Viktor E. Frankl on Embracing Life in the Face of Adversity
How can we ever embrace a life that actively degrades our human dignity?
The cult of materialism dominates our society, advertising its vices on every screen our eyes rest on. The upshot is a prevailing culture characterized by a mindless consumption of and obsessive fixation on the next shiny object. We guzzle away nostrum deceptively marketed to us as elixirs of life, define our personal identity by our worldly possessions, and lead meaningless lives devoid of any thought of morality.
What’s worse is our economic system that has relegated working men and women into mere means to an end, reducing them into tools to make money for the rich and powerful. This transformation of idiosyncratic individuals into pawns in the game of capitalism is both degrading and shameful.
These socio-cultural trends leave us vulnerable to the jaws of parochialism. Take, for instance, schools witnessing batches of suicides by young students after they received their examination scores. This deep interweaving between one’s self-identity and accomplishments put us in an extremely precarious position. All it takes is a slight push of a finger to knock down the self-esteem and sense of purpose that once undergirded our lives.
Nonetheless, Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor E. Frankl tells us it’s still possible to embrace life, even if it’s filled with malevolence and malice. As the founder of logotherapy and existential analysis, Frankl devoted his life to teaching other people the secret to finding meaning in their lives in the face of suffering.
Having spent three years in Auschwitz, Dachau and other concentration camps, Frankl had endured unimaginable and unspeakable hardship. Also like millions of others, his parents and pregnant wife perished in the concentration camps scattered across Poland.
This, however, did not deter Frankl from finding meaning in his life. Instead, he saw an opportunity to console and uplift others, who like himself had been permanently scarred and traumatized by the cruelty of war. So after a scant eleven months when he was freed from a labor camp in which he teetered on the brink of death, he compiled and edited a collection of lectures into his book Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything (1946).
The origins of the book’s title was a peculiar one, as described by Frankl himself:
One of the first commanders of Buchenwald — built in 1937 originally to hold political prisoners — ordered that a camp song be written. Prisoners, often already exhausted from a day of hard labour and little food, were forced to sing the song over and over. One camp survivor said of the singing, we "put all our hatred" into the effort […] 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 [...]
Prisoners of Buchenwald, tortured and nearly starved to death, found much hope in those lyrics despite their incessant suffering. So why can’t we, living far more comfortably, say “Yes” to life in spite of everything life throws at us? This was essentially Frankl’s life-affirming message in his lectures and in this book.
According to Frankl, we can primarily attain meaning in our lives in three ways:
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 [...]
If offered a choice, most of us would likely reach out to the first two sources of meaning. The prospect of having to forge our life’s meaning in the white flames of suffering is daunting. But unfortunately, we don’t always get to choose what we want. When Frankl and millions of others were tortured in concentration camps, the latter was their only option. To keep alive in themselves a flame of hope, they had to abruptly change the direction of this fulfillment of meaning, swiftly adapting it to their unforeseen circumstances.
Suffering can be meaningful, Frankl explains, because we can still achieve inner success through maintaining a certain attitude or being given the fulfillment of our life’s meaning. Our freedom to act may be suppressed and denied, but our freedom to think — more importantly, how we think — can never be taken away from us.
Similarly, natural death (not suicide) can also be proven to be meaningful. Someone may object that: “Since death ensures nothing endures, doesn’t this render our lives meaningless?”
To refute this claim, Frankl suggests rephrasing the question into: “If we were immortal, will our lives be meaningful then?” Presented in this way, it becomes evident that the initial objection does not stand at all. Because if we were immortal, nothing we do would matter since we can do it right now, or tomorrow, or whenever.
Conversely, it’s exactly because we are mortal and our lives are finite, our lives are meaningful. We occupy our limited time with our projects and pursuits, turning them into a reality. Death motivates us to create meaning in our lives, and forms the background against which our existence becomes purposeful.
If you are still not convinced, think of the greatest piece of literature ever produced. What makes it brilliant isn’t the number of pages in the book, but the richness of its content. The length of human life doesn’t automatically make it meaningful; we are tasked with the responsibility of imbuing our lives with meaning.
Suicide, unlike natural death, does not make life meaningful. Because premature, voluntary death can never answer the questions life poses to us, such as “What does life expect of me?” and “What task is life waiting for me?” If confronted with the urge of suicide, performing this Copernican revolution will help us to expand our perspective on our role in this world and in life.
Before moving on any further, however, let us back-pedal a bit, so we can perhaps ask ourselves a more crucial question, which is — when did this spiritual deterioration into existential weariness begin? Frankl tells us:
Once he had lost his inner hold — as soon as he no longer had an inner hold! Such hold could exist in two forms: either it was a hold on the future or a hold on eternity. The latter was the case with all truly religious people; they did not even need a hold on the future, their future life out there in the free world, after their coming liberation—these people could remain upright irrespective of whether they anticipated a future destiny, or would even experience such a future, or survive the concentration camp. The others, however, were forced to find a hold on their future life, on the content of their life in the future. But it was hard for them to think about the future, their thinking about it could find no reference point, no end point: an end — the end — could not be foreseen.
It’s necessary to point out that the eternity referenced here extends beyond religion. You can hold onto eternity without religion, though this may also encompass it. Because intrinsically, the eternal is composed of the temporal, the everyday. Whatever we create, experience and suffer is forever imprinted in the books of history. Our actions and decisions cannot simply be removed from the world. What this indicates is there’ll always be an ongoing reaction between the finite and the infinite, making us one with the eternal.
But for this to happen, Frankl duly notes:
[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. So everyday life becomes the reality per se, and this reality becomes the potential for action. And so, the “metaphysics of everyday life” only at first leads us out of everyday life, but then — consciously and responsibly — it leads us back into everyday life [...]
Put simply, no more talking or lecturing can help us progress any further. The only thing left for us to do is: to assume responsibility and to act in our everyday lives. This sense of responsibility feels both terrible and glorious at the same time, because:
It is terrible to know that at every moment I bear responsibility for the next; that every decision, from the smallest to the largest, is a decision “for all eternity”; that in every moment I can actualize the possibility of a moment, of that particular moment, or forfeit it. Every single moment contains thousands of possibilities — and I can only choose one of them to actualize it. But in making the choice, I have condemned all the others and sentenced them to “never being,” and even this is for all eternity! But it is wonderful to know that the future — my own future and with it the future of the things, the people around me — is somehow, albeit to a very small extent, dependent on my decisions in every moment. Everything I realize through them, or “bring into the world,” as we have said, I save into reality and thus protect from transience.
Through hardship and suffering, we melt down all the unessential parts of ourselves: money, fame, power. We as human beings are reduced to our most essential selves. Our existence, now naked and raw, is nothing more than a decision — to live or not to live. By choosing to live, we assume responsibility, actualize the potential of the present moment, and immortalize ourselves on the scrolls of time. And this is why Frankl tells us that we can and should say “Yes” to life in spite of everything.