Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything

by Viktor E. Frankl

Propaganda, as we learned in my civics class, relies on not just lies and misinformation but also on distorted negative stereotypes, inflammatory terms, and other such tricks to manipulate people’s opinions and beliefs in the service of some ideological agenda.

Hitler had argued that people would believe anything if it was repeated often enough and if disconfirming information was routinely denied, silenced, or disputed with yet more lies.

Sounds like coronavirus now. october 30, 2021

Frankl’s main contribution to the world of psychotherapy was what he called “logotherapy,” which treats psychological problems by helping people find meaning in their lives.

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.

First, 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.

He references the Dalai Lama

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?”

our unique strengths and weaknesses make each of us uniquely irreplaceable.

Frankl said this

But if instead witnesses spoke up in protest of evil, Staub saw, it made such acts more difficult for the evildoers.

Were Frankl with us today (he died in 1997), he would no doubt be pleased that so many of today’s younger people are choosing to know and are finding purpose and meaning in surfacing environmental facts and acting on them.

he would be happy they are finding purpose, but do we know enough about him to realize whether he would be happy about the environmental piece?

As Frankl put it, “It should not be a surprise if contemporary philosophy perceives the world as though it had no substance.”

But these days, those who recruit and hire for companies, for instance, report that more than any time in memory the new generation of prospective employees shun working for places whose activities conflict with their personal values.

Suicide,” he wrote, “is never able to solve a problem” or to answer the question being asked of us by life. Frankl urged that instead of fixating on and exaggerating the catastrophic life consequence of poor scores, students instead contemplate their larger aspirations for their lives. His program, some sources report, reduced those suicides to zero in one of the first years it ran.

In some respects it is easier today: we can now speak freely again about so many things—things that are inherently connected with the problem of the meaningfulness of human existence and its value, and with human dignity.

The propaganda of these last years was a propaganda against all possible meaning and against the questionable value of existence itself! In fact, these years have sought to demonstrate the worthlessness of human life.

So, just as our lives were not worth a bowl of soup, our deaths were also of minimal value, not even worth a lead bullet, just some Zyklon B.1

Although I am using a somewhat journalistic phrase here, the state of mind and the spiritual condition of an average person today is most accurately described as “spiritually bombed out.”

However, we cannot move toward any spiritual reconstruction with a sense of fatalism such as this. We first have to overcome it. But in doing so, we ought to take into account that today we cannot, with blithe optimism, just consign to history everything these last years have brought with them. We have become pessimistic.

And if there is a fundamental difference between the way people perceived the world around them in the past and the way they perceive it at present, then it is perhaps best identified as follows: in the past, activism was coupled with optimism, while today activism requires pessimism.

If today we cannot sit idly by, it is precisely because each and every one of us determines what and how far something “progresses.” In this, we are aware that inner progress is only actually possible for each individual, while mass progress at most consists of technical progress, which only impresses us because we live in a technical age.

It is always about the individual. Only we cam define how things progress. Data is onlyeaningful as it relates to the individual. this is the problem with our current addiction to data .

Give me a sober activism anytime, rather than that rose-tinted fatalism!

And equally it was the human being that was left in the experiences of the concentration camps. (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 senior camp warden, so himself a prisoner, mistreated the camp inmates in the most appalling way: it all came down to the individual human being!)

Only thirty-six! An infinitesimal minority. And yet they guarantee the continuing moral existence of the whole world. But this story continues: as soon as one of these just individuals is recognized as such and is, so to speak, unmasked by his surroundings, by his fellow human beings, he disappears, he is “withdrawn,” and then dies instantly.

We will not be far off the mark if we express it like this: as soon as we notice any pedagogical tendency in a role model, we become resentful; we human beings do not like to be lectured to like children.

Two things: everything depends on the individual human being, regardless of how small a number of like-minded people there is, 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.

But as soon as we speak of the meaning of existence, at that moment it is somehow called into question. Once we ask about it explicitly, it has somehow already been doubted.

Firstly, suicide can be a consequence—a consequence not of a primarily mental but of a physical, bodily state.

Then there are people whose determination to commit suicide feeds on a calculation of its effect on their surroundings: people who want to take revenge on someone for something that has been done to them, and who want their urge for revenge to result in the others in question being weighed down by a guilty conscience for the rest of their lives: they must be made to feel guilty for the suicide’s death.

Thirdly, there are people whose desire to commit suicide comes from the fact that they simply feel tired, tired of life.

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.”

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

How beautifully Rabindranath Tagore expressed all this, the disappointment human beings feel toward their claim to happiness in life, in this poem in which he says: I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was duty. I worked—and behold, duty was joy.

President Monson Quoted this poem.

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; the outcome of the fulfillment of that which in Tagore’s poem is called duty, and that we will later try to define more closely.

Happiness can only be an outcome. Never a goal. Makes perfecf sense to me but i have never thought of it this way. Later compared to luck, only found but never sought after and obtaimed

luck can only fall into one’s lap but can never be hunted down.

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!

Living itself means nothing other than being questioned; our whole act of being is nothing more than responding to—of being responsible toward—life.

This man had forgotten that 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 fills his place, his circle.

Whether a life is fulfilled doesn’t depend on how great one’s range of action is, but rather only on whether the circle is filled out.

We give life meaning not only through our actions but also through loving and, finally, through suffering.

So, how we deal with difficulties truly shows who we are, and that, too, can enable us to live meaningfully. And we should not forget the sporting spirit, that uniquely human spirit! What do athletes do but create difficulties for themselves so that they can grow through overcoming them?

In general, of course, it is not advisable to create difficulties for oneself; in general, suffering as a result of misfortune is only meaningful if this misfortune has come about through fate, and is thus unavoidable and inescapable.

“There is no predicament which cannot be ennobled either by an achievement or by endurance,” said Goethe.

Either we change our fate, if possible, or we willingly accept it, if necessary.

And now we also understand what Hölderlin means when he writes: “If I step onto my mi...

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.

This was a clear acknowledgment that true suffering of an authentic fate is an achievement, and, indeed, is the highest possible achievement.

in the final analysis, it is not a question of either achievement or endurance—rather, in some cases, endurance itself is the greatest achievement.

life always offers us a possibility for the fulfillment of meaning, therefore there is always the option that it has a meaning.

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 fight.

Therefore, death forms the background against which our act of being becomes a responsibility.