What An Afghan Woman Can Teach Us About Viktor Frankl's Philosophy

An ancient truth on a raid in Afghanistan

Prometheus Bound. Thomas Cole. 1847.

“You carry God within you, wretch, and you do not even know it.” — Epictetus

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In Man’s Search for Meaning, Victor Frankl wrote that what matters “… is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person’s life at a given moment.”¹ He is alluding to what remains when all else has been stripped away from us – our power of choice.

I remember the first time I understood the severity of what he meant.

I was in a sniper hide in Afghanistan watching over a ground unit conducting an assault. When they finished their mission, I and my team descended the craggy hills and paralleled them on our long walk back to camp. I had two ANASF (Afghan National Army Special Forces) operators with me and an interpreter since they did not speak English and I did not speak Pashto.

Our meditative march was broken by concussive cracks of machine gun fire and RPG blasts that thundered down the cavernous walls of the river valley. All four of us crouched behind a mud hedge that ran alongside a rutted dirt road as we and the other friendly units deeper in the forest came under fire. The enemy fighters were somewhere to our north using the dense orchards and crisscrossing hedges to hide their movements. I looked behind me at a compound surrounded by tall mud walls housing an inner courtyard. I had the interpreter tell the Special Forces operators to breach the metal double doors so I could get on the roof; I had a scoped rifle and I needed a bit of elevation.

They threw their shoulders against the doors which clanged open. I stepped into the packed dirt courtyard and saw a young woman with her back to me sitting on her heals near a fire. She stood, turned, and locked her eyes to mine. My perception of time had already slowed due to the firefight, but this moment made it freeze. I cannot remember any woman in all of my time in the tribal lands who locked eyes with me or any other man. This was not normal.

My first impression: the green and hazel shades of her eyes reminded me of the sounds of a fugue. My second impression: the men were jittery and twitchy from the gunfire but she was still as stone. My third impression, however, was what struck me: her eyes were rebellious.

She turned, crouched beneath the low door of a mud hut, and it was all over. I climbed the scrap-wood ladder to the roof.

That image rests in my mind alongside another image: the first time I stood in the desert and saw the Milky Way as it existed prior to the invention of electricity, every star sparkling in a broad swath of white splashed across the black arc of sky above me. There exists a kinship between the two. I want to know what it is. How was her rebellion possible in a world designed to drown out this light?  

What then was her world? She had never heard of Hermione Granger. She had never seen a chalkboard. She slept, ate, and walked amid goat, chicken, and human feces. The word “feminism” had never penetrated the deep river valley of her home. She possessed no light switch, no heating, no plumbing, no mattress, no phone, no internet, no books, no voting, and no rights. She did not own property – she was property. The brutal mountains and lack of education meant her slavery did not even need chains.

Her world, then, was not the cause of her rebellion.

These were not the rabid eyes of First World protesters holding picket signs that read, “We will not be oppressed,” but who do not know oppression. These were not the unseeing eyes of the developed world with its televisions and uncalloused hands. Nor were they the broken eyes in worn female faces across the rest of the tribal lands, eyes resigned to their fate, eyes cast down in submission.

This woman is a paradox. I can find no other way of unriddling this paradox than through negation. She did not need “negative visualization” because what she saw with her own eyes was already negative. She did not need to “practice worst case scenarios” because her life was already the worst case scenario. She did not need to “live according to nature” because nature was already freezing, burning, and killing everyone around her. She did not need to “view each day as its own unit,” because she already knew each day might be her last. She did not need to be “surprised by nothing” since she expected nothing in the first place. She did not need to “think on death” because death by bare knuckles, death by assault rifle, and death by steel blade was right in front of her for no other reason than because she was a woman.

It seems, then, that philosophy too was not the cause of her rebellion.

The skeptical reader might say, “You are delusional. She was just angry at the bearded gorilla breaking into her home with a long-gun in the middle of a firefight. She simply wanted to slip a shank into one of your kidneys as you climbed that ladder.” But if that were true, then with eyes like that she would not have hesitated for a second – and she would have gone for my throat, not my kidney.

“She was merely a fanatic. I have seen many eyes like hers.” I know fanatic eyes. They are so widely jacked open that you wonder if the fanatic has eyelids, and so radically intense and focused that you wonder if they have the capacity for doubt or compassion. This too: men in this corner of the earth are raised to be fanatics; women are raised to be broken.

“Let us say you are right and she was unbroken. But she was merely one woman.” And that is all it takes to prove it is possible to remain unbroken when all is else is bent on breaking you.

This has been a process of elimination. Like a black hole commanding the center of a galaxy that can only be seen by the light that bends and warps around it, all we have proven so far is the world that twists and turns around her.  

This unnamed woman is a paradox: a free slave. How could her eyes radiate rebellion when her whole life was designed so that she would never discover that her worth was greater than that of a goat or a mud brick? When she has no inspiration, no role models, and no advocates? On the spectrum of oppression, there are few woman on earth more oppressed than her – and yet she was free.    

All the layers that could explain her rebellion have now been torn away. What then? Did I witness the elemental proof of the “unmoved mover” in that arena of mud and oppression and flying bits of metal? The first spark of white in the blackness of space? That which is animated by nothing but itself? Was the rebellion in her eyes what I saw the first time I witnessed the Milky Way after the lights of civilization had been shut off? Were her eyes silently speaking Frankl’s truth that no matter how bad it might get – no matter what manner of death she was fated to meet – the meaning of each remaining second of her life was that no one could take that last spark of rebellion away from her? Did I see some secret core of mankind stripped of everything imaginable except for the last choice we possess in each second of our lives: to rebel or not to rebel?

It was as if all that was left of this woman was this raw bit of star matter that acted as the engine of her consciousness. It may be that this, then, is what we are made of – stuff as strong as star matter. I may be wrong about all of this. On the other hand, she may be living proof that our natural condition is such that nothing on earth can break us – we can only break ourselves.

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1. Frankl, V.E. (1963). Man's search for meaning: an introduction to logotherapy. Washington Square Press.