Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frank

Premise

Frankl writes about his time in a concentration camp during World War II.

Perspective is Everything

“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.”

“A man who let himself decline because he could not see the future goal preoccupied himself with retrospective thoughts… But in robbing the present of its reality there lay a certain danger. It became easy to overlook the opportunities to make something positive of (camp) life, opportunities which really did exist.”

On Suffering and its Hidden Opportunities

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

The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity — even under the most difficult circumstances — to add a deeper meaning to his life... Here lies the chance for a man either to make use of or to forgo the opportunities of attaining the moral values that a difficult situation may afford him. And this decides whether he is worthy of his sufferings or not.”

“The meaning of life embraced the wider cycles of life and death, of suffering and of dying… Suffering had become a task on which we did not want to turn out backs. We had realised its hidden opportunities for achievement, the opportunities which caused the poet Rilke to write, “Wie viel ist aufzuleiden!”(How much suffering there is to get through!)

Conquering Challenges, and Mental Health

“Some of the most idyllic hours I have ever spent were in the middle of the night when all the others were delirious or sleeping. I could lie stretched out in front of the stove and roast a few pilfered potatoes in a fire made from stolen charcoal. But the following day I always felt even more tired, insensitive and irritable.”

“Mental health is based on a certain degree of tension, the tension between what one has already achieved and what one still ought to accomplish, or the gap between what one is and what one should become. Such a tension is inherent in the human being and therefore is indispensable to mental well-being. We should not, then, be hesitant about challenging man with a potential meaning for him to fulfil.”

Existential Vacuum

“No instinct tells him what he has to do, and no tradition tells him what he ought to do; sometimes he does not even know what he wishes to do. Instead, he either wishes to do what other people do (conformism) or he does what other people wish him to do (totalitarianism)… the existential vacuum manifests itself mainly in a state of boredom… let us consider, for instance, “Sunday neurosis”, that kind of depression which afflicts people who become aware of the lack of content in their lives when the rush of the busy week is over and the void within themselves becomes manifest… by filling the existential vacuum, the patient will be prevented from suffering further relapses.”

Miscellaneous

“He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how.” — Nietzsche

“Having been is also a kind of being, and perhaps the surest kind.”

“Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfil the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.”

Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognise that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.”

“The more one forgets himself — by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love — the more human he is and the more he actualises himself.”

“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… As soon as we have used an opportunity and have actualised a potential meaning, we have done so once and for all. We have rescued it into the past wherein it has been safely delivered and deposited. In the past, nothing is irretrievably lost, but rather, on the contrary, everything is irrevocably stored and treasured. To be sure, people tend to see only the stubble fields of transitoriness but overlook and forget the full granaries of the past into which they have brought the harvest of their lives: the deeds done, the loves loved, and last but not least, the sufferings they have gone through with courage and dignity.