PDF Summary:Man's Search for Meaning, by Viktor E. Frankl

What’s the meaning of life? This question has both plagued and motivated humans for centuries, and has probably crossed your mind as well. But how do we answer it? In Man’s Search for Meaning, psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl guides readers toward meaningful lives. He argues that we can always find meaning and purpose in our lives under any circumstances—even the most horrific—because we always have the freedom to choose how we respond to our situation. Frankl also describes logotherapy, the school of psychology he developed, which maintains that meaning is the core drive in life, and he explores paths to finding it.

Our guide provides an overview of Frankl’s experiences in the concentration camps, then explores the principles of logotherapy. In addition, we elaborate on the psychological principles behind Frankl's ideas, extend his advice on finding meaning, and explore counterarguments that challenge his views.

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(Shortform note: Frankl’s definition of meaning is one among many other attempts by philosophers to define or understand the term. Alasdair MacIntyre writes that to have meaning is to have a coherent narrative that we can use to make sense of our lives. Immanuel Kant sees meaning as acting in accordance with moral law; he argues that every action is a symbolic expression of our values, independent of its results, and our lives are meaningful when we express our best values. Finally, Jean-Paul Sartre says meaning is the product of self-creation: We live an inherently meaningless world, but we create our own meaning through our decisions and commitments.)

Frankl also notes that meaning is individual and situational, and that it plays an enormous role in mental health. Let’s explore his arguments about meaning in more detail.

1) Meaning is Individual

First, Frankl says that meaning is different for every person. We can’t simply ask “what’s the meaning of life?” as if there’s one universal answer that should satisfy us all. No two people live the same life, and therefore the tasks of every life are different. Furthermore, Frankl maintains that each individual is responsible for finding their own meaning in life. Life won’t tell you what your purpose is: Instead, life asks you your purpose, and you must provide an answer.

(Shortform note: The freedom to find your own meaning in life raises a challenging question: How do you know what’s meaningful for you? According to some logotherapists, something is meaningful when it actualizes your personal values. A personal value is anything that consistently feels right and good to you, and has a broader meaning than “morals,” as the term is sometimes used. These values can be actualized in many ways. For example, someone who values nurturing may be able to actualize that goal as a teacher, a parent, or a gardener. Someone who values nature could actualize that value by becoming an ecologist, or by moving to the country to be closer to nature.)

2) Meaning is Situational

Frankl also argues that meaning in life is situational. You don’t decide a single purpose for your life and then never have to think about it again. Instead, every situation you encounter will require different decisions from you that shape your life. Therefore, to find meaning in your life, you must keep asking yourself how you can do something meaningful right now. Frankl asserts that every situation offers a unique opportunity to do something meaningful, even in moments of suffering or despair.

(Shortform note: Finding meaning situationally requires you to develop what some psychologists call “adaptive intelligence.” This is the cognitive ability to read changing situations accurately and to recalibrate your thinking and behavior as needed. Some experts draw a distinction between this ability and being intelligent in general, since the two don’t always overlap. People with high adaptive intelligence are good at “thinking on their feet” or “rolling with the punches.” To develop your adaptive intelligence, management experts recommend that you practice admitting what you don”t know, identifying your core assumptions, and becoming comfortable with uncertainty.)

Because meaning changes from situation to situation, Frankl says you’ll likely never know the full meaning of your entire life. This is because while you’re in the middle of life, its full meaning is beyond the scope of your awareness. For example, you’ll never have complete knowledge of every single way you’ve impacted the lives of others, but each of those impacts will have happened nonetheless. At first, this may seem unsatisfying because many people want to know the total meaning of their lives. However, Frankl encourages you to take solace in the knowledge that your life is meaningful in ways you’ll never understand. This makes the meaning of your life inherent rather than contingent on achieving a specific goal.

The Unknowable Meaning of Suffering

While Frankl specifically wrote his works on psychology to be secular and available to anyone, his Jewish faith still played a role in shaping his ideas. Specifically, in arguing that your life has meaning beyond your awareness, he draws on traditional Jewish teachings that these meanings are known by a divine consciousness. This teaching goes back to the Book of Job, in which a good man is forced to suffer, apparently without reason, and demands that God tell him why. While conversing with God, he realizes that it’s not his place to question the divine and accepts that the meaning of his suffering is hidden from him.

In his later writings, Frankl draws a clearer connection between his religious views and his philosophy of meaning. He writes that monotheism instilled in humans a few interrelated beliefs:

• That the events in their lives are duties assigned to them by God

• That these duties are all the more important to carry out because God assigned them

• And that even if you don’t know the purpose of these duties, God does, having assigned them to you

This view takes on additional resonance when read in light of the Jewish theological debates that followed the Holocaust. Some Jewish theologians argued that God must either not exist or be indifferent to suffering to have allowed the Holocaust to happen. Others argued that God wasn’t absent, only hidden, and that just as the meaning of Job’s suffering was unknown, the meaning of suffering during the Holocaust is equally unknowable.

