Man’s Search for Meaning

Frankl defines tragic optimism as optimism in the face of “pain, guilt, and death,” or “saying yes to life in spite of everything.” This kind of optimist believes that man can make suffering meaningful, use guilt as motivation to improve oneself, and interpret the “transitoriness” of life as a reason to find responsibility and meaning.

Optimism cannot be commanded because the counterparts to pain, guilt, and death—hope, faith, and love—cannot be commanded. Instead, optimism must appear naturally. And just as one cannot pursue optimism, one also should not pursue happiness because when one strives for happiness, one will not find it. Frankl says that this is similar to the hyper-intention that occurs in sexual neuroses. For example, when one focuses on finding pleasure during sex instead of giving it, that pleasure will not come. Frankl calls this “the pleasure principle.”

When one finds meaning in one’s life, one is naturally happy. However, when one has lost the will to meaning, one turns to pleasure to fill the void. In the concentration camps, it was clear that a prisoner had given up on life when he smoked the cigarette he had been carefully saving. Frankl suspects that the recent rise in drug usage is an indication that more and more people believe that life is meaningless and are turning to pleasure for fulfillment.

Man can come to believe that life is meaningless through several different paths. Unemployment, in particular, makes man feel useless, which in turn makes him feel that there is nothing for which to live. Depression can trigger a similar feeling.

According to Frankl, there is an over-arching meaning to each man’s specific life, but that meaning only becomes clear after the man’s death. Thus, it is not useful for man to concern himself with this meaning. The type of meaning in which Frankl is interested is the meaning that can be found on a day to day level.

In addition to the paths to meaning set out in previous sections of the book, Frankl says that one can also study the biographies of those who have lead meaningful lives. Still, suffering is the most valuable path to meaning because man can change himself by choosing to rise above his situation. Indeed, many people who endure immense suffering say that they are grateful for that suffering because they learned a great deal by going through it.

Frankl says that the best case for tragic optimism can be made by “the defiant power of the human spirit.” He cites as evidence a case in which a paralyzed man willed himself able to attend college and told Frankl that he actually considered his disability an asset because it helped him understand how to help others. Frankl says that if possible, we should do everything we can to avoid suffering. But in the case that we must suffer, we need to learn how to endure our suffering and make it meaningful.

Frankl then shifts his focus away from optimism in the face of pain and toward optimism in the face of guilt. He refers to a theological concept, mysterium iniquitatis, which holds that a crime can never truly be explained because if it were, it would take away the criminal’s guilt. Indeed, an explanation would mean that the person was driven to commit a crime by biological or social factors rather than his own free will. With the freedom to commit a crime comes the responsibility to feel guilt over it.

While Frankl sees value in individual guilt, he believes that it is not just to hold one person responsible for the actions of a group or collective. When people asked him how he could continue to write books in German after all of his experiences, he replied that people did not stop using knives simply because murderers also used them.

While life is meaningful because of the possibilities it holds in the future, people are valuable because of the things that they have accomplished in the past. By valuing youth and success, today’s society emphasizes the wrong things. Instead, we should value the elderly because of the number of possibilities they have turned into realities. Frankl is very clear that a man’s value should not be determined based on his present usefulness.

Frankl writes that, in contrast to Freud, he believes that each person should be considered as an individual with a unique responsibility to the world. Frankl is sure of this because his experience in concentration camps helped him understand that no man’s path is predetermined, and anyone can change from good to bad, or vice versa, in only a moment.

Frankl challenges his readers to try to be good. This is extremely important because the world will become even worse if people do not strive to become better. He says, “So let us be alert—alert in a twofold sense: Since Auschwitz we know what man is capable of. And since Hiroshima what know what is at stake.”