Book review: Man's Search for Meaning

I think I came across this via an ACX book review; although it might have been this one; or even another; I'm not sure. The book is in two parts: the first is the original, about the concentration camps; the second expounds his "logotherapy" theory, as he says at the request of readers. Note that I finished this a couple of months ago, so my recollections are fading and this review may not be entirely reliable; it certainly lacks detail.

The obvious comparison is to If This is a Man by Primo Levi. The two are more similar than different; I think I preferred ITIAM. The subtext on the image "hope from the Holocaust" is sort-of correct: what he thinks, and it seems quite plausible, is that your chances of surviving rather than dying of misery and apathy were greatly increased by having some purpose in life. But this is trite. The reverse, which the slogan implies to me, that one can find hope - people still being good amongst the horror - is only weakly true.

Let me expand a little on the I am just a teensy tiny bit suspicious that there are things we aren't told, that might not be entirely to his credit; but only because that is almost inevitable, if you survived that I wrote in reviewing ITIAM. He says quite early on On the average, only those prisoners could keep alive who, after years of trekking from camp to camp, had lost all scruples in their fight for existence; they were prepared to use every means, honest and otherwise, even brutal force, theft, and betrayal of their friends, in order to save themselves. We who have come back, by the aid of many lucky chances or miracles - whatever one may choose to call them - we know: the best of us did not return. But a little later we have for example I spent some time in a hut for typhus patients who ran very high temperatures and were often delirious, many of them moribund. After one of them had just died, I watched without any emotional upset the scene that followed, which was repeated over and over again with each death. One by one the prisoners approached the still warm body. One grabbed the remains of a messy meal of potatoes; another decided that the corpse's wooden shoes were an improvement on his own, and exchanged them. A third man did the same with the dead man's coat, and another was glad to be able to secure some - just imagine - genuine string. All this I watched with unconcern. Notice that the only sin he confesses is to watching with unconcern. There are no instances of him using brutal force, theft or betrayal. Possibly he got really lucky and just didn't need to do any of that.

Part two, his description of his "logotherapy", I found rather less interesting and only skimmed. He has, of course, no actual meaning to offer - this I guess is good; he has not simply invented a spurious one - and falls back to "veryone has to invent their own meaning" or thereabouts. As a retired gentleman of leisure this resonates to a degree; though I'm not sure I would use the word "meaning" myself.