Review: Man's Search for Meaning

Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I have time now to grudge this hell of a book some of my vehement reflections. First, why all these reiterations of the same ideas, why frame them with the exact words over and over again? I would’ve made allowances if it is one giant tome —it is not, however, with its 180-odd pages lengthwise (but in terms of the stop-and-start reading experience, it is surely a big time-consumer and bootless distraction for me). I’d have frowned less if these ideas are of value, worthy of empatic repetitions—they are not, however, original or ground-breaking (and I, a non-Christian, have come to detect most of the doctrines to be from Jesus himself); in point of fact, it is the parading and touting them as new and salutary that tick me off.

Frankle was clear and adamant in his conviction that life should be a quest for meaning, and he brushed off pleasure and power as a worthy object to be pursed. However, he failed to offer a systematic reasoning behind his claim; and while a will to power or pleasure stands not only as a driving force of human instinct, but as a way to explain how dynamics and interactions between individuals function, Frankle’s will to meaning seems a thin, withery, well-intentioned hand over a pair of moribond eyes, kind, plausible and preventing any further thinking—but the pathos does not supply what is lacking in his theory: what is meaning, why we must hunt for it, how the quest for it makes what we are and shapes the society to what it is today?

To be fair, Frankle did offer some slipshod explanations when he tried to ground a certain idea of his, but the problem is that when taken from the point, and put together in justapositions, his explanations contradict themselves. And that is to say nothing of the part where he avowed one of his discoveries and hurried to the next with no reasons granted. When confronted (by no one other than his conscious and amendatory self), he says:

‘‘Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked.’’

And then:

‘‘These values, however, cannot be espoused and adopted by us on a conscious level—they are something that we are.’’

And then:

‘‘Therefore, I will not be elaborating here on the meaning of one’s life as a whole, although I do not deny that such a long-range meaning does exist.’’

Isn’t this just mind-blowing? I read in hopes for an answer, which was denied me the way a master denies his slave. “He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How.” If Nietzsche had a nickle every time Frankle larded his lean writing with this flab of his. My problem with this book is, from first to last, Frankle does not reveal me the Why in a convincing way, his eludication only adding to the muddle rather than otherwise, and in the cited phrases he flatly refused to expand any further. He preached finding meaning in work, love and courage in adversity—I find it commmonplace and too shy to be printed on the jacket of self-help books. Why through work, love, and conquering of the insuffrable must a man be fully realised? Is it means or ultimate purposes? Isn’t it the same as Christian teachings that dominate centuries of unhappy human life at large? He fudged by relating to his own experience in the camps which was real and thus must ring true against all reasoning minds, or some of the cases he met with working as a therapist, which were random and polorised contributions to a singular point at hand to be made. Attention to the following diverted, many whys shaved off, he then recursed to some old, tired, self-coined, long-exisiting terms to round out his theory. I find it infinitely wearing.

Besides, I am infinitely annoyed by his dependence on futurity as a way to divert present trials. I have only one thing to say to this: future is a falsity of time that will never come! A clean break from the illusion is the only instrument to quench your burning thirst if you don’t want to end up rizzared under the mirage.

Speaking of this, I have to add that I am also infinitely piqued by his consciousness of happiess and success as fundamental but depicting them as an afterthought:

Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it.

And:

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 or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself.

I’ve known people to take medicine for sickness, not one who takes it for principle. Frankle’s sporadic nods at happiness and success actually foreground their paramount importance in his search for meaning, so much so that this pairing of basic human satisfactions upstages his advocating for a meaning that he himself can not construct. And I just want to know, how can one produce something unintended that they are happy to have, in a world where one’s odds are ineluctably against oneself? Feed your bait fat and think nothing of the fish (the fish that is in your conception, in your aim, and above all in the immediate vast mirror of a lake under your eye)—the reverse fishing, the let-happen-what-may attitude strikes me as a representation of the slave-morality, as if meekness, self-denial and forebearance were not glamorised enough as virtue, and dealt enough as whips of judgement.

I swear I had better (not nicer) things to say while I kept rolling my eyes reading until I had to get upstairs to fetch my pair and forgot much of my discontent with this book, for which I must admit, I had high hopes after all the hype and praise. Sadly, it is one minestrone of kind, preaching contrarieties; stale, under-developed ideas; rickety, shallow connections between experience and its distillation—a puff in the dust at best.

(Please humour me for my bad grammar, spelling, and opinions!)

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