Philosophy. Viktor Frankls Mans Search for Meaning, Platos Theory of Essay

Philosophy. Viktor Frankls Mans Search for Meaning, Platos Theory of Forms - Essay Example Yes, we sometimes understand an emotional resposne to something, but this does not mean that we excuse it: we rely on logic to examine whether or not it is true, even if we know that there is an emotion behind it. With this in mind, one can evaluate Viktor Frankl’s most famous quote: â€Å"there are two races of men in this world, but only these two – the â€Å"race† of descent men, and the â€Å"race† of indecent men. Both are found everywhere, they penetrate into all groups of society. No group consists entirely of decent or indecent people,† (Frankl 43). This quotation comes from Viktor Frankl’s seminal book ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’ was written in 1946 and draws on his experiences in four different concentration camps but particularly during his time in Auschwitz, that great factory of mass murder where over 1.5 million Jews and other political prisoners were exterminated. Frankl had to suffer several of his familyâ⠂¬â„¢s deaths including his pregnant wife while he had to continue labouring and blocking out the suffering from his mind. Frankl’s encounters with the terrible and almost unreal experiences in the concentration camps truly prove to be harrwoing reading. ... Frankl is also concerned with the effects of all this mass murder on the Germans themselves who also end up severely traumatized by their experiences. Indeed he has words of comfort for those who have to go through their own personal suffering to achieve some sort of understanding and catharsis, yet he is obviously much more sympathetic with what the camp inmates are going through. The experiences of those who are left in the starvation block are particularly harrwoing and disturbing as Frankl has to examine some of them who are very near death. Here one begins to understand the horror and torture that these person were going through with absolutely no chance of survival. Yet even with all of this emotional baggage that forms a part of this argument, that there are only two races of men, it falls on a philosopher to analyze if this is true. This contains within it some premises that may or may not be true: we will evaluate each of the individually. Because this is a short passage, so me of these premises will only be implied instead of explicit, but I will argue where apropriate how they are implied. An examination of the underlying premises show that his original statement is in fact not true, logically speaking. One of the first premises of this statement, especially when viewed in the context of the book itself, is that one can significantly separate someone’s role in support of a system from their moral responsibility for that system’s actions. One of his fundamental points when making this statement is that there were some descent people among the gaurds at the prison camp where Frankl stayed. He even said as much in his book. This is an objection to the idea that there can be descent people among any group – no gaurd at a