Life in a denotata: Philosophizing Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning

Imagine yourself being you, thinking a lot of things; perhaps, drowning yourself from

problems, doubts, or anything else that forces you to hit the rock bottom. Suddenly, a time travelling

machine appears to exist and catches you off guard. This time, it is absolutely sound to say that you

are troubled.

Afterwards, you find yourself in a place where everything is black and white. There you meet same

faces in despair, without so much excitement but with so much hunger and distress. You feel sorry

for them and you want to help, but you also want to escape. However, you must be caught off guard

first to make it possible not by the machine once again but by cruel people and be tortured

physically and internally. Escaping there gives you less chances literally but surviving there gives you

more chances to imagine yourself being you once again and this time, to think positively under the

sun.

Victor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning” exemplifies this scenario at its very best. This

book contains narratives from Frankl’s experiences in Auschwitz concentration camp as a prisoner of

war and a victim of the deathly Holocaust. An Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist, Frankl

challenged his ideas by learning a lot not only from his own but also from his fellow prisoners of war

and those heartless people he met to put this suffering in context and gave birth to his life’s best

invention widely known as logotherapy. Considered as the third Viennese School of Psychotherapy,

this concept separates its essence from Freud’s psychoanalysis and Adler’s individual psychology in a

way it is drawn from the meaning of life which is believed to be the sole determining force

accompanied by pain and guilt towards personal fulfillment in the future.

Although not presented chronologically, his narratives about injustices inside concentration

camps were directly connected to his fulfilling technique in a way those readers who did not

experience life inside camps can understand and recognize something from him that connects them.

To start with his narrative, Frankl witnessed several struggles and how those struggles affected him

and his fellow inmates’ mental state for the long run. He found out that in the first few days that a

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prisoner arrives, that person experiences shock in the first place. Upon being accustomed with unfair

treatment inside the camp, a prisoner becomes apathetic and completely detached from the reality

outside; hence, his emotional death. After being freed from imprisonment comes his disillusionment

where the person becomes confused with the reality and must start to learn and be accustomed

again as soon as possible. Longing for his parents and his wife, Frankl claimed that he did not

become apathetic and depressed even in the worst situations had happened. Instead, he decided to

use his suffering as his asset to improve himself and exercise his freedom to choose his own path

towards life. Devoted in his logotherapeutic way of treating patients from their neuroses or mental

disorders, Frankl explained that one’s will to meaning can be existentially frustrated whenever a

person does not strive to exercise noo-dynamics or concerning oneself towards his or her future and

not the past and present (less retrospective and less introspective). Using paradoxical intention or

facing one’s fears in a peculiar way, a patient ultimately becomes enthusiastic and capable of

controlling one’s life out of horrible situations; hence, Frankl’s basis on tragic optimism or saying

“yes” despite untoward circumstances.

Discerning his two-edged narration in and out of the horrible concentration camps, Frankl’s

main argument centers on the idea that man’s life is meaningful, to which one must find one’s

purpose to survive. In order to prove it, a man must constantly struggle and embrace it by finding

oneself and choosing one’s attitude towards life’s inevitable consequences. He encouraged

logotherapy among the possible solutions to aid in overcoming anxieties brought by the struggle but

the best way he argued depends on the person on how one looks for ways to make each moment

valuable. In detail, more than half of his book contains untold narratives from his ordeals during the

Holocaust depicted on the first chapter entitled Experiences in a Concentration Camp. Then, it is

followed by the technique in detail on Logotherapy in a Nutshell. Lastly, the third section is a

postscript entitled The Case of Tragic Optimism to provide a contextualization of his ideas redirected

towards the possibilities in the near future.

WILL TO MEANING: AN UNENDING QUEST

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 Frankl testifies that man’s ultimate goal is to search for his meaning and be successful in life.

In order to find for it, he asserts that one must depend on the word successful. One must not aim for

success because “the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it”

(17). His premise and conclusion here are collectively valid because it follows that one must have

their own indicator of success and let it ensue without thinking too much of it. However, his

argument here might not be sound because success varies among people and it might be that they

aim at it and they win.

Understanding the wholeness of his narratives, Frankl frequently mentions love and how it

helped on the process of being accustomed inside the camp. He believed that love is the “ultimate

and the highest goal to which man can aspire” (57). It also follows that “love goes very far beyond

the physical person of the beloved” (58). How he made assumptions about the occurrence of love

apart from his beloved ones is exemplary. Using the primary occurrence, Frankl assumes that his

wife, in particular, still exists – in his mind and heart. However, he cannot avoid confirming his

existence – whether his wife or even him is still alive at all or not. His argument here might be not

that case but his belief about love being his most important asset has been surely justified by

himself.

Upon searching for the meaning in life, Frankl asserts that there must be also a

counterbalance – the suffering and death after all. He said that without these two, life could have

been incomplete at all (88). For him, it is impossible for a person to generally define the meaning of

life. Also, life according to Frankl “does not mean something vague, but something very real and

concrete, just as life’s tasks are also real and concrete” (98). This argument is somehow a

manifestation of epistemic luck, to which it can be coincidental that a person claims a belief must be

true over anything else. Because of life’s vagueness, a person subsumes to the idea that achieving

the meaning of life means knowing, believing, and being justified by it without thinking once again or

moving forward with it because one has achieved it. This notion of searching for one’s meaning is

surely a tough task among all but after achieving it, one should be careful of being into it already. It

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is perhaps difficult to understand the vagueness of life, but it can be more difficult to think of it as

your knowledge but ends up being doomed once again. Also, everything that happens to a person

can be coincidences or luck, but the best course of action would be take it as one point to ponder

and move forward.

