Man’s Search for Meaning

 Richie Hecker Jan 26, 2009

So I recently read the book Man’s Search for Meaning. The book details the psychological underpinnings of a man as he went through the Holocaust. Instead of talking about all the evil, it focused on how people thought. The best example that comes to mind is that they used to have transport trucks that needed to take X numbers of prisoners to death camps. Of course, everyone didn’t want to be on it or their friends to be on it so they did everything possible to avoid it. However, if someone got out of going on the truck that means, someone else had to go on the truck - to die. The book’s premise is at the end of the day, we have all have a very simple moral character - whatever is in our (us, family, very close friends) immediate best interest. People at their core do what makes sense for them. Of course there are exceptions but they are just that - exceptions.

The second half of the book deals with the authors psychology theory, Logotherapy says that man’s goal is to find meaning in what we do. After all don’t most teenagers love to question “whats the point” and they are more honest then the rest of us (unless they are lying)

From wikipedia…

The following list of tenets represents Frankl’s basic principles of Logotherapy:
Life has meaning under all circumstances, even the most miserable ones.
Our main motivation for living is our will to find meaning in life.
We have freedom to find meaning in what we do, and what we experience, or at least in the stand we take when faced with a situation of unchangeable suffering.
The human spirit is referred to in several of the assumptions of Logotherapy, but it should be noted that the use of the term spirit is not “spiritual” or “religious”. In Frankl’s view, the spirit is the will of the human being. The emphasis, therefore, is on the search for meaning, which is not necessarily the search for God or any other supernatural being. Frankl also noted the barriers to humanity’s quest for meaning in life. He warns against “…affluence, hedonism, [and] materialism…” in the search for meaning.

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One Response to “Man’s Search for Meaning”

  1. Patricia Vaccarino Says:
    January 27th, 2009 at 2:05 pm

    I was sixteen years old, The first time I read Man’s Search for Manning, which was given to me to read by a Catholic nun. The nun also gave me Dag Hammerskjold’s book “Markings,” which is written in the same context of defining the essence of the human spirit. Every ten years, I read “Man’s Search for Meaning” just as a reminder and a reality check that a life that does not have meaning, is not worth living. And by the way, the highest rate of those who survived the concentration camps, was found among the intellectuals who had been incarcerated. It takes a certain kind of ‘intellectual’ intelligence to find meaning in any form of suffering. Thanks for giving Victor Frankl a plug, he won’t get any money out of it, or get to be the book pick on Oprah, but we can all stand to have some meaning in our lives.

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