Yes To Life In Spite of Everything

by Viktor E. Frankl

Frankl spends a good deal of time refuting the assumption underlying euthanasia—not in its literal meaning, a “good,” gentle, and painless death but rather in its perverse sense: that certain lives have no value, including those of the mentally ill and developmentally challenged, and so their deaths are justified.

There are three main ways people find fulfillment of their life meaning, in Frankl’s view. First, there is action, such as creating a work, whether art or a labor of love—something that outlasts us and continues to have an impact. Second, he says, meaning can be found in appreciating nature, works of art, or simply loving people; Frankl cites Kierkegaard, that the door to happiness always opens outward. The third lies in how a person adapts and reacts to unavoidable limits on their life possibilities, such as facing their own death or enduring a dreadful fate like the concentration camps. In short, our lives take on meaning through our actions, through loving, and through suffering.

“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?”

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.

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

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.

it is not we who are permitted to ask about the meaning of life, it is life that asks the questions, directs questions at us – we are the ones who are questioned!

it is never a question of where someone is in life, or which profession he is in, it is only a matter of how he occupies his circle in life and fills his place. 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.

Conversely, the fact, and only the fact, that we are mortal, that our lives are finite, that our time is restricted and our possibilities are limited, this fact is what makes it meaningful to do something, to exploit a possibility and make it become a reality, to fulfil it, to use our time and occupy it. Death gives us a compulsion to do so. Therefore, death forms the background against which our act of being becomes a responsibility.

But before we think about the meaningfulness of our imperfection, we must, for the moment, ask whether the despair of human beings over their own imperfection and inadequacy can ever justifiably exist. For we must ask whether people who measure their ‘being’ against a ‘what ought to be’, who thus measure themselves against an ideal, can ever be completely worthless. Is it not rather the case that precisely the fact that they can despair of themselves somehow vindicates them and ultimately, to a certain degree, deprives their despair of legitimacy? Could such people even sit in judgement on themselves if they were so worthless that they were not even able to see the ideal? Does not the distance from the ideal, as soon as they perceive it, confirm that they have not become completely disloyal to this ideal?

Individuality can only be valuable when it is not individuality for its own sake, but individuality for the human community. The simple fact that every human being has completely unique ridge patterns on their fingertips, is, at most, relevant only to criminologists for crime research or the investigation of a particular criminal; but this biological ‘individuality’ of every human being does not automatically turn the person into a personality or a living being that in its uniqueness is valuable for society.

‘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?’ ‘If not I’ – therein lies the uniqueness of every single person; ‘If only for me’, therein lies the worthlessness and meaninglessness of such uniqueness unless it is a ‘serving’ uniqueness; ‘and if not now’, therein lies the uniqueness of every individual situation!

a state that is already economically so badly off that it relies on eliminating the relatively insignificant percentage of its incurable citizens in order to save on those aforementioned goods – such a state has already reached the end economically.

And in spite of everything, no human suffering can be compared to anyone else’s because it is part of the nature of suffering that it is the suffering of a particular person, that it is his or her own suffering – that its ‘magnitude’ is dependent solely on the sufferer, that is, on the person; a person’s solitary suffering is just as unique and individual as is every person. Therefore, it would be pointless to speak of differences in the magnitude of suffering; but a difference that truly matters is that between meaningful and meaningless suffering. But – and I think you will have gathered this sufficiently from previous lectures – this difference depends entirely on the individual human being: the individual, and only that individual, determines whether their suffering is meaningful or not.