A Man's Search For Meaning (book)
✒️ Note-Making
🔗Connect
🔼Topic:: Existentialism (MOC)
💡Clarify
🔈 Summary of main ideas
- Meaning is created, not found - One has to craft the meaning of their life, and follow it with all their passion. Meaning is what provides us with a sense of purpose, of mental and physical strength, it what makes us human, and not mere objects.
🗒️Relate
⛓ Life lessons, action items
🔍Critique
✅ by following this method, what will happen?
❌ the logical jumps, holes or simply cases where it is wrong...
🧱 Implementations and limitations of it are...
🗨️Review
💭 my opinions on the book, the writers style... The book is excellent as it is hard. The descriptions are vivid and are well combined such that the second psychological part that dives more deeply into his psychological attitude might not have been needed. The persuit after meaning as a coherent stance both to today's social issues and to humanties worst moments is very impressive.
As a grandson to a holocaust survivor, this is not an easy read, it is difficult not to cry, to know that these things actually happened.
📒 Notes
The first part is about his time in Auswitch. At the first step there is blind optimism that you will be the one who is saved, but it is quickly replaced with depression or black humor, until you reach emotional death. The lack of all emotion besides a pure will to survive Will to life, nothing shocks or moves you anymore, you are a stone wall. Some chose to kill themselves at this step.
There were several defense mechanisms: art (mostly poetry nights), religion, mysticism, humor, and even gratitude, mostly on "at least its not worse", even in their condition. Love also gave a sense of relief and meaning. People imagined talking to their loved ones, meeting them again, as if they are by their side. Love touches us in the deepest parts. Some thought about escaping, but Victor has let fate take the wheels Amor FatiHe felt he should stay with his friends, and retroactively, it seems that's what saved him.
Freedom is the one thing they can't take you. It is not about physical freedom, rather the ability to choose how to respond to a situation Freedom of response, to see your existence as meaningful. Those who kept their sense of freedom are those who were able to survive what has happened.
Another meaningful factor is the ability to look into the future and visualize a goal, a light at the end of the tunnel Life's Mission. Those who gave up had no more mental or physical strength. Those who kept believing and imagine a better future were stronger and healthier Optimism
The guards were a mix of angels and demons, as every group of people can be. They were not pure evil, but regular humans for better or worse.
When they were liberated, some at first didn't believe it actually happened, they were in complete denial, but quickly they turned to the other end of the scale. They felt they could do as they wanted, without any consideration for what is moral or accepted, completely unchecked, justifying their actions based on the suffering they went through Moral Licensing. The hopes that have held people through the holocaust have been shattered and evaporated once they found out that their loved ones have passed away, their home was taken, and nobody has missed them, to say the least.
Meaning is not an abstract concept out there, but rather something internal we create ourselves Meaning is Crafted, it is our personal mission in the world, whether it is an action, an experience (such as love), or even dealing with challenges such as pain.
We all have the tension between who we are and who we want to become. The goal in life is not balance but rather strive for transcendence because if we stay put, we would settle for who we are now, and we might fall in toan existential vacuum Absurdity of existence. This is when the "will for meaning" is replaced by cheap imitations such as the desire for money, power or status.
Highlights
Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning. The greatest task for any person is to find meaning in his or her life. Frankl saw three possible sources for meaning: in work (doing something significant), in love (caring for another person), and in courage during difficult times. Suffering in and of itself is meaningless; we give our suffering meaning by the way in which we respond to it. — location: 28 ^ref-46354
“Don’t aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself — location: 80 ^ref-6985
If someone now asked of us the truth of Dostoevski’s statement that flatly defines man as a being who can get used to anything, we would reply, “Yes, a man can get used to anything, but do not ask us how.” — location: 279 ^ref-3990
Apathy, the main symptom of the second phase, was a necessary mechanism of self-defense. Reality dimmed, and all efforts and all emotions were centered on one task: preserving one’s own life and that of the other fellow. — location: 406 ^ref-62670
Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved. It finds its deepest meaning in his spiritual being, his inner self. — location: 532 ^ref-18840
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. — location: 879 ^ref-33738
Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it. — location: 963 ^ref-39376
Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual. — location: 999 ^ref-48704
human life, under any circumstances, never ceases to have a meaning, and that this infinite meaning of life includes suffering and dying, privation and death. — location: 1071 ^ref-63438
in logotherapy the patient is actually confronted with and reoriented toward the meaning of his life. — location: 1217 ^ref-48613
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. — location: 1291 ^ref-28853
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). — location: 1310 ^ref-63622
Pleasure is, and must remain, a side-effect or by-product, and is destroyed and spoiled to the degree to which it is made a goal in itself. — location: 1504 ^ref-52351
Man is capable of changing the world for the better if possible, and of changing himself for the better if necessary. — location: 1602 ^ref-40568
some of our comrades behave like swine while others behaved like saints. Man has both potentialities within himself; which one is actualized depends on decisions but not on conditions. — location: 1632 ^ref-48779