While Frankl didn’t participate in these debates, as a prominent Jewish intellectual he’d likely have been aware of them, and as a Holocaust survivor he may have shared in many of their questions and concerns. His conviction that all our lives have hidden meaning may suggest that he continued to place his faith in the traditional Jewish perspective on suffering, in spite of the Holocaust.

3) Meaning Determines Mental Health

Frankl asserts that the presence or absence of meaning in your life plays an enormous role in your mental health. He argues that many self-help philosophies make a mistake by encouraging people to pursue happiness and fulfilment, as these goals lead you to focus on yourself rather than on transcending yourself to connect with something greater. He writes that happiness isn’t an end itself, but a byproduct of living meaningfully. Conversely, a lack of meaning or an excess of inward focus can leave you feeling empty, bored, and detached, often resulting in anxiety and depression.

(Shortform note: Since this book’s publication, researchers have corroborated Frankl’s argument that meaning leads to improved mental health. Studies have shown a link between having a strong sense of meaning in life and reduced depression and anxiety, a lower subjective sense of stress, and greater resilience and overall satisfaction in life.)

Three Paths to Meaning

Now that we’ve established the foundational ideas of Frankl’s logotherapy, we’ll look to where you can find meaning in your life. As we’ve mentioned, Frankl argues that we find meaning by transcending our individual selves. This means turning your attention away from your own personal comfort, pleasure, or success and toward greater things that exist beyond us, such as people, causes, and values. These could include mentoring a student, creating a work of music that inspires others, volunteering for a community project, or preserving cultural traditions for future generations.

(Shortform note: Frankl’s call to pull our attention away from ourselves may align with several critiques of modern therapy culture. Some philosophers argue that its emphasis on self-help, personal trauma, and self-expression has created a culture where people turn inward, prioritizing their psychological well-being over their responsibilities to others and to their communities. However, many people have still benefited from modern talk therapy, leading some therapists to draw a distinction between therapy, which they argue we should view as a tool, and therapy culture, which they view as a lifestyle where therapeutic self-improvement has become the guiding principle in people’s lives.)

Frankl suggests three paths toward self-transcendence: achievements, experiences, and suffering. You’ll notice similarities between these and the three strategies of resistance: Having future goals will direct you toward achieving them, a rich inner life allows you to be more open to profound experiences, and the freedom to choose will allow you to choose meaning in the face of suffering.

1) Achievements

The first path to meaning is through accomplishments. Frankl explains that this approach emphasizes action in the external world, where people discover purpose by doing or creating things that matter to them. He suggests that individuals who connect their work to a personally transcendent goal tend to be happier and more effective. For example, educators who focus on the long-term goal of shaping future generations will find more meaning in their work than those who view their role simply as a job to pay the bills.

(Shortform note: Some scholars note that achievements can be found in what you don’t do as well as what you do. For example, it’s a moral achievement when a citizen refuses to follow an unjust law, a soldier refuses to follow an illegal order, or an employee refuses an unethical task. These refusals are achievements because they require the moral courage to defy peer pressure, cultural conventions, or state power. In his essay Civil Disobedience, Henry David Thoreau takes this a step further, arguing that we have a moral obligation to break unjust laws, which was why he refused to pay taxes, out of protest against slavery and the Mexican-American War.)

2) Experiences

The second path to meaning comes from the experiences we receive from the world. Frankl argues that experiences can be meaningful because they shift our attention away from ourselves and toward something we’ve encountered, a form of self-transcendance. He highlights experiences of love, nature, or art, as well as instantiations of values like truth, beauty, or justice.

Frankl notes that you can have more meaningful experiences when you’re open and receptive to the world, rather than trying to control it. Even when action is severely limited—as it was for prisoners—they still maintained their ability to transcend themselves through experiences.

(Shortform note: In Awe, psychology professor Dacher Keltner further explains how experiences can lead to self-transcendence. He writes that when we experience awe—a feeling of connection with something larger than ourselves—this shifts our neural activity away from our default mode network. This is the part of your brain that’s active when you feel like you’re not doing anything in particular, and it’s deeply associated with your sense of identity and concern for how others perceive you. The neurological shift away from this network leads to a diminishing of the self and the ego, allowing you to transcend personal priorities and concerns.)

