A Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor E Frankl

A Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor E Frankl is his account of the Auschwitz camps in Nazi Germany.

The book has two parts- first- his account of the horrors of the Auschwitz camps, though he did not define them as horrors but merely as suffering that helped him and many others find a meaning in their lives, and second- logotherapy is a theory developed by Frankl, according to which human nature is motivated by the search of purpose in life. In his words,

Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning. The greatest task for any person is to find meaning in his or her life. Frankl saw three possible sources for meaning: in work (doing something significant), in love (caring for another person), and in courage during difficult times.

Being more a fan of stories and incidents than of theories and their applications, I liked the first part better. It reminded me of how even during the worst of days a man can choose to see meaning and purpose in all of his suffering and help others understand it too. But, the second part definitely was insightful. A particular incident from Frankl’s days as a logotherapist really stuck to my mind:

“An American woman once confronted me with the reproach, “How can you still write some of your books in German, Adolf Hitler’s language?” In response, I asked her if she had knives in her kitchen, and when she answered that she did, I acted dismayed and shocked, exclaiming, “How can you still use knives after so many killers have used them to stab and murder their victims?” She stopped objecting to my writing books in German.”

Here are some of the most moving lines from the book:

He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How.

You cannot control what happens to you in life, but you can always control what you will feel and do about what happens to you.

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

And how does a human being go about finding meaning? As Charlotte Bühler has stated: “All we can do is study the lives of people who seem to have found their answers to the questions of what ultimately human life is about as against those who have not.”

Man is capable of changing the world for the better if possible, and of changing himself for the better if necessary.

But there was no need to be ashamed of tears, for tears bore witness that a man had the greatest of courage, the courage to suffer.

The meaning of life always changes, but that it never ceases to be. According to logotherapy, we can discover this meaning in life in three dif- ferent ways: (1) by creating a work or doing a deed; (2) by experiencing something or encountering someone; and (3) by the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering.

From all this we may learn that there are two races of men in this world, but only these two—the “race” of the decent man and the “race” of the indecent man. Both are found everywhere; they penetrate into all groups of society. No group consists entirely of decent or indecent people. In this sense, no group is of “pure race”—and therefore one occasionally found a decent fellow among the camp guards.

Since Auschwitz we know what man is capable of. And since Hiroshima we know what is at stake.