Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything

by Viktor E. Frankl

Happiness in itself does not qualify as such a purpose; pleasures do not give our life meaning. In contrast, he points out that even the dark and joyless episodes of our lives can be times when we mature and find meaning. He even posits that the more difficult, the more meaningful troubles and challenges can be. How we deal with the tough parts of our lives, he observes, “shows who we are.”

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.

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?” For Frankl, this suggests that each of us has our unique life purpose and that serving others ennobles it. The scope and range of our actions matter less than how well we respond to the specific demands of our life circle.

But suicide, 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.

But the whole of life stands in the face of death, and if this man had been right, then our whole lives would also be meaningless, were we only to strive for pleasure and nothing else—preferably the most pleasure and the highest degree of pleasure possible. 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.

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

So, 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; 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. In any case, all human striving for happiness, in this sense, is doomed to failure as luck can only fall into one’s lap but can never be hunted down. It was Kierkegaard who told the wise parable that the door to happiness always opens “outward,” which means it closes itself precisely against the person who tries to push the door to happiness “inward,” so to speak.

the question can no longer be “What can I expect from life?” but can now only be “What does life expect of me?” What task in life is waiting for me?

Now we also understand how, in the final analysis, the question of the meaning of life is not asked in the right way, if asked in the way it is generally asked: 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! 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 toward—life. With this mental standpoint nothing can scare us anymore, no future, no apparent lack of a future. 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

But none of us knows what is waiting for us, what big moment, what unique opportunity for acting in an exceptional way, just like the rescue of ten people by that black man aboard the Leviathan.

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. In his specific life circle, every single human being is irreplaceable and inimitable, and that is true for everyone. The tasks that his life imposes are only for him, and only he is required to fulfill them. And a person who has not completely filled his (relatively) larger circle remains more unfulfilled than that of a person whose more closely drawn circle is sufficient. In his specific environment, this tailor’s assistant can achieve more, and, in the things he does and the things he leaves undone, he can lead a more meaningful life than the person he envies, as long as that person is not aware of his greater responsibility in life and does not do justice to it.

We give life meaning not only 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.

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 behavior 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 fight.

Let us try to find the answer to this objection by asking the question the other way around; let us ask ourselves, “What if we were immortal?” And we can give the answer: if we were immortal, then we could postpone everything, but truly everything. Because it would never matter whether we did a particular thing right now, or tomorrow, or the day after, or in a year, or in ten years, or whenever. No death, no end would be looming over us, there would be no limitation of our possibilities, we would see no reason to do a particular thing right now, or surrender ourselves to an experience just now—there would be time, we would have time, an infinite amount of time.

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 fulfill 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. If we look at things that way then, essentially, it may prove to be quite irrelevant to us how long a human life lasts. Its long duration does not automatically make it meaningful, and its possible briefness makes it far from meaningless. 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.

Certainly, our life, in terms of the biological, the physical, is transitory in nature. Nothing of it survives—and yet how much remains! What remains of it, what will remain of us, what can outlast us, is what we have achieved during our existence that continues to have an effect, transcending us and extending beyond us. The effectiveness of our life becomes incorporeal and in that way it resembles radium, whose physical form is also, during the course of its “lifetime” (and radioactive materials are known to have a limited lifetime) increasingly converted into radiation energy, never to return to materiality. 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.

Then he suddenly burst into tears, and the venerable, world-famous old man whose hands I was holding wept softly like a little child: “I can’t stand it, there is no point in living life as a cripple,” he whimpered. Then I looked him in the eye and asked him insistently, but facetiously: “Tell me, Your Honor, do you intend to pursue a successful career as a short- or long-distance runner?” He looked up, astonished. “Because then,” I continued, “but only then, would I be able to understand your despair and your previous statement; because then you would have played your last card, for then your further life, your living on, would be pointless for you: because you would no longer be capable of being a short- or a long-distance runner. But beyond that, for a man like you who has led his whole life in a highly meaningful way, who has been effective and made a name for himself in the professional world—for such a man, should the whole of life have lost its meaning just because he has lost a leg?”

In this way she was fortunate, she had succeeded in doing what Rilke demanded of every human being or wished for every human being: “to be able to die his own death”!7 In other words, to meaningfully incorporate even death into the whole of life, yes, even to fulfill the meaning of life in death.

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. Everything I realize through them, or “bring into the world,” as we have said, I save into reality and thus protect from transience.

To say yes to life is not only meaningful under all circumstances—because life itself is—but it is also possible under all circumstances. And ultimately that was the entire purpose of these three parts: to show you that people can still—despite hardship and death (first part), despite suffering from physical or mental illness (second part) or under the fate of the concentration camp (third part)—say yes to life in spite of everything.

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 realize that life is so infinitely meaningful that even in suffering and even in failure there still has to be a meaning.

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