“Yes” to Life, in Spite of Everything

Find hope and meaning in uncertain times, through Viktor Frankl’s Lost Lectures

“The question can no longer be, ‘What can I expect from life,’ but can now only be, ‘What does life expect from me? What task in life is waiting for me?’”— Viktor Frankl

To decide whether life is worth living is to answer the most essential question of philosophy. But sometimes, life asks this question not as a thought experiment, but as a trial demonstrating the painful cruelty of living.

During World War II, the young psychiatrist and neurologist Viktor Frankl (March 26, 1905–September 2, 1997) was taken to Auschwitz with more than a million other living souls, where the right to answer the question of whether life is worth living was brutally stolen, as they were regarded as undeserving of life. Some survived through bleak humor. Some through reading, writing, and painting. Most did not survive at all.

Frankl lost his mother, his father, and his brother to the mass murder in the concentration camps. His life was spared by a firmly woven web of constitution, choice, and chance.

Only eleven months after surviving against dire odds, Frankl held a series of public lectures in Vienna. The soon-to-be world-famous psychiatrist explained his thoughts on resilience, meaning, and the importance of embracing life even in the face of tremendous adversity. Then he wrote Yes to Life, In Spite of Everything, a powerful book released in Germany in 1946.

Published for the very first time in English, Frankl’s words resonate as strongly today — as the world faces a coronavirus pandemic, the aftermath, social isolation, and great economic uncertainty — as they did in 1946. He offers an insightful exploration of the maxim “Live as if you were living for the second time,” and he unfolds his basic conviction that every crisis contains an opportunity. Despite the unspeakable horrors of the camps, Frankl learned from the strength of his fellow inmates that it is always possible to “say yes to life” — a profound and timeless lesson for us all. Source.

Frankl starts by deliberating the question of whether life is worth living through the primary premise of human dignity. Observing how somberly the Holocaust shattered and disillusioned humanity toward itself, he warns against the pessimisitc “end-of-the-world” mindset to which many people had conformed, but also warns against “blithe optimism” of preceding times that had not yet experienced this horrifying mirror reflecting the cruelty of which human beings are capable. Both characteristics, he says, come from nihilism — the belief that life is meaningless.

Frankl writes, “We cannot move toward any spiritual reconstruction with a sense of fatalism such as this.”

He then ponders the actual definition of progress, placing focus on the significance of our singular choices in its continual changing.

“Today every impulse for action is generated by the knowledge that there is no form of progress on which we can trustingly rely. If today we cannot sit idly by, it is precisely because each and every one of us determines what and how far something ‘progresses.’ In this, we are aware that inner progress is only actually possible for each individual.”

Progress is never permanent; it will always be in peril, and must be revitalized and reimagined if it is to last.

Frankl contends that it takes great moral strength not to yield to nihilism, no matter if we are pessimistic or optimistic, saying “Give me a sober activism anytime, rather than that rose-tinted fatalism.”

We must seek and strive for an enlightened civilization in the midst of negativity and cynicalness, because living with ethics and belief in human kindness is the flourishing fountain of hope and courage.

Although the Holocaust indisputably disenchanted humanity, Frankl argues that it also assuredly showed “that what is human is still valid and that it is all a question of the individual human being.”

Reflecting on the inhumanity of the camps, he writes,

“What remained was the individual person, the human being and nothing else. Everything had fallen away from him during those years: money, power, fame; nothing was certain for him anymore: not life, not health, not happiness; all had been called into question for him, vanity, ambition, relationships. Everything was reduced to bare existence. Burnt through with pain, everything that was not essential was melted down the human being reduced to what he was in the last analysis: either a member of the masses, therefore no one real, so really no one — the anonymous one, a nameless thing, that ‘he’ had now become, just a prisoner number; or else he melted right down to his essential self.”

Then with emotion stemming from eternal truth, he says,

“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. So, life is somehow duty, a single, huge obligation. And there is certainly joy in life too, but it cannot be pursued, cannot be ‘willed into being’ as joy; rather, it must arise spontaneously, and in fact, it does arise spontaneously, just as an outcome may arise: Happiness should not, must not, and can never be a goal, but only an outcome; the outcome of the fulfillment. All human striving for happiness, in this sense, is doomed to failure as luck can only fall into one’s lap but can never be hunted down.”

Our whole life we are asked questions, and our responses influence the next questions that life asks us, and that is our ultimate responsibility: to say “yes” to life. With this perspective, fear and anxiety vanish because the present moment is the key that holds all of the possibilities and questions that life will ask of us next.

Frankl adds: “The question life asks us, and in answering which we can realize the meaning of the present moment, does not only change from hour to hour but also changes from person to person: the question is entirely different in each moment for every individual. One way or another, there can only be one alternative at a time to give meaning to life, meaning to the moment — so at any time we only need to make one decision about how we must answer, but, each time, a very specific question is being asked of us by life. From all this follows that life always offers us a possibility for the fulfillment of meaning, therefore there is always the option that it has a meaning. One could also say that our human existence can be made meaningful ‘to the very last breath’; as long as we have breath, as long as we are still conscious, we are each responsible for answering life’s questions.”

From this comes the feeling that experiencing life means learning to meet life on its own conditions, which change in each moment.

Remember that there’s hope running through even the darkest of times. Meaning doesn’t only come from work. Illness, whether physical or mental, doesn’t equal loss of meaning. Suffering can be either meaningful or meaningless.

We can find meaning in any situation in life, through activity, contemplation, and taking up a noble attitude even in the face of hardship, challenges, and unsensible cruelty.

Good can be seen in everyone; darkness can be overcome; and light, love, and humanity will always triumph if we allow them to.

“To say yes to life is not only meaningful under all circumstances — because life itself is — but it is also possible under all circumstances.” — Viktor Frankl