arpened my axe and will proceed to test these distilled ideas against both everyday life and the thoughts of the major philosophers studied in class in the hope that I may arrive at a satisfactory conclusion.It has been said that if there is such a thing as a binding force between the different non-visible elements in the universe it must be either gravity or love. This opinion is shared in part by Victor Frankl who stressed the importance of love and its binding properties in his book Mans Search for Meaning. According to him, not only does love go beyond the physical person of the beloved, but it finds its deepest meaning in his spiritual being, his inner self (p. 58). Love, then, according to Frankl, has to do something with our inner selves, or our true selves, as it is in our true selves that we can find the deepest meaning of love. And if, as Frankl suggests, the salvation of man is through love and in love (p. 57), the salvation of man must then lie somewhere within our true self. Frankl goes on to say that the intensification of inner life helped the prisoner take refuge from the emptiness, desolation and spiritual poverty of his existence. (p. 58)How then can persons get in touch with their true self or, as Frankl put it, intensify their inner life? This is obviously a question of interest, as the primary focus of a number of people, if not of all people, throughout the history of mankind has been to find meaning in life and in suffering. At this point I would like to introduce Josef Pieper and his essay Leisure: The Basis of Culture. It was Pieper who stressed the importance of a leisurely reflection on life and on selfhood as opposed to activities that distract in order to reach our real self. This, he said, requires us to face any uncertainty we might have about ourselves. Work, however, tends to shield us from our true selves. Josef Pieper observes that we generally tend to use work as a means of distraction with which we c...
