Man’s Search For Meaning

What if you found yourself in a concentration camp stripped of every semblance of human dignity, working like a beast of burden?

Viktor Frankl’s ‘Man’s Search For Meaning‘ is based on his experiences in the school of sorrow where the earthy lessons of life are taught. Frankl’s life and observations at the infamous Auschwitz concentration camp of Nazi Germany before he was liberated at the end of World War II forms the crux of our book.

“He who has a why to live can bear with almost any how”, said Friedrich Nietzsche and Frankl’s work is an expanded corollary of this quote.

What troubles man, according to Frankl, is not suffering itself but the fact that he finds this experience empty.A soldier, for example, is prepared to accept suffering unwaveringly as he knows why he needs to suffer. Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it.

The first part of the book concerns the life at concentration camp and how people quickly degenerated to apathetic sub-humane consciousness to protect themselves mentally. But few minds, even in those conditions, rose superior to the gloom around, and exercised the last of human freedoms, the ability to choose one’s attitude in a given set of circumstances.

Once people are convinced about the uniqueness of their responsibility, that life still expects something for them, that there is still something worthwhile to look forward to, they find meaning even in the present suffering. If we conclude that life has a meaning, then suffering too, being part and parcel of life should have a meaning.

Frankl enunciates his point through the following case. An old man, much devoted to his wife, found her death few months before excruciating painful and his suffering was too deep to heal. Frankl finally asked the person if it would have been better had he died before his wife, to which the man promptly retorts that the role-reversal could have been infinitely more painful to her. Wasn’t his present suffering then, Frankl suggested, the price he has to pay to spare his beloved wife the pain if the situation was the exact opposite. The suggestion appears to have had its effect, for the old man no longer complained and bore his cross ungrudgingly.

Not only are people’s responsibilities unique, even their sufferings are so. The suffering apparently is dovetailed to one’s individual life and our duty lies harnessing it to shape one’s life, feels Frankl. This irreplaceability of a man, because of his unique situation and position in world, if properly understood helps him develop a sense of responsibility towards fellow-humans or to an unfinished task that await him and no such man will throw away his life.