Man's search for Meaning

Viktor E. Frankl had been my friend on the train rides recently. In his quest to answer Man’s Search for Meaning, he recounts his time in Auschwitz and his insights on logotherapy. Central to his theory, and affirmed by his harrowing experiences, is the conviction that the primary drive for man is not the pursuit of pleasure, but the pursuit of meaning.

And this search is a timeless one. Be it in the 1940s during World War II, or today in 2012 during times or relative peace, the existential question is asked over and over again.
“What is the point of staying alive, when the future is but fraught with fear and uncertainty of when I will be sent to the gas chamber?”
“What is the point of my work and my days, when I do not know what I am rushing for?”

I resonated with much of what Viktor has shared. Instead of clumsily trying to express what he has shared, I shall share some of my favourite quotes/ ideas from this wonderful literature itself.

1. On the meaning of life

• “It is we ourselves who must answer the questions that life asks of us, and to these questions we can respond only by being responsible for our existence.”
• Frankl quotes from Nietzsche “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how”

 2. On how to live

• “I do not forget any good deed done to me, and I do not carry a grudge for a bad one”.
• Frankl’s imperative: “Live as if you were living for the second time and had acted as wrongly the first time as you are about to act now”
• Make the best possible use of each moment of our lives. The opportunities to act properly, the potentialities to fulfill a meaning, are affected by the irreversibility of our lives.
• “The person who attacks the problems of life actively.. can reflect on the life he has already lived to the fullest..” It does not mater if he is noticing that he is growing old, nor have any reason to envy the young, nor wax nostalgic over his own lost youth. For he can say, “Instead of possibilities, I have realities in my past, not only the reality of work done and of love loved, but of sufferings bravely suffered. These sufferings are even the things of which I am most proud, though these are things which cannot inspire envy.”

3. On suffering and how to suffer

• Know how to suffer- since suffering is inevitable.
• In the walls of Auschwitz, it made him realize that no matter what happened, he retained the freedom to choose how to respond to his suffering. It is not just an option, but every person’s responsibility to choose “the way in which he bears his burden”.

4. On man

• “So let us be alert- alert in a twofold sense: Since Auschwitz we know what man is capable of. And since Hiroshima we know what is at stake”
• “Man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord’s Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips”