Yes To Life In Spite of Everything

by Viktor E. Frankl

How we deal with the tough parts of our lives, he observes, “shows who we are.”

our lives take on meaning through our actions, through loving, and through suffering.

he recommended, gain some internal control over your own mind and how you react to life’s difficulties. Then, adopt an ethic of compassion and altruism, the urge to help others. Finally, act on that outlook in whatever ways your life offers.

Frankl cites a converging formulation from Rabbi Hillel almost two thousand years ago. The translation I know best goes: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? And if not now, when?”

Frankl argued, represents the height of meaninglessness. “Suicide,” he wrote, “is never able to solve a problem” or to answer the question being asked of us by life.

“Whoever has a why to live can bear almost any how,” as the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche declared.

“Fate” is what happens to us beyond our control. But we each are responsible for how we relate to those events.

in the past, activism was coupled with optimism, while today activism requires pessimism. Because today every impulse for action is generated by the knowledge that there is no form of progress on which we can trustingly rely.

(There was an example of this somewhere in Bavaria in which the camp commander, an SS man, secretly spent money from his own pocket to regularly buy medicines for ‘his’ prisoners from the pharmacy in the nearby Bavarian market town; while in the same camp, the camp elder himself a prisoner, mistreated the camp inmates in the most appalling way: it all came down to the individual human being!)

What remained was the individual person, the human being – and nothing else. Everything had fallen away from him during those years: money, power, fame; nothing was certain for him anymore: not life, not health, not happiness; all had been called into question for him: vanity, ambition, relationships. Everything was reduced to bare existence. Burnt through with pain, everything that was not essential was melted down – the human being reduced to what he was in the last analysis: either a member of the masses, therefore no one real, so really no one – the anonymous one, a nameless thing (!), that ‘he’ had now become, just a prisoner number; or else he melted right down to his essential self. So in the end, wasn’t there still something like a decision to be made? We should not be surprised, because ‘existence’ – to the nakedness and rawness of which the human being was returned – is nothing other than: a decision.

What has come through to us from the past? Two things: everything depends on the individual human being, regardless of how small a number of like-minded people there are, and everything depends on each person, through action and not mere words, creatively making the meaning of life a reality in his or her own being. Therefore, we must counter the negative propaganda of recent times, the propaganda of ‘Non-Sense’, of ‘Non-Meaning’, with another propaganda that must be firstly individual and secondly active. Only then can it be positive.

there are people whose desire to commit suicide comes from the fact that they simply feel tired, tired of life. But this tiredness is a feeling – and we all know that feelings are not reasons. That someone is weary, feels exhausted, is in itself not a reason for them to stop in their tracks. Rather, everything depends on whether carrying on does actually have meaning, whether that makes it worth overcoming the tiredness. What is needed here is simply an answer to the question of the meaning of life, of continuing to live despite persistent world-weariness. As such, this is not a counter-argument to living on; this continuing to live, however, will only be possible in the knowledge of life’s unconditional meaning. But in truth, a fourth group of people belong here, those who seek to commit suicide because they just cannot believe in the meaning of living on, in the meaning of life itself. A suicide with that kind of motivation is commonly called a ‘balance-sheet suicide’. In each case it results from a so-called negative life balance. Such a person creates a ‘balance sheet’ and compares what they have (credit) with what they feel they ought to have (debit); they weigh up what life still owes them against what profit they believe they can still derive from life, and the negative balance that they then calculate induces them to commit suicide.

the average person experiences significantly more feelings of dissatisfaction than feelings of pleasure.

Pleasure in itself cannot give our existence meaning; thus the lack of pleasure cannot take away meaning from life, which already seems obvious to us.

slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was duty. I worked – and behold, duty was joy.

life is somehow duty, a single huge obligation. And there is certainly joy in life too, but it cannot be pursued, cannot be ‘willed into being’ as joy, rather, it must arise spontaneously, and in fact, it does arise spontaneously, just as an outcome may arise: happiness should not, must not and can never be a goal, but only an outcome;

all human striving for happiness, in this sense, is doomed to failure as good fortune can only fall into one’s lap, it can never be hunted down. It was Kierkegaard who told the wise parable that the door to happiness always opens ‘outwards’, which means it closes itself precisely against the person who tries to push the door to happiness ‘inwards’, so to speak.

