I just finished Man’s Search for Meaning, and I have very mixed feelings about it.
The first thing that struck me was this sentence:
“We are indebted to the Second World War for enriching our knowledge…”
What the fuck? This much detachment from the experience of going through a concentration camp and losing basically everyone you love is almost pathological. It feels to me as if he detached himself from the emotions and took life as a “responsibility” which is quite different from how I interpret suffering and life.
Moreover, his definition of meaning is very vague and not very instructive or helpful in finding your own. The entire book revolves around the idea that if you don’t have meaning, you might as well not continue. He said this explicitly in his examples of people not having anything to look forward or meaning in the camps giving up. This kind of approach can make many people desperate. It makes you feel incomplete for not having a meaning.
And then I kept asking myself: What exactly is meaning? He gave some categories for different meanings someone can have but in no way there were methods. He also continued with repeating in multiple places what Nietzche said: "Those who have a why to live can bear almost any how."
Why does meaning have to be so strong and grand that I can do anything for it basically? If I don’t know what my meaning is, does that mean I’m already failing? Or I can't bear things. And what does it say about people who couldn't bear any how, does that mean they didn't have meaning or their version of meaning was not strong enough?
Frankl also says meaning changes from moment to moment. But that almost makes it harder to find your meaning. You can't look at it in such a narrow timeframe as “What matters today?”. It wouldn’t help anyone survive a concentration camp. I don’t think his definition of meaning is this minimal.
Then I started wondering if maybe we’re looking at it the wrong way. Steve Jobs said we can only connect the dots looking back. What if I can only find meaning after I live through it and not at the beginning? I don’t know if I suffered and studied and worked and moved for the sake of helping my parents. It was a very happy byproduct which, looking back now, gave meaning to all my suffering. Maybe meaning isn’t something you discover. Maybe it’s something you recognize afterwards.
Against all my reservations, there is something I truly admire about Frankl though. Going through all that, and while describing suffering, he says suffering is relative. He wasn’t diminishing anyone’s suffering despite possibly living through one of the worst experiences a human being can survive. That is quite admirable to me.
I also found myself underlining many of his observations almost immediately.
Not judging people too quickly.
Fear creating the very thing we fear.
Unnecessary suffering being masochistic rather than heroic.
And the danger of becoming an oppressor after being oppressed.
Those ideas felt timeless.
Even though I don’t think that I agree with Frankl with his philosophy of meaning, I appreciate the book.
