Yes To Life In Spite of Everything

by Viktor E. Frankl

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...