Colin Wilson in New Pathways In Psychology, p 219-220.Twentieth century science, philosophy, politics, literature - even music - has been constructed upon a weltanschauung that leaves half of human nature out of account. And this will not be possible until all the determinism and pessimism that we have inherited from the 19th century - and which has infected every department of our culture, from poetry to atomic physics - has been dismissed as fallacious and illogical. In order to realise his possibilities, man must believe in an open future he must have a vision of something worth doing. The conclusion needs to be stated in letters ten feet high. On the other hand, when they saw that Dachau had no chimney, standing out all night in the rain seemed no great hardship they laughed and joked. When Frankl's prisoners ceased to believe in the possibility of freedom, they grew sick and died. Man's freedom is a reality - a reality that makes a difference to his physical, as well as his mental health. Maslow's psychology, firmly based upon Freud and Watson, simply points out that the optimistic side of the picture has been overlooked the deterministic laws of our 'lower nature' hold sway in their won field but there are other laws.Postscript 1984В : The Case for a Tragic Optimism, based on a lecture at the Third World Congress of Logotherapy, Regensburg University (19 June 1983).Since Auschwitz we know what man is capable of.ДЄnd since Hiroshima we know what is at stake. So, let us be alert - alert in a twofold sense: For the world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best. And yet I see therein the very challenge to join the minority. More than that, they always will remain a minority. You may of course ask whether we really need to refer to ' saints.' Wouldn't it suffice just to refer to decent people? It is true that they form a minority.What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost, but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him. What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him.In a word, each man is questioned by life and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life to life he can only respond by being responsible. Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked.And this decides whether he is worthy of his sufferings or not. Here lies the chance for a man either to make use of or to forgo the opportunities of attaining the moral values that a difficult situation may afford him. Or in the bitter fight for self-preservation he may forget his human dignity and become no more than an animal. It may remain brave, dignified and unselfish. The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity - even under the most difficult circumstances - to add a deeper meaning to his life.вЂ¦ For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, 'The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory.' Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. The truth - that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers.There is nothing in the world, I venture to say, that would so effectively help one to survive even the worst conditions, as the knowledge that there is a meaning in oneвЂ™s life.Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering.Main article: Man's Search for Meaning Originally published as Trotzdem Ja Zum Leben SagenВ : Ein Psychologe erlebt das Konzentrationslager (1946), then as From Death-Camp to Existentialism (1959)

Viktor frankl meaning of life