3) Suffering

Frankl argues that suffering can become a source of meaning when faced with the right attitude. As we discussed above, no matter how excruciating or hopeless a situation, humans retain one existential freedom that can never be taken away: the freedom to choose how they respond to those circumstances. Frankl says that even when facing loss or death, you can choose to maintain your dignity, values, and responsibility in spite of your suffering. This means that life has meaning unconditionally: There’s no situation where it’s impossible to find self-transcendence.

However, it’s important to note that Frankl argues against the idea of suffering for its own sake. If possible, you should try to remove the cause of your suffering instead of looking for meaning in it. However, when suffering is unavoidable, choosing to meet it by staying true to your values can become a deeply rewarding experience.

Finding Meaning in Suffering

The existentialist philosopher Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus) agrees that, with the right attitude, life can be worth living even in the most hopeless and painful situation. However, he disagrees with Frankl that life has an inherent meaning for us to discover, and instead argues that we must find life worthwhile, even without meaning.

Camus asks us to consider the myth of Sisyphus, in which an immortal being is condemned to perpetually push a boulder up a hill, only to have it roll down again as soon as he gets to the top. Camus argues that even in this totally meaningless situation, Sisyphus is still alive, conscious, and free to experience the world and think his thoughts. This, according to Camus, is enough to make life worth living, and thus he argues that Sisyphus has the power to be happy. From the perspective of Frankl’s ideas, the choice to take satisfaction in simply existing would be an example of Sisyphus choosing his attitude toward suffering.

Obstacles to Meaning

Even though there are always opportunities for meaning, many people still struggle to find it. Frankl argues that this is a normal part of the process, and may even be unavoidable. The pursuit of meaning in life is inherently fraught with tension, struggle, and conflict.

Frankl explains that it’s what you do with this tension that matters. Inner tension can push you to discover answers, improve yourself, and reach goals. He encourages you to feel the tension between what you’ve already achieved, and what you’re able to accomplish; between what you are, and what you could become. These are healthy calls to meaning, waiting to be fulfilled. In fact, Frankl argues that it’s dangerous to equate good mental health with a complete lack of tension, because that’s not achievable.

(Shortform note: Narrative identity theory can help shed light on why the process of finding meaning is so fraught with tension. According to this theory, people make sense of themselves and their lives by telling stories that connect their memories together in a coherent narrative. However, our lives don’t follow predictable scripts, and new experiences arise that contradict our stories. Therefore, figuring out who we are and what our situation is, is an activity that requires us to wrestle with new contradictory experiences and the stories that we’ve already told. Since meaning is individual and situational, finding it requires us to keep figuring out who we are and what is happening.)

Frankl highlights three major obstacles that we must overcome in this struggle: nihilism, determinism, and the passing of time.

1) Nihilism

Frankl discusses nihilism as the widespread belief that life lacks inherent meaning, value, or purpose. He argues that this view is intensifying in the modern world because traditional values and social structures have weakened, leaving many unsure of why they should live or how they should act. Without a sense of meaning, people may experience boredom, apathy, depression, or turn to substitutes for meaning such as pleasure, power, or conformity.

Nihilism and Spectator Culture

According to some scholars, decline in purpose may also be caused by a rising culture of spectatorship. Over the past century, people have spent more time consuming media and less time actively engaging with their own communities, neighbors, families, and friends. This is because technological growth has made media more abundant and easily available than ever.

Scholars argue that this consumption results in a life where we’re relegated to the role of spectators, and keeps our attention on matters far away from our own lives and our own spheres of influence. Spectating is passive while meaning-making is active, and our focus on media keeps our attention away from the daily moments when opportunities to find meaning present themselves. As a result, spectator culture makes it harder to view our lives as meaningful, which may contribute to nihilism.

Frankl argues that this nihilistic view is mistaken: Every life is inherently valuable because it’s irreplaceable. There will never be another person exactly like you in your exact circumstances at your exact moment in history. Therefore, there are tasks that only you can complete and relationships or experiences that only you can have. In other words, because each life is so unique, each life also has unique opportunities for self-transcendence. For example, you may be in the position to provide mentorship to someone in your family who otherwise wouldn’t be able receive the type of mentorship that only you can provide.

Irreplaceability and Being “Thrown” Into the World

Frankl’s argument that we’re all irreplaceable overlaps with the philosopher Martin Heidegger’s concept of “thrownness,” though their purposes differ. Heidegger argues that humans are all “thrown” into the unique contexts of their lives: We don’t get to choose, for example, when or where we’re born, the sociocultural or historical circumstances we’re born into, or the bodies we’re born into. This is similar to Frankl’s notion that each of us occupies a position in the world that no one else can duplicate. Just as Heidegger says we’re “thrown” into a specific context, Frankl argues that we’re placed in a particular constellation of relationships, challenges, and opportunities that uniquely belong to us.

