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The Search for Meaning

Frankl & Sartre in Search of Meaning

Georgia Arkell compares logotherapy and atheistic existentialism.

Both born in 1905, Viktor Frankl and Jean-Paul Sartre were two of the twentieth century’s most influential thinkers about the human condition. Frankl was the father of logotherapy and Sartre of atheistic existentialism. While both rooted their thought in existentialist philosophy, sharing several key foundation-stones such as the centrality of human freedom, they had contrasting perspectives on the origins and implications of those shared ideas, and so reached diverging explanations of human existence. The purpose of this article is to summarise their ideas and compare how their thoughts converged and diverged over certain existential questions.

Comparing logotherapy and atheistic existentialism is particularly interesting because these two philosophical currents are the product of two minds which lived in the same historical period yet experienced it in dramatically different ways.

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