Frankl Vs Sartre Essay

Jean-Paul Sartre and Victor Frankl are men of different backgrounds but of similar philosophes. While the former offers a philosophical opinion and the latter a psychiatric view, both thinkers advocate for an existentialist approach to living. The following will first delve deeply into the nuances and positions of each thinker, but after a thorough explanation of the main tenets of each philosophy, the following will then demonstrate the problematic nature of an existentialist lifestyle as it relates to concrete moral decision making. What will be shown is that, contrary to their main objective to make human beings more responsible, their ethics doctrine, in practice, allows for 1) less accountability and 2) the justification of evil actions.

Sartre believes that action is less important than the act of choosing that action, and the choice itself possesses value and indicates to the world your personal values. To supplement this theory, Sartre posits that human beings are “forlorn”—without God and therefore without “values or commands to turn to which legitimize [their] conduct” (349). Therefore, Sartre believes that man cannot make excuses for his actions because he cannot appeal or shift blame to objective moral standards promulgated by a God or a religious institution. Before explaining Frankl’s logotherapy and its existentialist elements, it is important to understand his background and the impetus behind writing “Man’s Search for Meaning.” First, Victor Frankl was a neurologist and psychiatrist, not a philosopher. More importantly, however, Frankl wrote his landmark novel after being a prisoner in a concertation camp during the Holocaust. His novel consists of two sections: 1) a narrative account of his time in captivity and 2) Frankl’s psychotherapeutic doctrine. The following will primarily deal with the second half of the psychiatrists’