His religious character has been also presented in a way one can be convinced to have it as

his consideration. He mentions below about his suffering and how he manages to breathe following

the occurrence of a higher being that helps him understand the whole process:

“At that moment there was very little I knew of myself or of the world—I had but one

sentence in mind—always the same: “I called to the Lord from my narrow prison and He

answered me in the freedom of space.” How long I knelt there and repeated this sentence

memory can no longer recall. But I know that on that day, in that hour, my new life started.

Step for step I progressed, until I again became a human being” (Frankl 111).

His linguistic depiction here is powerful to a point that he has no option to doubt His

existence anymore. He becomes pragmatist after his turning points in his life. Surprisingly, it is fact

that pragmatists are psychologists in profession. Frankl was a psychologist in profession, and it

seems that he had the view of opting to belief that a person has no choice but to believe and

consider it as evidence. For Frankl, God is already an evidence. However, his belief might be

contradicting to the essence of evidentialism to which one never believes unless an evidence can be

seen or proved. God’s existence cannot be proved until now, even the bible does by words but not

by vision. His notion of depending on God might make him pointless and direction-less but

fortunately, he manages to combat the untoward incidences by being critical and open-minded with

his surroundings.

In the case of logotherapy, Frankl still manages to introduce love as a very important input

for a man’s continuing quest towards life. He claims that “no one can become fully aware of the very

essence of another human being unless he loves him” (134). This claim is best manifested by his

patient where one is a mother of his disabled child. The mother is depressed to a point that she

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wants her son to be away from her for she might hurt him in the long run. However, Frankl’s

psychological capacity enables the view of the mother to shift and realize that his child, although not

normal, is the one who fills the love out of her neurosis. Nihilism or being convinced that there is no

greater purpose for a man to live up has been taken away from the mind of Frankl’s patients.

Besides, one’s suffering has essence, and logotherapy, perhaps, helps to become rational out of life’s

unending crisis.

HOPE AND SUFFERING: PARTNERS FOR LIFE

Frankl encounters the stage of shock, apathy, and disillusionment and observes these stages

into his fellow inmates and its effect towards their mental state. From here he notices that his

fellows still experience nightmares while dreaming. He says that experiencing dreams can be a sign

that reality keeps in touch with them still. However, Frankl realizes that dreams are ironic to a point

that “he became intensely conscious of the fact that no dream, no matter how horrible, could be as

bad as the reality of the camp which surrounded them, and to which he was about to recall him”

(48). From this view comes the idea that his observations are clearly testable but can be falsifiable to

some extent. It can be experienced and be shared but how sure they are that their dreams that

keeps in touch with their reality are far way better than the present to a point that in fact, they are

experiencing emotional death? Being carried away by their numbness towards situations, they

should have been practical with their course of actions. Fortunately, Frankl was among those who

avoided become indifferent in order to understand the horrible situations inside and how to

overcome it without thinking too much.

His discussion on experiences inside concentration camps is a clear depiction that hope and

suffering interplay. He draws an analogy that “a man’s suffering is similar to the behavior of gas”

(64). He assumes If a certain quantity of gas is pumped into an empty chamber, it will fill the

chamber completely and evenly, no matter its size. In relation to suffering, it completely occupies

the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little. He points out

the relativeness of suffering towards one’s life.

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 Relative to his narrative, he obtains knowledge by acquaintance. Unaffected by denotated

signs, his narrative is a living testimony that he experienced everything about the camps and wrote a

book about it sincerely. He also understood the ins and outs of the camps because of his a posteriori

way of reasoning. Utilizing his experiences as contributor to his knowledge, Frankl effectively made

some claims about emotion that ceases as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it (88). He

also states that everyone has that crowning experience that a person should take away everything

that fears him.

Fundamentally, Frankl is aware on how to make sense of freedom. Upon his liberation from

the camps, he questions, “Who can throw a stone at a man who favors his friends under

circumstances when, sooner or later, it is a question of life or death? (68). Throwing a stone at a man

is both unethical and immoral. It is also possible that the man should ask himself in absolute honesty

whether he is in a similar situation. There arises the infamous “Mamamatay naman tayong lahat” in

response to one’s course of action to exert effort and make life meaningful as being pointless and

meaningless. However, a person must not resort with this idea for it takes away the sense of

freedom after all. According to Frankl, “life ultimately means taking responsibility to find the right

answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual” (98).

It is also our duty to make use of time to meaningful efforts. Frankl’s emphasis on the

categorical imperative of logotherapy which is to “live as if you were living already for the second

time and if you had acted as wrongly the first time as you are about to act now” is a manifestation of

the essence of existence. Coming this existence is being responsible which fulfills with freedom being

“only a part of the story and half of the truth” (155).

In totality of the idea of Man’s Search for Meaning, although I noticed some flaws which I

would have not been believed that easy, it is a book that I would be recommending to my previous

classmates. We have been under this type of suffering, although not harsh and rigid similarly inside

the camps, and gets intensified when we entered a new course of our life on a higher level. It is not

only a book, but it can be regarded as a bible where it contains narratives that are way powerful to

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make a person feel something about it and think once again. Also, I have some acquaintances who I

know they want to pursue psychology soon. Better that I let them know about this book because it

opens ideas on the field and prepares the readers to find one’s meaning in life and not ask about it.

Indeed, everyone is surely be liking it but the way it touches one’s mind and soul makes the book

interesting and fulfilling.

Reference:

Frankl, Victor Emil. “Man’s Search for Meaning: Revised and Updated.” New York: Washington

Square Press. 1984.

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