Yes to Life, in Spite of Everything: Viktor Frankl’s Lost Lectures on Moving Beyond Optimism and Pessimism to Find the Deepest Source of Meaning
“To decide whether life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question of philosophy,” Albert Camus wrote in his classic 119-page essay The Myth of Sisyphus in 1942. “Everything else… is child’s play; we must first of all answer the question.”
Sometimes, life asks this question not as a thought experiment but as a gauntlet hurled with the raw brutality of living.
That selfsame year, the young Viennese neurologist and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl (March 26, 1905–September 2, 1997) was taken to Auschwitz along with more than a million human beings robbed of the basic right to answer this question for themselves, instead deemed unworthy of living. Some survived by reading. Some through humor. Some by pure chance. Most did not. Frankl lost his mother, his father, and his brother to the mass murder in the concentration camps. His own life was spared by the tightly braided lifeline of chance, choice, and character.
A mere eleven months after surviving the unsurvivable, Frankl took up the elemental question at the heart of Camus’s philosophical parable in a set of lectures, which he himself edited into a slim, potent book published in Germany in 1946, just as he was completing Man’s Search for Meaning.
As our collective memory always tends toward amnesia and erasure — especially of periods scarred by civilizational shame — these existential infusions of sanity and lucid buoyancy fell out of print and were soon forgotten. Eventually rediscovered — as is also the tendency of our collective memory when the present fails us and we must lean for succor on the life-tested wisdom of the past — they are now published in English for the first time as Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything (public library).
Frankl begins by considering the question of whether life is worth living through the central fact of human dignity. Noting how gravely the Holocaust disillusioned humanity with itself, he cautions against the defeatist “end-of-the-world” mindset with which many responded to this disillusionment, but cautions equally against the “blithe optimism” of previous, more naïve eras that had not yet faced this gruesome civilizational mirror reflecting what human beings are capable of doing to one another. Both dispositions, he argues, stem from nihilism. In consonance with his colleague and contemporary Erich Fromm’s insistence that we can only transcend the shared laziness of optimism and pessimism through rational faith in the human spirit, Frankl writes:
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.We cannot move toward any spiritual reconstruction with a sense of fatalism such as this.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.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, while mass progress at most consists of technical progress, which only impresses us because we live in a technical age.
Insisting that it takes a measure of moral strength not to succumb to nihilism, be it that of the pessimist or of the optimist, he exclaims:
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.Give me a sober activism anytime, rather than that rose-tinted fatalism!
How steadfast would a person’s belief in the meaningfulness of life have to be, so as not to be shattered by such skepticism. How unconditionally do we have to believe in the meaning and value of human existence, if this belief is able to take up and bear this skepticism and pessimism?
[…]
Through this nihilism, through the pessimism and skepticism, through the soberness of a “new objectivity” that is no longer that “new” but has grown old, we must strive toward a new humanity.
Sophie Scholl, upon whom chance did not smile as favorably as it did upon Frankl, affirmed this notion with her insistence that living with integrity and belief in human goodness is the wellspring of courage as she courageously faced her own untimely death in the hands of the Nazis. But while the Holocaust indisputably disenchanted humanity, Frankl argues, it also indisputably demonstrated “that what is human is still valid… that it is all a question of the individual human being.” Looking back on the brutality of the camps, he reflects:
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.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.
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In a sentiment that bellows from the hallways of history into the great vaulted temple of timeless truth, he adds:
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.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.
