Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything

by Viktor E. Frankl

we now summarize what we said about the “meaning” of life, we can conclude: 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. This therefore means that it can only become more meaningful the more difficult it becomes. The athlete, the climber who actively seeks tasks, even creates the difficulties for himself: how delighted is that climber when he finds in a rock face another difficult, an even more difficult, “variant” of his task! At this point we must note, however, that religious people, in their sense of life, in their “understanding of being,” distinguish themselves in that they go a step further than the person who merely understands their life as a task, in that they also experience the agency that “gives” them the task or that sets them before the task—the divine being! In other words, religious people experience their life as a divine mission. And to sum up, what could we say about the question of the “value” of life? The view that presented itself to us is perhaps most aptly expressed in the words of Hebbel, who says: “Life is not something, it is the opportunity for something!”5

we now summarize what we said about the “meaning” of life, we can conclude: 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. This therefore means that it can only become more meaningful the more difficult it becomes. The athlete, the climber who actively seeks tasks, even creates the difficulties for himself: how delighted is that climber when he finds in a rock face another difficult, an even more difficult, “variant” of his task! At this point we must note, however, that religious people, in their sense of life, in their “understanding of being,” distinguish themselves in that they go a step further than the person who merely understands their life as a task, in that they also experience the agency that “gives” them the task or that sets them before the task—the divine being! In other words, religious people experience their life as a divine mission. And to sum up, what could we say about the question of the “value” of life? The view that presented itself to us is perhaps most aptly expressed in the words of Hebbel, who says: “Life is not something, it is the opportunity for something!”5