most genuinely
human
Scheler aimed for separating the psychic and spiritual, but didn’t succeed
Scheler has convincingly argued for the differentiation of awareness with
the help of the auxiliary concepts of psychic and spiritual
It is clear that the spiritual differs from the psychic, but their boundary in
the awareness is wavering and they are so intimately intertwined, that it is
inevitable that they have always to be examined together as an entity of
awareness  they can not be clearly and completely separated
©Timo Purjo

5. The Philosophy of Spirituality
• Nicolai Hartmann (1882-1950) has analyzed being of the spiritual perhaps
in greatest detail and most accurately within phenomenology
• He divides more distinct than Scheler the modes of being (or reality) in four
levels: inanimate-material, organic, psychic and intellectual-spiritual
• The lower level is always a precondition for the realization of the higher.
Every level means always something new.The reduction of the higher level
to the lower is not possible. On each level own categories and concepts have
to be used.
• The personal, subjective spirit exists and functions in the awareness of
human person. It realizes itself in constantly continuing occurrence of
awareness – in decisions and choices – as a result of which the spirit, in a
way, grows into the surrounding reality. It has to be free as it exists only in
the decisions and choices it takes by itself.
©Timo Purjo

6. The Philosophy of Spirituality
• The spiritual is capable of self-consciousness during the human person’s
phases of time. It can take a directional standpoint towards the person’s
course of life.The personal spirit is living and also subject to death. It can not
be transmitted to another person and it is not inherited. Everyone has to
develop it as a part of his person.
• Hartmann emphasizes often, that the individual psychic awareness
dissociates people and the spiritual associates them.The significations, in
which the spirit is alive and acts, can be shared by means of languages.
• From current perspective Hartmann’s analysis appears to be an end result,
that has been achieved in the philosophical development – but of course it is
not the final truth about spirit
©Timo Purjo

7. The Philosophy of Spirituality
• Spiritual – in a sense of ”spiritualistic” – experiences that are exceeding the
mortal and brain-bound human awareness, can not be included in this
concept of factual personal spiritual
• The concept of spirituality as Christian or other religious faith (geistlich) can
be regarded as a subordinate term within the general conception of spiritual.
It can be considered as transcending to spiritual (geistlich) contents of
experiencing instead of gliding to a structurally other level (or dimension) or
transcendence in a spiritualistic sense
©Timo Purjo

8. Philosophical Anthropology
• Frankl – as well as the Finnish philosopher (in the first place psychologist)
Lauri Rauhala – founded his own philosophical conception of the person on
Max Scheler’s philosophical anthropology and Nicolai Hartmann’s ontology
• Easy reading:
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Scheler
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolai_Hartmann
• More advanced reading:
• http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scheler/
• http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nicolai-hartmann/
©Timo Purjo

9. One Philosophical Conception of the Person
• Basic modes of human existence: Corporeality, Awareness, and Situationality
(Lauri Rauhala)
• Frankl’s conception of the person could (should?!) be completed with
situationality
• Situationality shows how the world belongs to the individual in addition to
the fact that the person is part of the world.
• Situation marks off the part of the world that a certain person, an individual,
gets into relationship with - in other words, in which the world is encountered
when existence is realized. Situation contains all that an individual has got
into personal relationships with, either consciously or unconsciously.
©Timo Purjo

10. The Significance of Situationality in the Person
• Selfish, unethical action does not concern only outsiders because this other
person that belongs to our situation is also part of us and we are also part of the
other through the other’s situation. So the other person is not in fact a
completely separate entity, but part of our evolving self.
• Doing e.g. psychic harm to another person by a selfish, unethical deed affects us
as well. It resonates in our own awareness as an experiences of feeling unwell.
• Correspondingly, ethically good deeds resonate in
our own awareness as experiences of our own
well-being. This provides a phenomenological
explanation to Frankl’s thought, that the
discovery of meaning gives us a reason to be
happy; the experience of happiness is the side-
effect of discovering meaning.
©Timo Purjo

11. The Personal Spiritual Level / Dimension
©Timo Purjo

12. • The psychical awareness
• Psychic = non-objectivized individual fundamental experience of
awareness (Scheler). In this sense psychic is also possible for animals
• In a psychic state the person only undergoes
experiences, basic moods or emotions (aggression, anxiety, fear,
joy, lust, pleasure, sadness, satisfaction, etc.), instinctual needs,
desires, passion, wants, indefinable states, etc.
• but he doesn’t observe them as such as phenomena
phenomenologically, by means of phenomenological analysis)
• A person is in his psychic state completely with his experience, without
being able to distance himself from current occurring in the
awareness. Hence he is in a state of e.g. irritation or anger.Then he
might also act accordingly.
Differencies between the psychic and spiritual

