Man's Search for Meaning
buy new, used books, rare books for sale at half price
|
 |
List Price: $6.99
Our Price:
$6.99
You Save: $0
|
| [ + Zoom ] [ Buy Now ] |
Book : Usually ships in 24 hours |
|
Man's Search for Meaning Customer Reviews
|
|
|
|
♥♥♥♥♥
|
A Priceless Addition to Any Collection
|
This small volume is a priceless addition to any collection of humanitarian ideas. Its subtext makes several interrelated existential points about human suffering and human meaning; points that only those who have known extreme suffering could make with the kind of conviction and eloquence that Dr. Frankel has made here: That while pain and suffering may be relative, even "chosen," the infliction of gratuitous cruelty -- insults, indignities and debasement are absolutes, and is an unforgivable but universal currency applied by all totalitarian systems.
Social and political tyrannies, whether soft or hard, are just opposite sides of the same coin of cultural and existential emptiness. They begin first by destroying the most precious of freedoms, the freedom of thought: effectively creating a "concentration camp of the mind" through social stratification, willful (or benign) neglect, obscene discrepancies in wealth and wellbeing, and by twisted race-based ideologies and other forms of "groupthink" consensus-based political and social orthodoxies. Then come the politics of exclusion, followed by social death - ghettoes and segregation; and then the final stop: unjust physical imprisonment and eventually removal to concentration camps. It is a gradient that leads progressively to walls of hopelessness and despair and that at each step of the way is every bit as cruel in their cumulative emotional and psychological effects as the electrified fences that enclosed the prisoners of Auschwitz.
The existential challenge for the suffer has been put best by Professor Cornel West of Princeton University, who as a self-described "Chekhovian Christian" sees the challenge as follows: "... Being a Chekhovian Christian is refusing to be imprisoned and walled-in by intentionally inflicted misery. It is to wake up each day with a new strategy for survival."
That is exactly what Dr. Frankel did in repeatedly facing-down certain death at the hands of the Nazi war-machine. This book and the Logo-therapy that it gave rise to are fitting living tributes to all of those who died in the European holocaust. |
|
Man's Search for Meaning Used Books New.