Frankl then turns to the question of finding a sense of meaning when the world gives us ample reasons to view life as meaningless — the question of “continuing to live despite persistent world-weariness.” Writing in the post-war pre-dawn of the golden age of consumerism, which has built a global economy by continually robbing us of the sense of meaning and selling it back to us at the price of the product, Frankl first dismantles the notion that meaning is to be found in the pursuit and acquisition of various pleasures:
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.Let us imagine a man who has been sentenced to death and, a few hours before his execution, has been told he is free to decide on the menu for his last meal. The guard comes into his cell and asks him what he wants to eat, offers him all kinds of delicacies; but the man rejects all his suggestions. He thinks to himself that it is quite irrelevant whether he stuffs good food into the stomach of his organism or not, as in a few hours it will be a corpse. And even the feelings of pleasure that could still be felt in the organism’s cerebral ganglia seem pointless in view of the fact that in two hours they will be destroyed forever. But the whole of life stands in the face of death, and if this man had been right, then our whole lives would also be meaningless, were we only to strive for pleasure and nothing else — preferably the most pleasure and the highest degree of pleasure possible. Pleasure in itself cannot give our existence meaning; thus the lack of pleasure cannot take away meaning from life, which now seems obvious to us.
He quotes a short verse by the great Indian poet and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore — the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize, Einstein’s onetime conversation partner in contemplating science and spirituality, and a man who thought deeply about human nature:
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was duty. I worked — and behold, duty was joy.
In consonance with Camus’s view of happiness as a moral obligation — an outcome to be attained not through direct pursuit but as a byproduct of living with authenticity and integrity — Frankl reflects on Tagore’s poetic point:
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.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 of that which in Tagore’s poem is called duty… 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.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.At this point it would be helpful [to perform] a conceptual turn through 180 degrees, after which the question can no longer be “What can I expect from life?” but can now only be “What does life expect of me?” What task in life is waiting for me?
Now we also understand how, in the final analysis, the question of the meaning of life is not asked in the right way, if asked in the way it is generally asked: it is not we who are permitted to ask about the meaning of life — it is life that asks the questions, directs questions at us… We are the ones who must answer, must give answers to the constant, hourly question of life, to the essential “life questions.” Living itself means nothing other than being questioned; our whole act of being is nothing more than responding to — of being responsible toward — life. With this mental standpoint nothing can scare us anymore, no future, no apparent lack of a future. Because now the present is everything as it holds the eternally new question of life for us.
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Frankl adds a caveat of tremendous importance — triply so in our present culture of self-appointed gurus, self-help demagogues, and endless podcast feeds of interviews with accomplished individuals attempting to distill a universal recipe for self-actualization:
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.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.
We can, therefore, see how the question as to the meaning of life is posed too simply, unless it is posed with complete specificity, in the concreteness of the here and now. To ask about “the meaning of life” in this way seems just as naive to us as the question of a reporter interviewing a world chess champion and asking, “And now, Master, please tell me: which chess move do you think is the best?” Is there a move, a particular move, that could be good, or even the best, beyond a very specific, concrete game situation, a specific configuration of the pieces?
What emerges from Frankl’s inversion of the question is the sense that, just as learning to die is learning to meet the universe on its own terms, learning to live is learning to meet the universe on its own terms — terms that change daily, hourly, by the moment:
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.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.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.The fact, and only the fact, that we are mortal, that our lives are finite, that our time is restricted and our possibilities are limited, this fact is what makes it meaningful to do something, to exploit a possibility and make it become a reality, to fulfill it, to use our time and occupy it. Death gives us a compulsion to do so. Therefore, death forms the background against which our act of being becomes a responsibility.
[…]
Death is a meaningful part of life, just like human suffering. Both do not rob the existence of human beings of meaning but make it meaningful in the first place. Thus, it is precisely the uniqueness of our existence in the world, the irretrievability of our lifetime, the irrevocability of everything with which we fill it — or leave unfulfilled — that gives our existence significance. But it is not only the uniqueness of an individual life as a whole that gives it importance, it is also the uniqueness of every day, every hour, every moment that represents something that loads our existence with the weight of a terrible and yet so beautiful responsibility! Any hour whose demands we do not fulfill, or fulfill halfheartedly, this hour is forfeited, forfeited “for all eternity.” Conversely, what we achieve by seizing the moment is, once and for all, rescued into reality, into a reality in which it is only apparently “canceled out” by becoming the past. In truth, it has actually been preserved, in the sense of being kept safe. Having been is in this sense perhaps even the safest form of being. The “being,” the reality that we have rescued into the past in this way, can no longer be harmed by transitoriness.
