Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything

by Viktor E. Frankl

The Holocaust, which saw millions die in concentration camps, included as victims Frankl’s parents and his pregnant wife. Yet despite these personal tragedies and the inevitable deep sadness these losses brought Frankl, he was able to put such suffering in a perspective that has inspired millions of readers of his best-known book, Man’s Search for Meaning—and in these lectures.

But, she told me, when she was growing up outside Boston her parents would gather with friends who were also survivors of the death camps—and have a party. The women, as my Russian-born grandmother used to say, would get “gussied up,” wearing their finest clothes, decking themselves out as though for a fancy ball.

Second chance on life

Whatever our future may hold: We still want to say “yes” to life, Because one day the time will come— Then we will be free!

If the prisoners of Buchenwald, tortured and worked and starved nearly to death, could find some hope in those lyrics despite their unending suffering, Frankl asks us, shouldn’t we, living far more comfortably, be able to say “Yes” to life in spite of everything life brings us?

The human will in the face of suffering is amazing

As an inoculation against lies coming from Russia at the time, we learned to spot the rudiments of such disinformation, the Big Lie among them. Propaganda, as we learned in my civics class, relies on not just lies and misinformation but also on distorted negative stereotypes, inflammatory terms, and other such tricks to manipulate people’s opinions and beliefs in the service of some ideological agenda.

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.

Election lies

Throughout the centuries, as today, the same disinformation playbook has been put to use by authoritarian rulers worldwide. The signs are clear: shutting down opposition media, quashing dissident voices, and jailing journalists who dare to report something other than the prevailing party line.

The danger of substituting for real, objective news instead sets of lies, flimsy conspiracy theories, and us-versus-them hatreds has been amplified by digital media, where those who share beliefs in some or another distorted outlook can find online refuge among others whose minds are likewise set in a sympathetic worldview—and encounter no disconfirming evidence. Niche propaganda rules. I

Another Big Lie had to do with my local power company, PG&E. When I was young, that utility had the image of being trustworthy. These days we know once that public utility became a private company, greed and the bottom line meant that profits were taken rather than putting money into repairing and maintaining the outfit’s infrastructure. And today that once reliable organization has been the cause of countless wildfires—and has gone into bankruptcy.

Is it time again to bring back civics—lessons in speaking up, being a responsible citizen, and spotting today’s Big Lies?

The approach had, oddly, originated in the American “eugenics” movement, a form of social Darwinism that justified a society in ridding itself of those who were deemed unfit, often through forced sterilization. That argument was carried to its logical, if horrific, fulfillment by the Nazis.

Frankl’s main contribution to the world of psychotherapy was what he called “logotherapy,” which treats psychological problems by helping people find meaning in their lives.

Happiness in itself does not qualify as such a purpose; pleasures do not give our life meaning.

How we deal with the tough parts of our lives, he observes, “shows who we are.”

If we can’t change our fate, at least we can accept it, adapt, and possibly undergo inner growth even in the midst of troubles.

“existential t...

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;

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?” 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.

To be sure, Frankl saw human frailty, too. Each of us, he notes, is imperfect—but imperfect in our own way. He put a positive spin on this, too, concluding that our unique strengths and weaknesses make each of us uniquely irreplaceable.

Another survivor of the Nazis, the social psychologist Ervin Staub,

Staub studied cruelty and hatred,

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.

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.

That very eagerness for consumption has become today a dominant worldview, one devoid of any greater meaning or inner purpose.

From all these insults to reach any sense of meaning ensued an inner crisis, as Frankl sensed, one that led to the comfortless worldview of a nihilistic existentialism—think Beckett’s bleak postwar play Waiting for Godot, an expression of the cynicism and hopelessness of those years.

As Frankl put it, “It should not be a surprise if contemporary philosophy perceives the world as though it had no substance.”

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

Despite the cruelty visited on prisoners by the guards, the beatings, torture, and constant threat of death, there was one part of their lives that remained free: their own minds. The hopes, imagination, and dreams of prisoners were up to them, despite their awful circumstances.

“Fate” is what happens to us beyond our control. But we each are responsible for how we relate to those events.

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

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.

Let us try to imagine—so that we can make a judgment—that a state intends somehow to make use of all the people it has condemned to death, to exploit their capacity for labor right up to the very last moment of their lives—perhaps considering that this would be more sensible than simply killing such people immediately, or even feeding them for the rest of their lives.

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.

has been so disappointed, and all enthusiasm so abused; but when we cannot do other than appeal to idealism or enthusiasm.

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.

(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!)

“Even more powerful than fate is the courage that bears it steadfastly.”

ancient myth tells us that the existence of the world is based on thirty-six truly just people being present in it at all times. Only thirty-six! An infinitesimal minority. And yet they guarantee the continuing moral existence of the whole world. But this story continues: as soon as one of these just individuals is recognized as such and is, so to speak, unmasked by his surroundings, by his fellow human beings, he disappears, he

is “withdrawn,” and then dies instantly. What is meant by that?

We will not be far off the mark if we express it like this: as soon as we notice any pedagogical tendency in a role model, we become resentful; we human beings ...

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.

What is needed here is simply an answer to the question of the meaning of life, of continuing to live despite persistent world-weariness. As such, the latter is not a counterargument to living on; this continuing to live, however, will only be possible in the knowledge of life’s unconditional meaning.

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.

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

Happiness should not, must not, and can never be a goal, but only an outcome; the outcome of the fulfillment

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.

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.

“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?”