Decades-old writing that remains timely.
A celebrated psychotherapist and philosopher offers insight into why humanity must persevere in its quest to find meaning in everyday life.
Frankl, the author of international bestseller Man’s Search for Meaning, has long been considered one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century. Yet not all of his work has been translated or made available to wider reading audiences. The four pieces that comprise this collection—three essays and one interview with the author on Canadian TV—were written or transcribed between 1946 and 1984; all deal with the inevitability of human suffering and eternal struggle to find hope and peace. In the opening essay, the author reflects on the transience of human life and the responsibility of each individual to not only “recognize opportunities for meaning” but also fulfill them despite any suffering that person may be experiencing. Turning tragedy into triumph and suffering into an achievement mitigates transience, opening the door to meaning, and all depends on individual choice because, as Frankl explains in the piece that follows, meaning “can be found irrespective of the environmental situation.” In the third essay, the author suggests that such modern-day ills as fanaticism and collectivist thinking are really signifiers of the existential emptiness that arises from feelings of purposelessness. The way human beings can move past that emptiness is by resisting the temptation to do nothing and—and, as Frankl discusses in the last essay—taking “responsibility (for choices and actions) in the face of transience” and suffering. These essays are without a doubt the products of the difficult, often alienating century in which they were written, but the wisdom—and, perhaps more importantly, hope—they offer during a time of competing global emergencies and the threat of human extinction is both comforting and necessary.
Decades-old writing that remains timely.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2024
ISBN: 9780807020432
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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