We are the ones who must answer, must give answers to the constant, hourly question of life, to the essential ‘life questions’. Living itself means nothing other than being questioned; our whole act of being is nothing more than responding to – of being responsible towards – life. From this mental standpoint nothing can scare us anymore, no future, no apparent sense of futility. Because now the present is everything, as it holds the eternally new question of life for us. Now everything depends on what is expected of us. As to what awaits us in the future, we don’t need to know that any more than we are able to know it.

The question life asks us, and in answering which we can realise the meaning of the present moment, does not only change from hour to hour but also changes from person to person: the question is entirely different in each moment for every individual. We can, therefore, see how the question as to the meaning of life is posed too simply, unless it is posed with complete specificity, in the concreteness of the here and now. To ask about ‘the meaning of life’ in this way seems just as naive to us as the question of a reporter interviewing a world chess champion and asking, ‘And now, Master, please tell me: which chess move do you think is the best?’ Is there a move, a particular move, that could be good, or even the best, beyond a very specific, concrete game situation, a particular configuration of the pieces?

Whether a life is fulfilled does not depend on how great one’s radius of action is, but rather only on whether the circle is fully filled out. In his particular environment in life, every single human being is irreplaceable and inimitable, and that is true for everyone.

No one should believe that we are so frivolous as to underestimate economic difficulties, an economically desperate situation, or, in fact, the sociological or economic factors in such contexts. We know today more than ever, how far ‘Grub first, then ethics’fn2 can take us. We have no illusions about that anymore. But we know how meaningless it is to guzzle away without any morality and how catastrophic this meaninglessness can be to anyone who is fixated only on consumption. And, lastly, we know how much ‘morality’ means: the unshakeable belief in an unconditional meaning to life, that, one way or another, makes life bearable. Because we have experienced the reality that human beings are truly prepared to starve if starvation has a purpose or meaning.

we can fulfil the demands of existence not only as active agents, but also as loving human beings: in our loving dedication to the beautiful, the great, the good. Should I perhaps try to explain for you with some hackneyed phrase how and why experiencing beauty can make life meaningful? I prefer to confine myself to the following thought experiment: imagine that you are sitting in a concert hall and listening to your favourite symphony, and your favourite bars of the symphony resound in your ears, and you are so moved by the music that it sends shivers down your spine; and now imagine that it would be possible (something that is psychologically so impossible) for someone to ask you in this moment whether your life has meaning. I believe you would agree with me if I declared that in this case you would only be able to give one answer, and it would go something like: ‘It would have been worth it to have lived for this moment alone!’ Those who experience, not the arts, but nature, may have a similar response,

We give life meaning through our actions, but also through loving and, finally, through suffering. Because how human beings deal with the limitation of their possibilities regarding how it affects their actions and their ability to love, how they behave under these restrictions – the way in which they accept their suffering under such restrictions – in all of this they still remain capable of fulfilling human values. So, how we deal with difficulties truly shows who we are, and that, too, can enable us to live meaningfully.

Fate, in other words, what happens to us, can certainly be shaped, in one way or another. ‘There is no predicament which cannot be ennobled either by an achievement or by endurance’, said Goethe.fn3 Either we change our fate, if possible, or we willingly accept it, if necessary. In either case we can experience nothing but inner growth through such misfortune. And now we also understand what Hölderlinfn4 means when he writes: ‘If I step onto my misfortune, I stand higher.’ How misguided it now seems to us when people simply complain about their misfortune or rail against their fate. What would have become of each of us without our fate? How else would our existence have taken shape and form than under its hammer blows and in the white heat of our suffering at its hands? Those who rebel against their fate – that is, against circumstances they cannot help and which they certainly cannot change – have not grasped the meaning of fate. Fate really is integral in the totality of our lives; and not even the smallest part of what is destined can be broken away from this totality without destroying the whole, the configuration of our existence. So, fate is part of our lives and so is suffering. Therefore, if life has meaning, suffering also has meaning. Consequently, suffering, as long as it is necessary and unavoidable, also holds the possibility of being meaningful. It is actually universally recognised and appreciated as such.

One could also say that our human existence can be made meaningful ‘to the very last breath’; as long as we have breath, as long as we are still conscious, we are each responsible for answering life’s questions. This should not surprise us once we recall the great fundamental truth of being human – being human is nothing other than being conscious and being responsible!