Frankl and Heidegger agree that these unchosen conditions matter. For Frankl, the fact that each person’s life is singular means we have unique opportunities to create meaning through self-transcendence. Similarly, Heidegger emphasizes the importance of responding deliberately to the circumstances we didn’t choose rather than pretending we float free of them. Building on this, some existential therapists teach clients not to worry about why they were thrown into their particular lives, but to focus on the possibilities that being thus thrown creates.

2) Determinism

The second obstacle to meaning is determinism: the view that humans lack the personal agency to direct their own lives because everything they do is determined by factors outside of their control. For example, a determinist might argue that our lives are entirely shaped by the environments we grew up in, or by inherent biological instincts and drives. While Frankl acknowledges that these factors can influence our lives, he maintains that we always have the freedom to make a personal choice about how we respond to those circumstances and drives.

He supports his argument by drawing on his observations of life in the concentration camps. Even though everyone in the camps shared the same terrible situation, the differences between prisoners became more pronounced as each one chose their own response to adversity. This directly contradicted the theories of biological determinist Sigmund Freud, who argued that if you put a group of men together and let them all starve, you’d see the differences between them disappear, as the biological drive of hunger would come to dominate them equally.

The Debate Between Free Will and Biological Determinism

Frankl’s theory of meaning in life hinges on our ability to make personal choices, such as choosing our attitude to adversity. However, the question of whether humans have free will or are driven by innate biological drives has been hotly debated. Here, we’ll explore several arguments in favor and against free will.

Drawing inspiration from Darwin’s theory of evolution, Freud argued that all human behavior is motivated by two fundamental drives: sex and aggression. In other words, he believed that every behavior from chatting with friends over coffee to falling into road rage on the highway is driven by either the need to reproduce or to protect ourselves from threats. In Freud’s view, we don’t have control over these drives; however, we can choose how to act on them by purposefully channeling the energy they create into constructive or destructive pursuits.

Modern biologists have taken this idea further. In Incognito, neuroscientist David Eagleman argues in favor of a biologically determinist account of human behavior. He explains that the vast majority of our mental activity happens without the awareness of our “conscious minds”—the part that we use to think and be aware of our surroundings. He cites studies showing that the process of making a decision begins before the conscious mind is even aware of what is happening. Therefore, our conscious mind doesn”t “choose” our actions, and in his view, humans lack the ability to make the meaningful choices that form the basis of Frankl’s paths to meaning.

3) The Passing of Time

The final obstacle to meaning is the passing of time and the transitory nature of life. Frankl explains that we’re all going to die someday, and this knowledge can increase our frustration with existence, both because it can make life seem pointless and because it can create pressure to find life’s meaning.

However, Frankl argues that transitoriness can add to life’s meaning instead of detracting from it. He explains that because the past can’t be changed, our past decisions, achievements and experiences can never be changed either. Therefore, as we age and get closer to death, we’re creating an ever-greater storehouse of meaningful actions and experiences from the past, where they can never be altered or taken from us.

So while a pessimist might watch gray hairs appear and feel only loss, counting each new strand as evidence of life slipping away, an optimist could see those same gray hairs as a record of commitments kept, work done, and love given. She wouldn’t envy youth for its open-ended possibilities, but would value age for what it contains: a lived history of meaning and purpose that can never be taken from her.

Why We Struggle to Appreciate our Transitory Lives

Frankl’s call to appreciate life’s transitory nature and take pride in your past may require you to move against the grain of your culture. Here, we’ll discuss two cultural attitudes toward death and pride that may get in the way.

First, in Death; an Inside Story, spiritual teacher Sadhguru argues that we suffer because we struggle to think about death. It’s an uncomfortable subject, and many cultures have strong taboos against discussing it frankly. Sadhguru argues that our difficulty recognizing death leads us to suffer in two ways: Some people refuse to recognize that their time is short, so they waste it on petty unimportant things. Meanwhile, others live in fear of death, avoiding risk at all costs and confining themselves to comfortable and predictable lives. To overcome your fear of death, he recommends spending five minutes thinking about your own death every day, and taking up meditation to remain tranquil and calm.

Second, in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, sociologist Max Weber argues that in capitalist societies, many people judge their own and others’ worthiness based on their present ability to contribute to the economy. He attributes this to early Protestant doctrine, in which devotion to work was seen as a spiritual value.

As a consequence, older adults are often seen as less valuable or relevant as they move beyond their prime working years. Not only are they viewed negatively by others, but many continue expecting themselves to lead active, independent lives, even though their limitations may prevent them. Therefore, to take pride in your past achievements, you may first need to let go of the idea that your present capability defines your worth.