Review of "Man's Search for Meaning" on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
There isn't much I can add about the effects of reading this book/essay. As I digested the horrors of the holocaust through the eyes of Viktor Frankl, a man determined to understand why humans strive for life despite enduring an enormous amount of suffering, I was struck by several thoughts.
The first, was how rhetorically effective his essay used a seamless integration of personal anecdote and thesis statement. I hardly knew I was reading an argument in support of logotherapy until the book was complete. I had never heard of Frankl's will to meaning psychology and I found it, well, meaningful.
The second thought that occurred to me was how I even came to read this book in the first place. It was honestly pretty random. It had been on my list of books to read, something formulated many years ago - so long I have no idea what inspired …
There isn't much I can add about the effects of reading this book/essay. As I digested the horrors of the holocaust through the eyes of Viktor Frankl, a man determined to understand why humans strive for life despite enduring an enormous amount of suffering, I was struck by several thoughts.
The first, was how rhetorically effective his essay used a seamless integration of personal anecdote and thesis statement. I hardly knew I was reading an argument in support of logotherapy until the book was complete. I had never heard of Frankl's will to meaning psychology and I found it, well, meaningful.
The second thought that occurred to me was how I even came to read this book in the first place. It was honestly pretty random. It had been on my list of books to read, something formulated many years ago - so long I have no idea what inspired its inclusion - and I decided to pick it up because it seemed the right length for my mood. Well it turns out my subconscious has been assembling a fantastic little seminar on the literature of epiphany. My recent sequence of books all constellate around epiphanic moment (or their notable lack): Three Pillars of Zen, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Charles Baxter's essay Against Epiphanies in Burning Down the House, and now this, a book that sets out to formalize the mechanics of epiphany into a system of psychology that starts with the assertion that humans are foremost driven by a search for meaning.
I'll need to write something more significant to synthesize the interactions between these books but it's all there. I seem to be in the midst of profound study and I'm only just now aware of it. Perhaps this is my epiphany.
