Man can find meaning in achievements, in a cause (these two things can be related), or in experiences with a person (love), and in suffering. Suffering presents people the opportunity for change and growth. Man’s biggest freedom is the freedom to choose how to respond to life; many choose to respond to the demands of life by giving up. Describes apathy as “emotional death,” at times a necessary “protective shell.” Quotes Dostoevsky that man can get used to anything, but says that man does not know how. Learning to laugh at oneself, and at situations, is part of knowing how to live, how to lighten the load. "The attempt to develop a sense of humor and to see things in a humorous light is some kind of a trick learned while mastering the art of living. Yet it is possible to practice the art of living even in a concentration camp, although suffering is omnipresent. To draw an analogy: a man's suffering is similar to the behavior of gas. If a certain quantity of gas is pumped into an empty chamber, it will fill the chamber completely and evenly, no matter how big the chamber. Thus suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little. Therefore the "size" of human suffering is absolutely relative." Humor “afford[s] an aloofness and an ability to rise above any situation, even if only for a few seconds.” I.e. telling funny stories to make being in a concentration camp less sucky. Things are relative, people can appreciate one concentration camp as being good relative to another which has a chimney for killing inmates. “No man should judge unless he asks himself in absolute honesty whether in a similar situation he might not have done the same.” As Sowell points out, what people actually choose to do and what they say they would do are two different things. Frankl chose to stay with his patients instead of escaping the camp, and no longer felt guilty of thinking about leaving them, “As soon as I had told him with finality that I had made up my mind to stay with my patients, the unhappy feeling left me... I had gained an inward peace that I had never experienced before.” Trusting his own instincts led him to this feeling of peace, being the self that he truly was, in the spirit of Kierkegaard/Rogers (the latter whom endorsed this book on the back flap). “...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.” “...man’s attitude to his existence, an existence restricted by external forces.” In the fight for self-preservation, are you a man, or an animal? Human dignity can offer meaning. When man’s existence is seen as provisional, man ceases to live for the future; he cannot see the light at the end of the tunnel or the opportunity for something new. “...people forgot that often it is just such an exceptionally difficult external situation which gives man the opportunity to grow spiritually beyond himself. Instead of taking the camp’s difficulties as a test of their inner strength, they did not take their life seriously and despised it as something of no consequence. They preferred to close their eyes and to live in the past. Life for such people became meaningless.” He continues, “Yet, in reality, there was an opportunity and a challenge. One could make a victory of those experiences, turning life into an inner triumph, or one could ignore the challenge and simply vegetate, as did a majority of the prisoners.” This being dubbed “give-up-itis.” "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.” Man “can only live by looking to the future.” He recounts stories of those who thought they would be out by a certain date, and when they date came to pass, they lost the will to live, and then they actually died, their immune systems giving way to typhus or whatever disease. “With his loss of belief in the future, he also lost his spiritual hold; he let himself decline and became subject to mental and physical decay.” “He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how” -Nietzsche. Right action and right conduct is what life demands; “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.” Thus, stop asking what life means, and respond to what life demands. Helping the suicidal meant helping them realize the future demanded things of them, whether it was unfinished work, or their children. “A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life.” “That which does not kill me, makes me stronger.” Nietzsche. He recounts that there are two races of men, the decent and the indecent, and that you find both kinds of people in any group, even amongst Nazi guards. “No group consists entirely of decent or indecent people.” “... no one has the right to do wrong, not even if wrong has been done to them.” of former prisoners who wanted revenge on the Nazis. Frankl’s logotherapy works as follows: “Thus, the typical self-centeredness of the neurotic is broken up instead of being continually fostered and reinforced.” by asking them to focus on what life asks of them instead of constant inward-focus. Man is able to live and die for his ideals and values, so they are important. We try to figure out what is authentic and genuine for a man, and not to say what man should want, the psychologist-in-bad-faith's “unconscious need to debase and depreciate what is genuine, what is genuinely human, in man.” Man needs to strive towards freely chosen tasks that he feels worthwhile goals, not a tensionless and utopian state. Man now has the “freedom to” ... do what? He is not driven by instinct nor totalitarian demands and sometimes not even by his own wishes; conformism may result. Frankl calls this the “existential vacuum.” When man cannot find meaning, he may substitute power, pleasure, or sex; “We can observe in such cases that the sexual libido becomes rampant in the existential vacuum.” “...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... responsibleness [is] the very essence of human existence.” Live as if you already lived once and are redoing it the right way (similar to Adler’s live like you are dancing). “...self-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence.” thus the term is something of a coup – one must forget about their own self to maximize their self. We have to change our attitudes towards fate; Frankl’s own family was lost in the Holocaust, but he still found meaning in that suffering (I.e. his wife didn’t have to bear to lose him instead, etc.), and found further meaning for his life in his work and in helping people find their meaning. He comments that one must not suffer needlessly, that one must remove the cause if it is possible; thus begs the chicken and egg question of Victimology as presented by McWhorter. “What is demanded of man is not, as some existential philosophers teach, to endure the meaninglessness of life, but rather to bear his incapacity to grasp its unconditional meaningfulness in rational terms.” Your life-meaning is deeper than logic and can involve feeling; everyone’s meaning is their own to determine. “I observed that procreation is not the only meaning of life, for then life in itself would become meaningless, and something which in itself is meaningless cannot be rendered meaningful merely by its perpetuation”; many people manage to sleepwalk through existence, but this is their own prerogative. Frankl points out that when life’s potentialities are actualized, they are forever a part of history; thus, when we live purposely, we do not fret the transitory nature of life. “...the person who attacks the problems of life actively is like a man who removes each successive leaf from his calendar and files it neatly... he can reflect with pride... on all the life he has already lived to the fullest.” Of determinism, which Frankl rejects, “...the theory that man is nothing but the result of biological, psychological and sociological conditions... Such a view of man makes a neurotic believe what he is prone to believe anyway, namely, that he is the pawn and victim of outer influences or inner circumstances. This neurotic fatalism is fostered and strengthened by a psychotherapy which denies that man is free.” And while we are not free from all external circumstance, we are free to respond to them as we choose. As a concentration camp survivor, he says, “I also bear witness to the unexpected extent to which man is capable of defying and braving even the worst conditions conceivable.” “...Yet one of the main features of human existence is the capacity to rise above such conditions, to grow beyond them. Man is capable of changing the world for the better if possible, and of changing himself for the better if necessary.” The flipside of the coin of freedom is the positive aspect, which is responsibility. Frankl suggests a Statue of Responsibility for the West Coast. “...freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness.” Someone can become paralyzed; they can choose how to respond to this terrible condition. A paraplegic said, “I know that without the suffering, the growth that I have achieved would have been impossible.” “As for the concept of collective guilt, I personally think that it is totally unjustified to hold one person responsible for the behavior of another person or collective of persons.” Thus Frankl did not hold his Austrian neighbors responsible for what happened to him. From the afterword, of a soldier who lost both legs, contemplating suicide, “The soldier attributed his transformation to reading Man’s Search for Meaning. When he was told about the soldier, Frankl wondered whether ”there may be such a thing as autobibliotherapy—healing through reading.” “I do not forget any good deed done to me, and I do not carry a grudge for a bad one.” -Frankl (this similar to Adler on holding grudges).
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