Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything

by Viktor E. Frankl

The phrase “yes to life,” Viktor Frankl recounts, was from the lyrics of a song sometimes sung sotto voce (so as not to anger guards) by inmates of some of the four camps in which he was a prisoner, the notorious Buchenwald among them.

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.

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.

For there is a kind of categorical imperative that is also a formula of “acting as if,” formally similar to Kant’s well-known maxim, which goes like this: “Live as if you were living for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!”

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.

There is indeed an essential difference between what a man experiences in battle and what he experiences in a concentration camp. In battle, he faces nothingness, he stares death in the face, but in the camp we ourselves were nothing, we were already dead during our lifetime. We were worth nothing. We did not only see nothingness, that is what we were. Our life counted for nothing; our death counted for nothing. There was no halo, not even a notional one, around our death. It was the departure of a small nothing into the vast nothingness. And this death was also barely noticed. We had already “lived” it long in advance!

in spite of everything, no human suffering can be compared to anyone else’s because it is part of the nature of suffering that it is the suffering of a particular person, that it is his or her own suffering—that its “magnitude” is dependent solely on the sufferer, that is, on the person; a person’s solitary suffering is just as unique and individual as is every person.

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.” However, at the same time, an appeal is made to our responsibility—precisely to bring what has not yet happened into the world! And each of us must do this as part of our daily work, as part of our everyday lives.