Earlier, we needed to use the game of chess as an allegory for the position of the human being in existence, for his always being confronted by the questions of life; with our example of the ‘best chess move’, we wanted to show how the question of life can only be thought of as a concrete, specific one: as a single question that relates to one person and one situation, one particular person and one particular moment – one question in the here and now. So, once again, we must take the game of chess as an allegory, now when we must show how completely absurd it is to attempt to ‘solve’ a life problem by committing suicide. Let us imagine for a moment: a chess player is faced with a chess problem and he cannot find the solution, so what does he do? He hurls the pieces off the board. Is that a solution to the chess problem? Certainly not. But this is exactly how the suicide behaves: he throws his life away and thinks he has thereby found a solution for a seemingly insoluble life problem. He does not know that in doing so he has flouted the rules of life – just as the chess player in our allegory has disregarded the rules of the game of chess, within which a chess problem might be solved by moving a knight, castling, or God knows what, at least by a simple chess move, but certainly not by the behaviour described. Now, the suicide also flouts the rules of the game of life; these rules do not require us to win at all costs, but they do demand from us that we never give up the fig...

We also do not judge the life history of a particular person by the number of pages in the book that portrays it, but only by the richness of the content it contains.

From this we can see just one thing: death is a meaningful part of life, just like human suffering. Both do not rob the existence of human beings of meaning but make it meaningful in the first place.

it is precisely the uniqueness of our existence in the world, the irretrievability of our lifetime, and the irrevocability of everything with which we fill it – or fail to fill it – that give significance to our existence. But it is not only the uniqueness of an individual life as a whole that gives it importance, it is also the uniqueness of every day, every hour, every moment that represents something that loads our existence with the weight of a terrible and yet so beautiful responsibility! Any hour whose demands we do not fulfil, or fulfil half-heartedly, this hour is forfeited, forfeited ‘for all eternity’. Conversely, what we achieve by seizing the moment is, once and for all, rescued into reality, into a reality in which it is only apparently ‘cancelled out’ by becoming the past. In truth it has actually been preserved, in the sense of being kept safe. Having been is in this sense perhaps even the safest form of being. The ‘being’, the reality that we have preserved in this way, can no longer be harmed by transitoriness.

let us not forget that each individual person is imperfect, but each is imperfect in a different way, each ‘in his own way’. And as imperfect as he is, he is uniquely imperfect. So, expressed in a positive way, he becomes somehow irreplaceable, unable to be represented by anyone else, unexchangeable.

the imperfect nature of human beings is meaningful since – now regarded positively – it represents the individuality of our essential inner being.

Individuality can only be valuable when it is not individuality for its own sake, but individuality for the human community.

‘If I do not do it, who else will do it? But if I only do it for me, what am I then? And if I do not do it now, then when will I do it?’

‘Life is not something, it is the opportunity for something!’

let us ask ourselves, honestly and seriously, whether we would want to erase the sad experiences from our past, perhaps from our love lives, whether we would want to miss out on everything that was painful or pain-inducing – then we would surely all say no. Somehow we know how much we were able to grow and mature precisely during these joyless periods of our existence.

Rilke demanded of every human being or wished for every human being: ‘to be able to die his own death’!fn2 In other words, to meaningfully incorporate even death into the whole of life, yes, even to fulfil the meaning of life in death.

Werfel,fn4 The Man who Conquered Death

The Death of Ivan Ilyich, by Tolstoy.

let us ask ourselves what we have to say about the fact that incurably ill people, especially incurably mentally ill people, have been declared to be unworthy of life solely on the basis of their illness, and have been threatened with destruction and even killed. Because we hear repeatedly that the killing of incurably mentally ill people would be the only justifiable measure that people ‘could still understand’ within an otherwise unacceptable programme of political ideology. That is why we would now like to examine all those reasons that, for the most part, are only the tacit basis for such remarks, and to elucidate them with counter-arguments that are as watertight as possible. Since, primarily, we are talking about whether we have the right to kill incurably mentally ill people whose lives are deemed meaningless, and ‘unworthy of living’, we must first ask, ‘What is meant by incurable?’

Have we not seen in psychiatry, especially in the last few decades, that mental disorders that were hitherto classified as incurable could at least be alleviated, if not completely cured, by some kind of treatment? So who can say whether the particular case of the disorder we are now dealing with would be influenced by such a treatment, by a therapy that is currently being worked on somewhere in the world, in some hospital, without us having any idea of it?

