How Should We Respond to Our Circumstances of Existence while searching for meaning?

How Should We Respond to Our Circumstances of Existence while searching for meaning?

Victor E. Frankl provides probably one of the most horrific examples of how circumstances affect an individuals search for meaning. Frankl, being a Holocaust survivor, provides insight on the decision the Holocaust survivors did have. Individual choice that is, the internal struggle someone faces when the circumstances have completely stripped human value away from you. Just because your circumstances have stripped away your rights, are you automatically left in defeat, or can you continue searching for your individual meaning? Just because society says you have no values, do you give into defeat and abandon those values? Do you give up on your hopes, when the hope in your future has been stripped with an uncertain length in imprisonment? According to Frankl, you can continue your individual search for meaning, hold on to your values, and hold on to your future, regardless of the circumstances. The circumstance is an influence that you have to over come for yourself, for what you hope to stand for.

During your existence, you individually search for your meaning. What is your importance? What have you done? What have you over come? The Holocaust is a perfect example of historical occurrences when this internal growth and development was literally stopped for a lot of those who lived through it.  The Holocaust, to Frankl, was an influence, not what actually took his individual search for meaning. He didn’t mean anything to the Nazi’s, that’s for sure, but he still found ambition in the camp regardless. He had invested himself into “… [his] only countryman, who was almost dying, and whose life it had been [his] ambition to save in spite of his condition” (page 68). Frankl knew the circumstances, and knew the odds weren’t in his favor. Still, you have to search for your own hope. You have to find something to find meaning in, because that the circumstances can’t stop.

When it comes to dry cut circumstances of survival, is there room for your values? You still have that much control. You can still make decisions that aren’t reflective of your environment, you can still make decisions that you can live with and be proud of. You aren’t bound to act a certain way based on the things that surround you, because you can still put yourself first even when everything around you doesn’t. Essentially, just because you physically bound to imprisonment, and you are constantly being influenced against your own mental will “man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind, even in such terrible conditions of psychic and physical stress” (page 74).  Your spirit is something uncontrollable, yet it can be influenced. The Holocaust influenced people to give up on their values because they believed their spirit too was imprisoned. That’s an individual’s attitude succumbing to the circumstance, not any actual dominance over an individual’s spirit.

If your attitude, and your spirit, is the only thing left, in a circumstance like the Holocaust, that an individual controls, wouldn’t people hold tightly to this control? Wouldn’t all of the survivors have triumphant stories of how the Nazi couldn’t dominate their mental independence? It’s part of the influence the circumstances had on the individuals. Being a prisoner in this circumstance was “…the most depressing influence of all that a prisoner could not know how long his term of imprisonment would be” (page 78). The prisoner’s inability to accept fate, or to let fate take its course, let his last freedom succumb to his circumstance. It’s nothing that the Nazi’s did to those whom lost their spirit in the Holocaust, but more what went on inside the individual’s soul that let the Nazi win. Their spirits were broken, and that’s what gave the Nazi’s mental control over those who endured the Holocaust.

The countless, horrific, factors that influenced Frankl’s circumstances are drastic but efficient. It’s an example that leaves nothing more than the internal struggle to uphold your spirit, mind, and value, when life is at stake all day everyday. Regardless if your values weren’t upheld, and your spirits broken its important to remember: “no man should judge unless he asks himself in absolute honesty whether in a similar situation he might not have done the same” (page 58). On the matter of the individual journey of finding meaning, it is a personal experience, heavily influenced by your circumstance, but most importantly a personal experience.