Religion of frankl
546 mots
3 pages
Frankl once said, ‘Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now’ (132). According to the author, when the human being values the importance of time, he will acknowledge the full responsibility for living. Life, then, will be viewed as a journey with many experiences that is unique to every individual. To quote Frankl again, ‘This meaning is unique and specific in that it must and be fulfilled by him alone.’ (121) Frankl unfortunate experience in the Nazi death camps, gave him a reason: no one can take away from an individual the meaning of his life but only the individual can lose its own meaning. Consequently, when an individual is faced with a feeling of meaninglessness, he will ‘do what other people do (conformism) or he does what other people wish him to do (totalitarianism)’ (128). Therefore, can we think that our individual freedom, to determine what our life will consist of, has its limitation? According to the author, we are fully responsible to find a potential meaning to our lives but being surrounded in social complication, restrain the potential for self-development; such a feeling of dissatisfaction after being engaged in the pursuit of superficial needs. Often, the external circumstances lead us to pursue a goal that is not particularly our own personal, but more as a purpose that had his share of influence from the world we inhabit: ‘in terms of the taskmaster who assigned it to them’ (132). Frankl believes that not only are we individually responsible for our own meaning to life but that we all have a certain obligation in this society- every individual has some specific mission to fulfill (131). To quote the author: ‘I wish to stress that true meaning of life is to be discovered in the world rather than within man or his own psyche, as though it were a closed system. I have termed this constitutive characteristic the self-transcendence of human existence.