Why does menta illness or disability need to be cure or that to be cured has to be the final goal? Surely not everything different must be considered negative, only because it doesn't fit with society or society's idea of "usefulness". Bust still what is different, what doesn't conform with society its often definedas a disability or illness, when actually it isn't. Take for example autism, learning difficulties or down syndrome, people with the right support can still live meaningful and independent lifes. only because someone does't have the means to fit in the larger group composing society does not take away from them. If the skills of these people were to be helped it would probly show sides of excellece highe than someone who doesn't have thar disability. I have often noticed for example the higher level of sensitivity and emotional undertanding and communication of people with autism, when supposedly they have issues on the emotional and attention sphere. Only because the processing is different does't mean that it is not there or inferior.

I believe that here we are presented with two major options for our way of thinking, each of which is irrefutable, and unprovable! After all, we could well assert that everything is, in the end, completely meaningless, just as we could state that everything is not only highly meaningful, but so meaningful that we can no longer comprehend the meaning of the whole, this universal meaning; that we could, in fact, only speak of an ‘ultimate meaning of the world’. Therefore, one could argue for the total meaninglessness of the world with the same justification as one could argue for an ultimate meaning of the world. With the same justification, which means in this case: with the same justified or unjustified logic. In fact, the decision we are faced with is no longer a logical decision. It would be as logical to argue for the one as for the other. In logic, both possibilities for our way of thinking are real possibilities of thought. The decision we are talking about here is, logically speaking, an unfounded decision; it has nothing as a foundation, its foundation is nothing: in this decision we hover above the abyss of nothingness – but at the same time in this decision we are standing at the horizon of ultimate meaning! A person cannot take this decision on the basis of a logical rule, but only from the depths of his or her own being; that is the only way to decide in favour of one or the other. But we do know one thing: if a human being decides to believe in an ultimate mean...

Pro or against euthanasia

belief is not just belief in one’s ‘own’ truth, it is more, much more: belief brings into being that which is believed!

spiritual and mental decline due to losing one’s inner hold, especially due to the loss of a hold on the future, also leads to physical decline.

Many of you who have not lived through the concentration camp will be astonished, and will ask me how a human being can endure all the things I have been talking about. I assure you, he who has experienced and survived all of that is even more amazed than you are! But do not forget this: the human psyche seems to behave in some ways like a vaulted arch: an arch that has become dilapidated can be supported by placing extra load on it. The human psyche also appears to be strengthened by experiencing a burden (at least to a particular degree and within certain limits). This is how, and this is the only way we can understand it, many a weakling was able to leave the concentration camp in a better, stronger state of mind, as it were, than when he had entered it.

we may discover that this ‘not-knowing’ is in fact a ‘not wanting to know’. What lies behind it is wanting to escape responsibility. However, the average person today is in fact being driven to flee responsibility. What is driving him to this flight is the fear of having to accept collective guilt.

Every single moment contains thousands of possibilities – and I can only choose one of them to actualise it. But in making the choice I have condemned all the others and sentenced them to ‘never being’, and even this is for all eternity! But it is wonderful to know that the future, my own future and with it the future of the things, the people around me, is somehow – albeit to a very small extent – dependent on my decisions in every moment.

But on average, people are too sluggish to shoulder their responsibilities. And this is where education for responsibility begins. Certainly, the burden is heavy, it is difficult not only to recognise responsibility but also to commit to it. To say yes to it, and to life.

I am unspeakably tired, unspeakably sad, unspeakably lonely…. In the camp, you really believed you had reached the low point of life – and then, when you came back, you were forced to see that things had not lasted, everything that had sustained you had been destroyed, that at the time when you had become human again, you could sink even deeper into an even more bottomless suffering. Maybe there is nothing else left but to weep a little and to search through the Psalms. Maybe you will laugh at me, maybe you will be angry with me; but I do not contradict myself in the least; I take back nothing of my old affirmation of life when I experience the things I have described. On the contrary: if I had not had this rock-solid positive attitude to life, what would have become of me during these weeks, indeed those months in the concentration camp? But I see things in another dimension now. Increasingly, I realise that life is so infinitely meaningful that even in suffering and even in failure there still has to be a meaning.4

For even if the spiritual causes of suicides are so different, the mental background is the lack of belief in a meaning to life. The person committing suicide not only lacks the courage to live, but also lacks humility before life. Only when a new morality replaces our new objectivity, only when the value of every human life is once again recognised as unique and incomparable, only then will mankind have the necessary mental hold to overcome spiritual crises.5