13. The spiritual awareness
• By means of attitude change in awareness the person can bring a recent affect
under examination as a matter-of-fact. One’s own psychic state of awareness
becomes then a fact or object. Hence the function of the spiritual can be called as
factualizing or objectifying.The person in a way distances in his awareness from
being in power of anger to a higher level, where he can evaluate his earlier
experience.This makes it possible for him to reflect afterwards on what happened
in a more objective manner. As a consequence might well be guilt and remorse.
• At the spiritual level, the person can also form a concept of his affects – e.g. anger –
which enables him to recall over and over again in his consciousness the general
essence of this phenomenon – to understand at any time what anger is, without
actually having to live it through by getting angry.
• By means of concepts the person can communicate about his psychic states to
other people intersubjectively
• Conceptualizing and the possibility of managing of generalized information on
phenomena, is according to Scheler the most essential feature of the
spirituality
Differencies between the psychic and spiritual

14. • The spiritual awareness
• Scheler emphasizes the participation of feelings in high-level
spiritual functions. Love and hatred are not psychic emotions, but
spiritual, intentional acts of the person, which Scheler categorizes as
"intentional feelings”. Love, compassion, sympathy etc. humanize
the human being and characterize him as a person. Love enhances
the ability to feel values as beauty, truth, goodness and holiness,
while hatred prevents from experiencing them.
• It is also important to notice, that factualizing doesn’t mean
rationalizing. Objectifying has to correspond to the nature of the
qualities of experiencing. Adequate is that a psychic emotion is
objectified with spiritual feelings.The wholeheartedness of an
attachment doesn’t manifest itself in rationalizing, but in that
spiritual level of feelings, that the person has achieved.
Differencies between the psychic and spiritual

15. The spiritual awareness
• The talk on spiritual growth and education and their goals is obscured by the lack of
precision of the concept of spirituality
• In order to give real content to spiritual being (or existence) some essential functions
of it can be sketched
• Knowing, conceptualizing
• Awareness of values: discovering values and purposes, respecting human worth and worth of
life in general, making decisions based on highest values
• Responsibility for oneself, fellow-men, nature and even for cosmic harmony
• Consciousness and actualization of self-developmental tasks: self-acceptance, enliven one’s
potentials for personal growth, sensitizing of experiencing love, holy and other highest values
• Consciousness of the transcendental dimension of one’s own existence
• Growing to an authentic personality with the goal of self-guidedness in one’s life, criticality to
mass behavior, independent creativity within personal possibilities
• Being socialized: fulfilling ethical principles in one’s life, enhancing the good of others,
constructive civil activism
Differencies between the psychic and spiritual

16. Spiritual refers also inViktor Frankl’s ontology to the
personal spiritual dimension or the human spirit
• Frankl’s contribution to philosophy of spirit is that he named and defined the
essential spiritual potentials in person in a supreme way
• “Therein rests really in our [Frankl’s] view also the whole dignity of the
spiritual being (geistigen Seins) and it’s precedence as insoluble-individual,
as irreducible personal being (personalen Seins)” 1
The Personal Spiritual Level / Dimension
1 ÄS 1. manuscript 1942. In Batthyany et al. (eds.)Viktor E. Frankl.
GesammelteWerke 4. Ärzliche Seelsorge etc., p.176
©Timo Purjo

17. The Personal Spiritual Level / Dimension
• Frankl1 endeavors to assure the self-justification of
the concrete (tangible, actual, real) spiritual,
the personal (personally) spiritual
• Frankl continues: ”our question could also be stated more precisely: we ask
if and how the psychotherapy is possible as valuing”
• Then he talks about the fundamental justification of valuing, the question of
instance: ”in name of which”, that thrusts into the world view
(Weltanschauung), the spiritual and the realm of the values.This is a
question of fairness of world view and cleanliness of methodology.
• In a whole section of (Ärztliche und priesterliche Seelsorge) Frankl points
out that psychotherapy and medical souls care should not be confused with
theology and religious pastoral care
1 ÄS 2007, pp.300-
©Timo Purjo

18. The Personal Spiritual Level / Dimension
• “In logotherapy the question about believing is focused to believing in a
comprehensive meaning, not to believing in God”1
• Meaning of life is philosophical-theoretically an axiom, as Frankl states; it has to be
taken for granted as the whole logotheory would collapse without it being true
• “Religion is one human phenomenon among all other phenomena, which
are encountered in logotherapy. For logotherapy religion is and can only be
an object (Gegenstand) – but not a location (Standort)”
• In German two different words
1. Geistig = spiritual, intellectual, mental; Geisteswissenschaften = human sciences
2. Geistlich = spiritual, clerical, priestly
• Frankl talks about the first one, geistig
1 ÄS 2007, p.296
©Timo Purjo

