Man's search for meaning

'He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how.' -- Nietzsche

For thousands of years, human being try to discover/explore the meaning of their lives, which is the purpose of their life, from 'The Big Picture', what we see is that there's no purpose of the universe, there's no purpose of life, the only reason human being remain in the world is the result of natural selection and evolution. But even though, why we still discuss about meaning and purpose?

The book (Man's search for meaning) covers two part, part one gives the description on the author's experiences in a concentration camp, part two indicates the logotherapy from the author, with a lot of stories from his patients.

During the period of life in the concentration camp, when they saw a comrade smoking his own cigarettes, then they would know that he may die in the coming days as he had given up his faith to live and just wanted to 'enjoy' their last days. If the will to live once lost, it seldom returned. With the loss of belief in the future, he lost his spiritual hold, he let himself decline and became subject to mental and physical decay. When we try to look into this phenomenon, we may need to figure out what life means and how to discover the meaning of life.

What life means? Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual. It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us, we need to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life - daily and hourly. What really matters, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person's life at a given moment.

If so, why we still trying to find out meaning and purpose? Oftentimes there's no instinct tells us what we have to do, and no tradition tells us what we ought to do, sometimes we don't even know what we wishes to do. Instead, we either wishes to do what other people do (conformism) or he does what other people wish us to do (totalitarianism). In order to break these pattern, we may try to discover the meaning of our own life, so how?

The 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, and we can discover it in three different ways:

- By creating a work or doing a deed

- By experiencing something or encountering someone

- By the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering

The first, the way of achievement or accomplishment, is quite obvious. The second way of finding a meaning in life is by experiencing something - such as goodness, truth and beauty - by experiencing nature and culture or, last but not least, by experiencing another human being in his very uniqueness - by loving him. By his love he is enable to see the essential traits and features in the beloved person, even more, he sees that which is potential in him, which is not yet actualized but yet ought to be actualized, furthermore, by his love, the loving person enables the beloved person to actualize these potentialities, by making him aware of what he can be and of what he should become, he makes these potentialities come ture.