In 1946, just eleven months after surviving Auschwitz, the Viennese neurologist and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl edited a series of lectures into a slim book published in Germany. These lectures took as their starting point the question Albert Camus posed in “The Myth of Sisyphus” in 1942: whether life is worth living.
Frankl had lost his mother, father and brother in the concentration camps. His own life was saved by a combination of luck, choices and character.
The book, prepared during the same period as “Man’s Search for Meaning,” gradually slipped into obscurity and was forgotten. Now the lectures are available in English for the first time as “Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything.”
In these lectures, Frankl rejects both the defeatist “end of the world” mindset that followed the Holocaust and the naive optimism of earlier times. Both attitudes, he argues, stem from nihilism. Like his contemporary Erich Fromm, he believes that only rational faith in the human spirit can bring us out of this impasse.
Frankl takes no form of progress for granted. “Today we cannot sit with our arms folded, precisely because each of us determines what ‘progresses’ and how much,” he writes. Inner progress, he insists, is possible only for the individual; progress on a mass scale is, at best, limited to technological progress, which impresses us because we live in a technological age.
Against the idea that meaning lies in pleasure, Frankl uses the image of a condemned man who refuses to choose his last meal: whatever he eats, in a few hours he will be a corpse. If we pursued only pleasure, he says, all of life would be futile in the face of death. Pleasure alone cannot give existence meaning; therefore, its absence cannot take that meaning away.
Quoting the poet Rabindranath Tagore, Frankl reminds us that joy cannot be pursued as a goal. Tagore expresses it in three lines: “I slept and dreamed that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was duty. I worked — and behold, duty was joy.” Happiness, Frankl writes, must not and can never be a goal, only a result.
The crucial step is a 180-degree turn: instead of asking “What can I expect from life?” we should ask “What does life expect from me?” The question of meaning, he explains, cannot be posed in general, abstract terms. It changes from hour to hour and from person to person, just as there is no “best move” in chess outside a particular game. Because life asks us a specific question at every moment, there is always the possibility of realizing meaning — “until the last breath,” as long as we are conscious and responsible.
Finally, Frankl stresses that mortality does not take away meaning, but makes it possible. The finite nature of our time and possibilities gives weight to every hour. What we fail to fulfill is lost “forever”; what we achieve is preserved in reality as the past and can no longer be harmed by decay.
In the rest of the book, Frankl examines how the imperfections of human nature add meaning to our lives rather than take it away.
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