QuestionsDoes life have a meaning?Meaning is not invented, it is discovered
Does life have a meaning?A given meaning

Meaning is not invented, it is discovered

Logotherapy; three ways to meaning; "a why to live for"; tragic optimism

Viktor Frankl 1905 · 1997Psychiatrist and camp survivor: we find meaning by giving ourselves to a cause, and happiness comes as a by-product.
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What it claims

The meaning of life is discovered and not invented, and it is unconditional: it even includes the potential meaning of unavoidable suffering.

Why

Meaning lies in the world, not in our head: we find it through a work, an encounter, or our attitude to unavoidable suffering.

The same idea through history
Friedrich Nietzsche1889Frankl cites Nietzsche's saying ("He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how") as the guiding motto of every effort to support a prisoner. We have not checked the saying in Nietzsche's own text: only Frankl's passage is quoted here.
Viktor Frankl1946Frankl wrote his account in 1946 (Ein Psycholog erlebt das Konzentrationslager). The three ways to meaning are set out in the "Logotherapy in a Nutshell" part of the English edition.
In short

"Meaning is not invented, it is discovered" is an argument by Viktor Frankl (Man's Search for Meaning, 1946 (English ed., 1959-1985), 1946) on the question "Does life have a meaning?" (answer: a given meaning). Its claim: The meaning of life is discovered and not invented, and it is unconditional: it even includes the potential meaning of unavoidable suffering. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P4). AskPhilosophy presents 3 objections, 3 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

Man's Search for Meaning, 1946 (English ed., 1959-1985)
Valid with an implicit premise

Frankl, a Jewish psychiatrist from Vienna, spends three years in the Nazi camps, Auschwitz among them. There he notices that those who have an aim, a "why", hold out better. He draws a simple idea from it: we are wrong to ask "what is the meaning of my life?", because it is life that questions us, hour after hour, through the situations it puts us in. Meaning is therefore not a thought one invents inside oneself, it is a task one discovers in the world. There are three ways to find it: doing a work or a deed, living a love or an experience, and choosing one's attitude toward suffering that cannot be avoided. Even dying, one can thus give one's life a meaning. This is what makes it, in his view, meaningful without condition.

P1The true meaning of life is to be discovered in the world rather than within man or his own psyche, as though it were a closed system.
P2We can discover this meaning in three ways: by creating a work or doing a deed; by experiencing something or encountering someone; and by the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering.
P3There are situations in which one is cut off from one's work and one's enjoyment. But the unavoidability of suffering can never be ruled out: so there always remains an attitude to choose.
P4 · implicit premiseIf, at every moment, a way to meaning remains open, then life has a meaning at every moment, up to the last.
Therefore the meaning of life is discovered and not invented, and it is unconditional: it even includes the potential meaning of unavoidable suffering.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P4, the computer finds a case where a way is open, where it would give a meaning if followed, but where nobody follows it: that person's life then has no meaning, even though it could have had one.
Valid with P4. P2 says each of the three ways gives access to a meaning. P3 says that if the first two are closed, the third remains open. From this we deduce that at least one way is open at any moment. P4 turns this into the conclusion: at every moment, life has a meaning. Without P4, one can grant the first three and refuse to conclude that life as a whole has a meaning: a possible meaning is not yet a real meaning, and whoever does not see it does not have it. P1 serves the second half of the conclusion ("discovered and not invented").
Analogy. A crossroads always has at least one open road, even when night falls and two roads are cut by snow. Frankl says: there always remains at least one road, that of attitude. But, as with a crossroads, you still have to walk on it: the road does not carry you.

Objections

3

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism 1945 · attacks premise 1

For Sartre, it is the opposite: "there is no sense in life a priori. Life is nothing until it is lived; but it is yours to make sense of, and the value of it is nothing else but the sense that you choose". Meaning does not wait in the world: it is born from each person's choice. To look for a meaning "to be discovered" would be to believe it exists in advance, which nothing shows.

Frankl replies
see the argument
Frankl Frankl, Logotherapy in a Nutshell (without naming Sartre)
Frankl writes that ultimately man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but must recognize that it is he who is asked: each man is questioned by life, and can only answer to life by answering for his own life.
The debate goes on (our summary) Frankl does not name Sartre in this passage: the reply is therefore reconstructed by us. The two authors agree on one point: each person's responsibility is central. They part on the origin of meaning. For Frankl, it is the situation that asks the question and the person who answers; for Sartre, it is the person who posits the value. Frankl himself nevertheless leaves each person the choice of what he feels responsible for (society, conscience, or a higher authority): logotherapy "must leave to him the option for what, to what, or to whom he understands himself to be responsible". This is the point the next criticism exploits. See the argument "sartre-sens-a-creer".
Susan Wolf, Meaning in Life and Why It Matters 2010 · attacks premise 2

If meaning is what each person discovers in his tasks, what distinguishes a true meaning from an impression of meaning? Wolf argues that meaning cannot be reduced to what the subject feels. She writes that it is not guaranteed that the subject's own assessment of the worth of his object "is privileged", and that someone who loves smoking pot all day or doing endless crossword puzzles, even without restraint, does not thereby make his life meaningful. A meaningful life requires an object that is worth it, not only a feeling.

Frankl replies
see the argument
Frankl Frankl, The Case for a Tragic Optimism (without naming Wolf)
Frankl writes that logotherapy conceives of conscience as a prompter which, if need be, indicates the direction in which we have to move in a given life situation.
The debate goes on (our summary) Wolf writes in 2010, after Frankl's death (1997), and does not cite him in the excerpt we read: the confrontation is reconstructed by us. In the quoted passage, Frankl says how one perceives meaning (conscience, which evaluates the situation with a hierarchy of values rooted, according to him, in our biological heritage) but not why this hierarchy would be objectively right. Wolf's objection therefore stands: is a meaning "felt" as such enough for a life that counts? Frankl does set limits: he writes that avoidable suffering should be removed, since it is then "masochistic rather than heroic". See the argument "wolf-sens".
A
An objection that arises from Frankl's own account 1946 · attacks the conclusion

Frankl reports that whoever had a "why" held out better. But he also writes: "We who have come back, by the aid of many lucky chances or miracles - whatever one may choose to call them - we know: the best of us did not return." If chance decided survival, the meaning one gives oneself proves nothing about one's life, and the general conclusion (an unconditional meaning) no longer rests on the camps.

Frankl replies
Frankl Frankl, Logotherapy in a Nutshell
Frankl says he was asking a different question from his comrades: not "will we survive?" but "has all this suffering, this dying around us, a meaning?" For, he adds, if not, then ultimately there is no meaning to survival.
The debate goes on (our summary) This reply shifts the debate: Frankl does not claim that meaning guarantees survival, but that it does not depend on survival. This is consistent with the conclusion (a meaning even before death), but makes the thesis hard to test: no fact from the camps can contradict it. Frankl also describes cases where lost hope precedes death (the week between Christmas 1944 and New Year), which are a psychiatrist's observations, not a study. The link between "why" and survival remains an impression, not a proof.