Man's Search for Meaning

This is the latest philosophical installment. Viktor Frankl was a Jewish doctor in a concentration camp during WWII.

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Man’s Search for Meaning is a dreadfully personal and real account of what happened in the Nazi concentration camps. In addition to being a very powerful piece of autobiography, Frankl brings the unique combination of a scientific eye and personal experience. He wraps up part one, which is his account of his experience, with a part psychological, part philosophical chapter that is riddled with quotes of famous existentialists. Something that got me thinking was his (and Dostoevsky’s) idea that people must be “worthy of their suffering,” And a follow up to that (which was completely Frankl’s idea) is “taking the camp’s difficulties as a test of their inner strength.” What is meant is that we try to rise to the challenge of our suffering, find meaning in the situation, and do the right thing for yourself and those around you. I think the reason I have difficulty with this concept is twofold. On the one hand, it goes against one of my most basic principles: it puts something up on a pedestal. Something higher, something for us to work for or against, a standard for humanity to be judged. It also takes suffering as the higher thing. Suffering is something to be fought against, avoided and tolerated if all else fails. It could be that I have never experienced suffering on Frankl’s level (I have not) and therefore do not understand the mentality of someone in such hopeless circumstances and is caught up in such unavoidable suffering. Suffering could have such an everpresent force that it became something higher, something to rise to.
I have less difficulty with the second quote, but I’m still a bit skeptical. This is also a bit of a religious concept. Being tested by something. Something bigger than us testing us. For Frankl, it’s “life” but for the religious, it is “God.” I have to wonder how much of a practical difference there is between the two. I think it’s that the only person you’d be proving you had inner strength to, not God, not your friends. It would be completely about you. And there seem to be so many better, voluntary ways to test inner strength.
One thing that caught my attention was that Frankl’s experience was no terribly unlike that of Sisyphus, and all of what he said about the Sisyphus-like material, completely proved my beliefs. Some people rose to the challenges of the camps, and through their consciousness, conquered the difficulties of life there. The people who did this were the religious and those who were devoted to some political view (Marxism etc.). Many others simply did not rise above the struggles of the camp and died as result. Humans can survive adversity through their consciousness or imagination, but often times do not.