Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything

by Viktor E. Frankl

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.”