Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything

by Viktor E. Frankl

Propaganda had played a major role in shaping the outlook of people ruled by the Axis powers. 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. Frankl knew well the toxicity of propaganda deployed by the Nazis in their rise to power and beyond. It was aimed, he saw, at the very value of existence itself, asserting the worthlessness of life—at least for anyone, like himself, who fell into a maligned category, like gypsies, gays, Jews, and political dissidents, among others.

Frankl argues that suffering, even incurable illness and the inner dignity of dying “one’s own death,” can prove meaningful. In the face of death, for instance, there can still be an inner success, whether in maintaining a certain attitude or given the fulfillment of that person’s life’s meaning. So, he contends, no one has the right to judge another person’s life as meaningless, or to deem another as unworthy of the right to life. Frankl himself had just recently been freed from the camps where the lives of inmates like him “counted for nothing.”

Rather than just seeking happiness, he proposed, we can seek a sense of purpose that life offers us. 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.

Viktor Frankl chose to stay in his native Vienna after being freed and became head of neurology at a main hospital in Vienna. The Austrians he lived among often perplexed Frankl by saying they did not know a thing about the horrors of the camps he had barely survived. For Frankl, though, this alibi seemed flimsy. These people, he felt, had chosen not to know. Another survivor of the Nazis, the social psychologist Ervin Staub, was saved from a certain death by Raoul Wallenberg, the diplomat who made Swedish passports for thousands of desperate Hungarians, keeping them safe from the Nazis. Staub studied cruelty and hatred, and he found one of the roots of such evil to be the turning away, choosing not to see or know, of bystanders. That not-knowing was read by perpetrators as a tacit approval. But if instead witnesses spoke up in protest of evil, Staub saw, it made such acts more difficult for the evildoers. For Frankl, the “not-knowing” he encountered in postwar Vienna was regarding the Nazi death camps scattered throughout that short-lived empire, and the obliviousness of Viennese citizens to the fate of their own neighbors who were imprisoned and died in those camps. The underlying motive for not-knowing, he points out, is to escape any sense of responsibility or guilt for those crimes. People in general, he saw, had been encouraged by their authoritarian rulers not to know—a fact of life today as well. That same plea of innocence, I had no idea, has contemporary resonanc...

In light of the wholesale madness that afflicted too much of the “civilized” world during the great war that had just passed, Frankl felt the younger generation of his day no longer had the kind of role models that would give them a sense of enthusiastic idealism, the energy that drives progress. The young people who had witnessed the war, he felt, had seen too much cruelty, pointless suffering, and devastating loss to harbor a positive outlook, let alone enthusiasm. The years leading up to and including the war, he noted, had “utterly discredited” all principles, leaving the nihilistic perception that the world itself lacked any substance. Frankl asked how it might be possible to resurrect and sustain concepts like a noble meaning in life, which had been so wantonly demolished by a torrent of lies. In another timely insight, Frankl saw that a materialistic view, in which people end up mindlessly consuming and fixating on what they can buy next, epitomizes a meaningless life, as he put it, where we are “guzzling away” without any thought of morality. That very eagerness for consumption has become today a dominant worldview, one devoid of any greater meaning or inner purpose. Add to that the degradation of human dignity created by an economic system that had, in the last few decades before Frankl gave his talks, relegated working men and women into “mere means,” degrading them into “tools” of making money for someone else. Frankl saw this as an insult to human dignity, argu...

These days, various lines of evidence suggest that many young people today are putting their sense of meaning and purpose first—a development Frankl could not have foreseen given the dark lens that the horrors he had just survived gave him. 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. Frankl’s intuitive sense of how purpose matters has been borne out by a large body of research. For instance, having a sense of purpose in life offers a buffer against poor health. People with a life purpose, data shows, tend to live longer. And researchers find that having a purpose numbers among the pillars of well-being.

“Whoever has a why to live can bear almost any how,” as the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche declared. Frankl takes this maxim as an explanation for the will to survive he noted in some fellow prisoners. Those who found a larger meaning and purpose in their lives, who had a dream of what they could contribute, were, in Frankl’s view, more likely to survive than were those who gave up.

The lesson Frankl drew from this existential fact: our perspective on life’s events—what we make of them—matters as much or more than what actually befalls us. “Fate” is what happens to us beyond our control. But we each are responsible for how we relate to those events. Frankl held these insights on the singular importance of a sense of meaning even before he underwent the horrors of camp life, though his years as a prisoner gave him even deeper conviction. When he was arrested and deported in 1941, he had sewn into the lining of his overcoat the manuscript of a book in which he argued for this view. He had hoped to publish that book one day, though he had to give up the coat—and the unpublished book—on his first day as a prisoner. And his desire to one day publish his views, along with his yearning to see his loved ones once again, gave him a personal purpose that helped keep him afloat.

“What is human,” he argued, “is still valid.”

Since Kant, European thought has succeeded in making clear statements about the true dignity of human beings: Kant himself, in the second formulation of his categorical imperative, said that everything has its value, but man has his dignity—a human being should never become a means to an end. But already in the economic system of the last few decades, most working people had been turned into mere means, degraded to become mere tools for economic life. It was no longer work that was the means to an end, a means for life or indeed a food for life—rather it was a man and his life, his vital energy, his “man power,” that became this means to an end.

