"archival series"

Man’s Search for Meaning

“Those who have a ‘why’ to live, can bear with almost any ‘how’.”

The book is the source of a pretty famous quote for existentialists. Frankl delivers his accounts of living within concentration camps alongside his theory of living through cruelness while maintaining hope. He posits that suffering is universal, but the ways in which people will cope with that truth and persevere is fundamentally what Frankl wants to give us. Frankl’s logotherapy then, is a specific method to humanism, where it’s goal is to uplift human spirituality. From Frankl, there are also many of thinkers who have followed the spiritual humanism and wrote their philosophies in such a way to value the human. Nietzsche’s “will to power”, Bergson’s “vitality”, Husserl’s “Lebenswelt”, Laozi’s “Tao”, and such conceptions aim to highlight the agency of the individual.