19. Other Spiritual Dimensions
• In LTEA the focus is in personal, spiritual abilities of the awareness that are
in common for as well atheists/agnostics/secular as religious individuals,
otherwise LTEA could not be considered as a philosofic-scientically credible
doctrine, but rather as some kind of belief system
• Frankl talks about open-door policy, which enables,
that an individual can enrich himself with other
spiritual dimension he beliefs in
• Frankl also states that he is happy if
reductionism (psychoanalysis) has not
succeeded in closing this gate to the
ultra-human (zum Ultra-humanen)
©Timo Purjo

20. TheTranscendent – someone or something?
• ”Existential analysis has to arrange a room for the immanence and furnish it
as possible, and only guard that the doors to transcendence are not blocked” 1
• ”Now it becomes also clear, that then the realm of the values must be a
transcending realm of objective and absolute facts” 2
•Frankl’s “10Theses on the Human Person”
•Frankl’s theory on person: an absolute necessary
clarification for his “dimensional ontology”!
(Logos und Existenz 1951, DerWille zum Sinn 1982, ÄS 2005-)
1 ÄS 2007, p.315, footnote 17. 2ÄS
2. manuscript 1945, Batthyany et al., p.213
©Timo Purjo

21. Viktor Frankl’s 10Theses on the Human Person
1. The person is an individual: the person is in-dividable, an oneness (Einheit)
2. The person is not only in-dividable, but also in-summable, a wholeness (Ganzheit);
the person as such can not be reproduced or procreated: only the organic, the
organism is reproduced, created by parental organisms.The person, the personal
spirit, the spiritual existence, can not be passed on by a human being.
3. Every individual Person is an absolute Novum (lat. for “new thing”). By a new
human being, who comes to the world, an absolute Novum is set in existence, to
reality.The spirit proves itself here to be real imponderable (an Imponderabile).
Only the “bricks” or the structure are reproducible.
4. The person is spiritual…
5. The person is existential…
6. The person is liable, responsible for itself…

22. Viktor Frankl’s 10Theses on the Human Person
7. The person is not only an oneness and a wholeness, but he constitutes,
establishes and guarantees a wholeness of lived body, soul (psychic). and
spirituality (leiblichen, seelischen und geistigen, cf. Scheler). A person
depicts a point of intersection, a crossing place of the three levels.These
levels of existence can not be separated clean enough from one another
(cf. Jaspers, N. Hartmann – reference by Frankl). However, the person is
not assembled of lived body, soul, and spirituality as it is a oneness and
wholeness. But within this oneness and wholeness, the spiritual in the
person is grappling with the lived body and the soul (psychic).
8. The person is dynamic. (At this point Frankl speaks about self-
distancing…)

23. Self-Distancing❶ and Self-Transcendence❷

24. Viktor Frankl’s 9.Thesis on the Human Person
©Timo Purjo

25. Viktor Frankl’s 10.Thesis on the Human Person
©Timo Purjo

26. Logos
©Timo Purjo

27. Viktor Frankl’s 10.Thesis on the Human Person
©Timo Purjo

28. Logotheory as Phenomenological Philosophy
©Timo Purjo
Rudolf Allers'
Phenomenology
of Psychiatry
Karl Jaspers'
Philosophy of
Existence
x)
x)
Edmund Husserl's
phenomenology
Max Scheler's
phenomenology
Martin Heidegger's
phenomenology
with special emphasis
on Ethics ofValues
with special emphasis
on Human Existence,
situationality x) Both psychiatrists and philosophers

29. Logotheory as Phenomenological Philosophy, and
Phenomenological Practice
• There is no separate philosophy of LTEA, LTEA is pure philosophy
• Existential analysis = phenomenological analysis of factors causing qualitative
problems in a person’s existence; “What causes suffering in a person’s life?”
• Logotherapy = phenomenological psychotherapy or counselling, in a Socratic
role of a midwife, helping the delivery of meanings and purposes from the
spiritual awareness; “What kind of meanings and purposes can be discovered
that cause happiness, a comprehensive experience of good life?”
• Based on the wayViktor Frankl practiced his occupation (see above), he can be
regarded as the forerunner of modern Philosophical Practice1
1 Instead of the German philosopher Gerd B. Achenbach,
who began in 1981, and has been given credit for being the first
©Timo Purjo