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how long a human life lasts. Its long duration does not automatically make it meaningful, and its possible briefness makes it far from meaningless.
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.
What we “radiate” into the world, the “waves” that emanate from our being, that is what will remain of us when our being itself has long since passed away.
Kant’s well-known maxim, which goes like this: “Live as if you were living for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!”
In other words, religious people experience their life as a divine mission.
Hebbel, who says: “Life is not something, it is the opportunity for something!”
Suffering is such a purely human matter, which in itself is somehow already part of human life, that in some circumstances it is precisely this “nonsuffering” that can actually be an illness.
For, 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.
How we longed for proper human suffering at that time, real human problems, real human conflicts, in place of these degrading questions of eating or starving, freezing or sleeping, toiling or being beaten.
We have already heard that the fulfillment of meaning is possible in three main directions: human beings are able to give meaning to their existence, firstly, by doing something, by acting, by creating—by bringing a work into being; secondly, by experiencing something—nature, art—or loving people; and thirdly, human beings are able to find meaning even where finding value in life is not possible for them in either the first or the second way—namely, precisely when they take a stance toward the unalterable, fated, inevitable, and unavoidable limitation of their possibilities: how they adapt to
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For we have already pointed out that the meaning of life can only be a specific one, specific both in relation to each individual person and in relation to each individual hour: the question that life asks us changes both from person to person, and from situation to situation.
You will understand me if I now state that no terrific advertising graphics, not the best nor the most beautiful in the world (if the patient had created them when he was professionally employed) would have been an accomplishment equal to the simple human achievement that this man demonstrated with his behavior in those last few hours of his life.
No matter our work it will matter little compared to our character.
Therefore, we no longer need to feel surprised if there are people who (acknowledging the meaningfulness of death within the total meaning of life) see no loss in illness and death and see not only a gain but almost a “gift.”
it was not easy for the writer of that letter to talk, and yet he acted and thereby showed that what is demanded can also be realized.
It will now be clear to you that the meaning that can ensue from illness and dying cannot be affected by any external lack of success or any failure in this world, that this is rather an internal success, and this inner success exists despite external failure.
Sdl
inner success, the inner fulfillment of life’s meaning, is something that, if at all, has been achieved “once and for always.” The fact that this goal is often only reached at the end of our existence does not detract from the meaning of life but rounds off this “end” to become a true completion.
If, after all this, it has been proven that even an ailing life, indeed even a life at death’s door, is by no means a meaningless life, then we must now turn to the question of what right anyone could ever have to assert that a sick or moribund person, a “terminally ill” person, is a worthless person, that their life is thus “unworthy of life.”
In general, the doctor also tends to treat the disease and not the person, not the sick person.
With these expressions that creep unconsciously into medical jargon, it is sufficiently evident how deep and how far the tendency for dissociation by doctors extends, and their objectification of human beings.
Even the mentally ill person “is” not just a disease to us but is first and foremost a human being, that is, a person who “has” an illness.
On the other hand, 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.
Supposing we were as omniscient as we would need to be in order to speak with absolute certainty of not just temporary but permanent incurability; who would then give the doctor the right to kill?
Well, when it comes to the consumption of goods such as food, hospital beds, the work of doctors and nurses, the consideration of these resources is irrelevant to a discussion about this argument if we keep one thing in mind: 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.
but now we can see that there is also a second way in which the person as a unique and individual being always comes into his own, in which the value of his personality is also realized and his personal, specific meaning of life is fulfilled: this is the way of love, or better still, of being loved.
On the path of love a person thus receives by “grace” the things he would otherwise have to strive for or obtain through action: the realization of both his uniqueness and his individuality.
For it is the nature of love that makes us see our loved one in their uniqueness and individuality.
in the end you could assert that, in the above-mentioned cases of mental illness, the doctor who kills an incurable patient is acting ultimately as a representative of the well-understood will of the patients concerned, as it were.
One could consider, if understood correctly, that such a killing would be a substitute for a suicide, which the patient would undoubtedly undertake if only he knew the truth of his situation.
Whichever way you look at it, the fact is and remains that his will to live was raging, and this fact must remind us unequivocally and once and for all (and is applicable to all similar cases) that we do not have the right to deny any patient this will to live!
It is not I who wishes to play the role of destiny but the doctor who abandons a suicide to his fate, who gives fate free reign and sits on his hands where he could perhaps still intervene to help, is the one who tries to act the part of destiny.
However, he drops his intention at once, simply because it has become more or less pointless; because a suicide attempt is redundant in this situation inasmuch as the average probability of not, sooner or later, going to the gas chamber is in any case minimal.
No wonder, then, if this submerging into the mass led to a “going under,” a decline of the personal sphere. In the camp the human being threatened to become a creature of the masses.
And there were people in the camp, who, for example, were able to overcome their apathy and suppress their irritability, and in the end it was a question of appealing to their ability to “do things differently” and not just the supposed compulsion to “do things this way”!
In other words, that man did once possess such freedom; but he had given it away, he had, as it were, renounced its use—voluntarily renounced it! But in so doing he had given himself up, abandoned his self, his very essence. Spiritually, he had let himself fall.
Such hold could exist in two forms: either it was a hold on the future or a hold on eternity.
The latter was the case with all truly religious people; they did not even need a hold on the future, their future life out there in the free world, after their coming liberation—these people could remain upright irrespective of whether they anticipated a future destiny, or would even experience such a future, or survive the concentration camp.
During a full three years I heard repeatedly: in six weeks the war will be over, we will be home again in six weeks at most.
“Hope deferred makes the heart sick.”13
Thinking of the words of Nietzsche who once said, “Whoever has a why to live can bear almost any how”—a “why,” that is part of the content of life, and the “how,” those were the conditions of life that made camp life so difficult that it only became bearable with regard to a “why,” a wherefore.
In addition, the psychotherapeutic task, which in the camp was truly the task of caring for the inmates’ souls, was made more difficult because we were dealing with people who, in general, on average, could not count on surviving!
It was essential that we should die a death of our own and not the death that the SS had forced on us!
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, the person who has experienced and survived all of that is even more amazed than you are!
The human soul also appears to be strengthened by experiencing a burden (at least to a particular degree and within certain limits).
And most traua stuff teaches that our lives should be ruined because of trauma.
At the same time, however, we now understand that the liberation, the release from the camp, the sudden release of the prisoner from the intense pressure he has been under all that time, in turn endangers his psyche.
