Articles

Man’s Search For Meaning

By Swati Moheet Agrawal

A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears towards a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the “why” for his existence and will be able to bear almost any “how”. 

The above is an extract from Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s Search For Meaning” – the classic tribute to hope from the holocaust. During World War 2, Frankl spent three years in Auschwitz, Dachau, and other Nazi concentration camps.

The prisoners who had lost all hope for a future were inevitably the first to die. They died less from lack of food, disease, and medicine than from lack of hope and something to live for. By contrast, Frankl held on to the following thoughts that kept him going: he clung to the image of his wife and the prospect of seeing her again, the thought of lecturing after the war about the psychological lessons to be learned from the Auschwitz experience, and his deep desire to rewrite his manuscript that was confiscated from him upon his arrival in Auschwitz.

Frankl’s concern is less with the question of why most people died than it is with the question of why anyone at all survived.

The intensification of inner life helped Frankl find a refuge from the emptiness and desolation surrounding camp life: Forces beyond your control can take away everything you have except your freedom to choose how you will respond to a given situation. 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. What will become of you is a choice you make.

Frankl did not let himself decline because he saw himself standing on the platform of a well-lit, warm and pleasant lecture room. It did not really matter what he expected from life, but rather what life expected from him. It kept him from despair. His experience in Auschwitz, dreadful as it was, reinforced the idea that life is not primarily a quest for pleasure or a quest for power, but a quest for meaning.

Frankl believed that human beings are motivated by something called a “will to meaning”, which is the desire to find meaning in life. His doctrine of logotherapy is aimed at helping people make better use of their spiritual resources to withstand suffering. The three ways to find meaning in life according to him are through work, through love, and through suffering.

About love he said: “The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understand how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved.”

About work, he said: “Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out a concrete assignment which demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated. Thus, everyone’s task is as unique as his specific opportunity to implement it.”

About suffering he said: “If there is meaning in life at all, then there must be meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death, human life cannot be complete.”

To be able to garner some good from an experience so abysmally bad is absolutely commendable. “Man’s Search For Meaning” is a masterpiece of survival literature that deserves to be read and re-read, a hymn to the phoenix rising in each of us. Highly recommended!

About the Author:

Swati Moheet Agrawal’s work has appeared in The Alipore Post, Muse India, Nailpolish Stories, Maythorn Magazine, Minnow Literary Magazine, Café Lit Magazine and Modern Literature among other publications. 

 

Comments are closed.