Nietzsche wrote: "He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how." The line may sound aloof, but Viktor Frankl tells you it was the very reason so many Holocaust survivors made it out of the Nazi concentration camps alive. Frankl was an Austrian psychologist and psychiatrist who, during the Second World War, was imprisoned in the camps. The first half of Man's Search for Meaning is the account of his inhuman experience there. As a psychiatrist, Frankl treated the whole camp as research material, drawing on his knowledge of psychology to examine the situations that played out inside it — how a loss of hope affected the body's immune defences, for instance, or how those whose days were numbered would take on a "death-mask" expression.
For Frankl, every story inside the camp answered a single question: "What kind of person manages to survive?"
Meaning is what gives suffering its purpose
Survivors all felt that the people most deserving of survival had, in the end, never escaped the camp — and that they themselves had simply been lucky to live. Yet Frankl noticed that most survivors shared one thing in common: they understood the meaning of their own survival — they knew what they were living for. That sense of meaning drove them to fight to stay alive, however lost or however agonising things became. In the camp, it was those who lost hope who most often failed to escape death.
The "meaning" spoken of here need not be some grand calling. It can be very small, very mundane, even detached from reality. Frankl himself was set on one thing: to publish, once freed, a book he had finished writing before entering the camp. Others longed to see their children again, though they had no way of knowing whether those children were even still alive. These were things only they could do, things that could not be done for them by anyone else — and so they offered an endless wellspring of will to live, and the greatest courage to face suffering: because they knew they were not suffering for nothing, but for something, lending their hardship a measure of meaning.
Man's Search for Meaning recounts the experiences of the psychologist and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl in the Nazi concentration camps, and analyses the psychological traits of those who survived them. What did the people who lived through the Second World War's camps feel on the day they were freed — were they overjoyed?
Frankl and his fellow inmates all said: they felt nothing at all. To survive, they had long since let go of their emotions to protect themselves, which also meant they had lost the capacity to feel joy. Liberation did not mean they could now live happily ever after; those inhuman, extreme experiences left survivors unable to fit back into the world. Some had once kept themselves going by imagining a life of freedom, only to find, after liberation, that reality fell short of what they had pictured — there was none of the happiness they had imagined. From this, the book draws out the idea that what human beings need is "self-transcendence" rather than mere "self-actualisation" — because the moment reality falls short of the wish during the act of self-actualisation, the will to live can vanish in an instant.
Meaning is choice
In the second part of the book, Frankl sets out the theoretical framework of logotherapy, arguing that it is the "meaning of life" that truly drives human activity. As logotherapy understands it, the "meaning of life" does not erase the feeling of suffering the way a painkiller might; rather, by coming to understand the meaning of one's hardship, a person can break through their limits and transcend themselves. He believed that many psychological illnesses arise because people do not understand what they are living for — that they do not, in fact, need medication or treatment, but only need to learn how to find their own meaning.
Even so, blindly chasing the meaning of life only backfires. The point is not to ask what the meaning of life is, but to answer the question life puts to us: "What is the meaning of life you hope for?" For the meaning of life is realised through each of our choices, large and small, one after another. We cannot sum up the meaning of life in words, but it can be revealed through your choices.
This article is based on the programme "RTHK: One-Minute Reading". The text and title have been adapted for online reading, or otherwise edited. This article may not be reproduced without authorisation from RTHK.
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