Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything

by Viktor E. Frankl

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 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.”

“logotherapy,” which treats psychological problems by helping people find meaning in their lives.

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.

“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?”

“Whoever has a why to live can bear almost any how,” as the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche declared.

So, in the end, was there something like a decision that needed to be made? It does not surprise us, because “existence”—to the nakedness and rawness of which the human being was returned—is nothing other than a decision.

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.

When we are talking about suicide, we must distinguish between four essential, but essentially different, reasons from which the inner will to commit suicide arises. Firstly, suicide can be a consequence—a consequence not of a primarily mental but of a physical, bodily state. This group includes those cases in which someone experiencing a physically determined change of mental state tries to kill themselves almost as if compelled to do so.

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 this tiredness is a feeling—and...

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.

The question life asks us, and in answering which we can realize the meaning of the present moment, does not only change from hour to hour but also changes from person to person: the question is entirely different in each moment for every individual.

Do we not know the feeling that overtakes us when we are in the presence of a particular person and, roughly translates as, The fact that this person exists in the world at all, this alone makes this world, and a life in it, meaningful.

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.

Thus, it is precisely the uniqueness of our existence in the world, the irretrievability of our lifetime, the irrevocability of everything with which we fill it—or leave unfulfilled—that gives our

existence significance.

life itself means being questioned, means answering; each person must be responsible for their own existence. Life no longer appears to us as a given, but as something given over to us, it is a task in every moment.

“Life is not something, it is the opportunity for something!”

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 this limitation, react toward it, how they accept this fate.

So he had withdrawn into that area of existence in which it is possible, beyond being active, for a person to fulfill the meaning of life and answer life’s question in the passive incorporation of the world into the self.

So, illness does not have to lead to a loss of meaning. But more than that, sometimes it can even lead to a benefit.

In the first part, when we talked about the fact that the uniqueness and individuality of every human being constitutes the value of his person, and that this value must be related to a community to which this uniqueness is of value, then we were all thinking of it primarily in terms of serving the community; 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.

Now, I hope I have shown you, through this discussion of all the apparent arguments that could support euthanasia, how unconditional is the meaningfulness of existence and therefore how unshakeable is our belief in meaning in our lives. If, at first, life as such proved to be meaningful to us, it later emerged that even suffering contributes to meaning and is part of the meaning of life. And then we saw that even dying can have meaning, that it can be meaningful “to die one’s own death.” And finally, it was seen that even illness, even incurable illness, yes, even incurable mental illness, does not give anyone the right to judge a human life as being “unworthy of life” and deny them the right to life. Thus, we appear to have explored the question of the meaning of life a little, from various angles. In a rough review of our main conclusion, we remember above all our basic observation that life itself means being questioned and that we cannot justifiably ask about its meaning, since this meaning exists in the act of answering. But we said that the answers that we must give to life’s specific questions can no longer exist in words but only in deeds, and more than that in living, in our whole being! The questions of “our lives” can, as we felt, only be answered by each of us being responsible for “our own lives.”

The first phase is at the time of the prisoners’ admission to the camp.

This is how the soul protects itself, how it tries to safeguard itself from the overwhelming power threatening to swamp it and tries to preserve its equilibrium—to rescue itself into indifference. In this way, the prisoner progresses into the second phase of his psychological reaction to camp life: the phase that could be characterized as the phase of apathy.

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”! That inner ability, that real human freedom—they could not take that away from the prisoner, even if, in there, they could take everything else away from him and, in fact, did so.

Nietzsche who once said, “Whoever has a why to live can bear almost any how”—a

the human psyche seems to behave in some ways like a vaulted arch—an arch that has become dilapidated can be supported by placing an extra load on it. The human soul also appears to be strengthened by experiencing a burden (at least to a particular degree and within certain limits).

third and final phase within the psychology of the concentration camp, the psychology of the liberated inmate.

No talking, no lectures can help us get any further—there is only one thing left for us to do: to act; namely, to act in our everyday lives.

it was not enough to make transparent the everyday—which is only apparently so gray, banal, and commonplace—so that we can look through it into the eternal; but in the final analysis it was necessary to point out that the eternal refers back to the temporal—to the temporal, the everyday, and the point of an ongoing encounter between the finite and the infinite. What we create, experience, and suffer, in this time, we create, experience, and suffer for all eternity. As far as we bear responsibility for an event, as far as it is “history,” our responsibility, it is incredibly burdened by the fact that something that has happened cannot be “taken out of the world.”

It is terrible to know that at every moment I bear responsibility for the next; that every decision, from the smallest to the largest, is a decision “for all eternity”; that in every moment I can actualize the possibility of a moment, of that particular moment, or forfeit it. Every single moment contains thousands of possibilities—and I can only choose one of them to actualize it. But in making the choice, I have condemned all the others and sentenced them to “never being,” and even this is for all eternity! 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.

For even if the spiritual causes of suicides are so different, the mental background is the lack of belief in a meaning to life. The person committing suicide not only lacks the courage to live, but also lacks humility before life. Only when a new morality replaces our new objectivity, only when the value of every human life is once again recognized as unique and incomparable, only then will mankind have the necessary mental hold to overcome spiritual crises.

The logotherapy and existential analysis he founded are also known as the “third Viennese direction of psychotherapy.”