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.
Following is the parts I underlined while reading:
- A man’s suffering is similar to the behaviour of gas. If a certain quantity of gas pumped into an empty chamber, it will fill the chamber completely and evenly, no matter how big the chamber. Thus suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little. Therefore the “size” of human suffering is relative.
- No man should judge unless he asks himself in absolute honesty whether in a similar situation he might not have done the same.
- But what about human liberty? Is there no spiritual freedom in regard to behaviour and reaction to any given surroundings? Is that theory tru which would have us believe that man is no more than a product of many conditional and environmental factors - be they of a biological, psychological or sociological nature? Is man but an accidental product of these?
- Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms - to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.
- Dostoyevski said once, “There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.”
- Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete. (???)
- Bismarck: “Life is like being at a dentist. You always think the worst is still to come, and yet it is over already.”
- During this psychological phase one observed that people with natures of a more primitive kind could not escape the influences of the brutality which had surrounded them in camp life. Now, being free, they thought they could use their freedom licentiously and ruthlessly. The only thing that had changed for them was that they were now the oppressors instead of the oppressed. They became instigators, not objects , of wilful force and injustice. They justified their behaviour by their own terrible experiences.
- Existential frustration is in itself neither pathological nor pathogenic. A man’s concern, even his despair, over the worthwhileness of life is an existential distress but by no means a mental disease.
- In the Nazi concentration camps, one could have witnessed that those who knew that there was a task waiting for them to fulfill were most apt to survive.
- I consider it a dangerous misconception of mental hygiene to assume that what man needs in the first place is equilibrium or, as it is called in biology, “homeostasis”, i.e. tensionless state. What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.
- What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person’s life at a given moment. To put the question in general terms would be comparable to the question posed to a chess champion: “Tell me, Master, what is the best move in the world?”
- The more one forgets himself - by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love - the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself.
- We can discover this meaning in life in three different ways: (1) by creating a work or doing a deed; (2) by experiencing something or encountering someone; and (3) by the attitude we take towards unavoidable suffering.
- We may also find meaning in life even when confronted with a hopeless situation, when facing a fate that cannot be changed. For what then matters is to bear witness to the uniquely human potential at its best, which is to transform a personal tragedy into a triumph, to turn one’s predicament into a human achievement. When we are no longer able to change a situation - just think of an incurable disease such as inoperable cancer - we are challenged to change ourselves.
- To suffer unnecessarily is masochistic rather than heroic.
- For, in the past, nothing is irretrievably lost but everything irrevocably stored.
- Fear brings about that which one is afraid of, and that hyper-intention makes impossible what one wishes.
- I also bear witness to the unexpected extent to which man is capable of defying and braving even the worst conditions conceivable.
- Consider a movie: it consists of thousands upon thousands of individual pictures, and each of them makes sense and carries a meaning, yet the meaning of the whole film cannot be seen before its last sequence is shown. However, we cannot understand the whole film without having first understood each of its components, each of the individual pictures. Isn’t it the same with life? Doesn’t the final meaning of life, too, reveal itself, if at all, only at its end, on the verge of death?
- There is no reason to pity old people. Instead, young people should envy them. It is true that the old have no opportunities, no possibilities in the future. But they have more than that. Instead of possibilities in the future, they have realities in the past - the potentialities they have actualized, the meaning they have fulfilled, the values they have realized - and nothing and nobody can ever remove these assets from the past.
- But everything great is just as difficult to realize as it is rare to find (Spinoza, Ethics)
- It is we ourselves who must answer the questions that life asks of us, and those questions we can respond only by being responsible for our existence.
