Chris Johns

Moore, actually, a Cambridge philosopher,

who did the poet's thing, I think it might have been Ordon, who said the point of life is truth and beauty.

The Bloomsbury group lived that.

And so this society has been searching for meaning ever since it decided that God no longer exists.

And I think the people who struggle with this, either explicitly like the intellectuals in the Bloomsbury group

or the rest of us who are only quasi-Codd intellectuals, struggle with it.

And if you think about dying and death as the end of everything, and after that it's just annihilation and you have a Nietzschean nihilistic view of the world, you don't like to be reminded of it, do you?

Yeah, Frankl wrote the book, Man's Search for Meaning.

He was an Auschwitz survivor, actually.

and became a psychoanalyst after the war.

And he was kind of an existentialist, but not in the tradition of Sartre, perhaps the one philosopher who did exemplify existentialism.

Sartre's existentialism was you make your own meaning, essence, and all those other buzzwords that Sartre and his intellectual group of philosophers used.

came up with.

I was entranced by Sartre and all of that as a younger man until I came to realize, a bit like the Bloomsbury group I mentioned earlier on, it was just an excuse for hedonism in many ways and to be a militant Marxist in the case of Sartre.

Whereas Frankl

said that meaning does exist.

You don't define it yourself, but you must find it.

And that's a subtle but important difference.

So he was an existentialist, but existentialist adjacent to Sartre.

He had much more moral and ethical grounding than Sartre ever did.