Man's Search For Meaning Review

Man’s Search for Meaning is a 1946 book by Viktor Frankl chronicling his experiences as a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps during World War II, and describing his psychotherapeutic method, which involved identifying a purpose in life to feel positive about, and then immersively imagining that outcome.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man%27s%5FSearch%5Ffor%5FMeaning

Existentialism At Its Toughest

In considering my journey into existentialism, At the Existentialist Cafe brought a new philosophy to light and the different schools of thought that orbit around existentialism. Man’s Search For Meaning is the stress test of that existentialism in the most inhumane conditions that history has known.

For me, reading this book was important because existentialism was just an idea that seemed cool. It was a philosophy that one would subscribe to and maybe find some peace. Seeing how existentialism can still provide meaning for those in a concentration camp, really drove the point home of how important existentialism is.

Meaning

“Existence precedes essence” is something that was repeated over and over again in ATEC. To see how this can be applied to meaning was incredible.

Seeing how a man can rise to the occasion and “deserve their suffering” and how that provides meaning all the way until their death, was something that was eye-opening for me.

It eases my existential anxieties and allows me to bravely move forward in the world.

Like At The Existentialist Cafe, I will continue to think about the lessons learned from this book for the rest of my life.

Dislikes

The main thing that I was not a fan of, was how redundant the second portion of the book is. This second part was written some years after the first and suffers a bit from that distance. Though it taught and iterated on some valuable lessons, I found myself writing less and less notes as I made my way through this portion of the book.

Overall

Many lessons learned, I just wish that the second part of the book was a bit more compact and didn’t repeat itself.

4/5