Today, our attitude to life hardly has any room for belief in meaning. We are living in a typical postwar period. 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.” This alone would be bad enough, but it is made even worse by the fact that we are overwhelmingly dominated, at the same time, by the feeling that we are yet again living in a kind of prewar period. The invention of the atomic bomb is feeding the fear of a catastrophe on a global scale, and a kind of apocalyptic, “end-of-the-world” mood has taken hold of the last part of the second millennium. We already know such apocalyptic moods from history. They existed at the beginning of the first millennium and at its end. And, famously, in the last century there was a fin-de-siècle feeling, and this was not the only one that was defeatist; at the root of all these moods lies fatalism.

All the programs, all the slogans and principles have been utterly discredited as a result of these last few years. Nothing was able to survive, so it should not be a surprise if contemporary philosophy perceives the world as though it has no substance. But through this nihilism, through the pessimism and skepticism, through the soberness of a “new objectivity” that is no longer that “new” but has grown old, we must strive toward a new humanity. The past few years have certainly disenchanted us, but they have also shown us that what is human is still valid; they have taught us that it is all a question of the individual human being. After all, in the end, what was left was the human being! Because it was the human being that survived amid all the filth of the recent past. 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!)

Words alone are not enough. I was once called upon to attend a woman who had committed suicide. On the wall above her couch, neatly framed, a saying hung on the wall: “Even more powerful than fate is the courage that bears it steadfastly.” And this fellow human being had taken her own life right under this motto.

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.

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.” In each case it results from a so-called negative life balance. Such a person creates a “balance sheet” and compares what they have (credit) with what they feel they ought to have (debit); they weigh up what life still owes them against what profit they believe they can still derive from life, and the negative balance that they then calculate induces them to commit suicide. We will now set about inspecting this balance sheet. Normally, the credit column contains all the suffering and pain; the debit column lists all the happiness and good fortune that one did not attain. But this balance is fundamentally incorrect. For, as the saying goes, “We are not in this world for fun.” And this is true in the double sense of what is (being) and what ought to be. Anyone who has not felt this for themselves may wish to refer to the writings of a Russian experimental psychologist, who once proved that the average person experiences significantly more feelings of dissatisfaction than feelings of pleasure. Therefore, from the outset, it would not be possible to live only for the sake of pleasure.

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.

it would be helpful, as we might say with Kant, to “perform a Copernican revolution,” a conceptual turn through 180 degrees, after which 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 it.

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.

We can, therefore, see how the question as to the meaning of life is posed too simply, unless it is posed with complete specificity, in the concreteness of the here and now. To ask about “the meaning of life” in this way seems just as naive to us as the question of a reporter interviewing a world chess champion and asking, “And now, Master, please tell me: which chess move do you think is the best?” Is there a move, a particular move, that could be good, or even the best, beyond a very specific, concrete game situation, a specific configuration of the pieces? No less naive was the young man who spoke to me one day, many years ago, as I was about to give a little seminar somewhere on the meaning of life. His words went roughly like this: “Hey Frankl, don’t be angry with me, I’ve been invited to my future in-laws tonight. I really do have to go, and I can’t stay for your lecture; please be so kind and tell me quickly, what is the meaning of life?”

one day, a young man sat in front of me who had just confronted me about the question of the meaning or meaninglessness of life. His argument was as follows: “It’s easy for you to talk, you have set up counseling centers, you help people, you straighten people out; but I—who am I, what am I—a tailor’s assistant. What can I do, how can I give my life meaning through my actions?” 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.

“So, how about the unemployed?,” you may now object, overlooking the fact that work is not the only field in which we can actively give meaning to our lives. Does work alone make life meaningful? Let’s ask the many people who complain to us (not without reason) about how meaningless their (often mechanical) work is, the endless adding up of columns of numbers or the monotonous pushing and pulling of machine levers on a never-ending production line. These people can only make their lives meaningful in their all too scant spare time, filling it with personal human meaning.

It is not only through our actions that we can give life meaning—insofar as we can answer life’s specific questions responsibly—we can fulfill the demands of existence not only as active agents but also as loving human beings: in our loving dedication to the beautiful, the great, the good. Should I perhaps try to explain for you with some hackneyed phrase how and why experiencing beauty can make life meaningful? I prefer to confine myself to the following thought experiment: imagine that you are sitting in a concert hall and listening to your favorite symphony, and your favorite bars of the symphony resound in your ears, and you are so moved by the music that it sends shivers down your spine; and now imagine that it would be possible (something that is psychologically so impossible) for someone to ask you in this moment whether your life has meaning. I believe you would agree with me if I declared that in this case you would only be able to give one answer, and it would go something like: “It would have been worth it to have lived for this moment alone!”

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.

Fate, in other words, what happens to us, can certainly be shaped, in one way or another. “There is no predicament which cannot be ennobled either by an achievement or by endurance,” said Goethe.3 Either we change our fate, if possible, or we willingly accept it, if necessary. In either case we can experience nothing but inner growth through such misfortune. And now we also understand what Hölderlin means when he writes: “If I step onto my misfortune, I stand higher.”

fate is part of our lives and so is suffering; therefore, if life has meaning, suffering also has meaning. Consequently, suffering, as long as it is necessary and unavoidable, also holds the possibility of being meaningful. It is actually universally recognized and appreciated as such. Several years ago, the news reached us that the English boy scouts’ organization had given awards to three boys for their greatest achievements; and who received these awards? Three boys who were terminally ill in the hospital and who nevertheless endured their burdensome fate with bravery and dignity. This was a clear acknowledgment that true suffering of an authentic fate is an achievement, and, indeed, is the highest possible achievement. The alternative given in the Goethe sentence quoted above is therefore no longer entirely true when examined more closely: in the final analysis, it is not a question of either achievement or endurance—rather, in some cases, endurance itself is the greatest achievement.