In the remainder of the slender and splendid Yes to Life, Frankl goes on to explore how the imperfections of human nature add to, rather than subtract from, the meaningfulness of our lives and what it means for us to be responsible for our own existence. Complement it with Mary Shelley, writing two centuries ago about a pandemic-savaged world, on what makes life worth living, Walt Whitman contemplating this question after surviving a paralytic stroke, and a vitalizing cosmic antidote to the fear of death from astrophysicist and poet Rebecca Elson, then revisit Frankl on humor as lifeline to sanity and survival. .
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Alan: What most characterizes Homo sapiens is that s/he is a meaning-seeking creature.
Mar 30, 2014 - The life-story of Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl, born on March 26, 1905, is one of history's greatest testaments to the ...
Republican lawmakers and Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) enacted the law after Florida voters overwhelmingly approved a constitutional amendment expanding voting rights to felons who have completed their sentences. The law’s backers said it was necessary to clarify the amendment, while critics said it made it virtually impossible for felons to register.
He is actually not in control of the senate. They are republicans. Trump is an outsider. They might side with him on some issues, but they are not under his control.
I agree that the Trump 'administration' is responsible for the shutdown. In fact it was his duty to follow what the experts and advisors told him to do. These were the CDC, WHO, and Fauci (who created the virus in a lab). They all told him that it wouldn't be a big deal until it was too late for him to do anything. So he did the 2nd best thing. He shut down the economy. The dem controlled news made it worse by fear mongering a virus that we now know only kills the elderly and those with pre-existing deadly conditions and it only kills those that are vitamin D deficient.
President Donald Trump’s supporters think of him as the ultimate alpha male, but a scathing op-ed in The Atlantic makes the case that he’s “the least masculine man” to be elected president in modern history.
Tom Nichols, a conservative professor at the Naval War College in Rhode Island, writes that he is baffled that blue-collar white men continue to support Trump even as the president has whiny tantrums about being treated unfairly in the media.
“Courage, honesty, respect, an economy of words, a bit of modesty, and a willingness to take responsibility are all virtues prized by the self-identified class of hard-working men, the stand-up guys, among whom I was raised,” he writes. “And yet, many of these same men expect none of those characteristics from Trump, who is a vain, cowardly, lying, vulgar, jabbering blowhard.”
The most damning aspect of Trump, writes Nichols, is his utter refusal to take any responsibility for his actions.
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“In this category, he exhibits one of the most unmanly of behaviors: He’s a blamer,” Nichols writes. “Nothing is ever his fault. In the midst of disaster, he praises himself while turning on even his most loyal supporters without a moment’s hesitation. Men across America who were socialized by team sports, whose lives are predicated on the principle of showing up and doing the job, continually excuse a man who continually excuses himself.”
It Has Come To This: How Do Intelligent Citizens Deal With The Irredeemably Stupid, Ignorant And Self-Pithed People Who Have Taken Over? The Invasion Of The Body Snatchers Is Now Reality
I have the audacity to believe that people everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality, and freedom for their spirits. – Martin Luther King, Jr.
The global pandemic has both exacerbated and unveiled the massive divisiveness in our community and country.
On any given fair-weather weekend, I enjoy driving my small collection of convertible classic cars. This spring, as late as it has been, has me exercising a number of cars each weekend. I enjoy cruising University and East Avenues as well as Main Street. This past weekend, I had the following remarkable experience. Keep in mind that I do not recommend what I am about to describe. However, I will say that more direct interaction and communication between and among citizens of all levels of society will result in our collective healing of homelessness, addiction, poverty, and hunger. Perhaps the pandemic is in some way a wake-up call for all of us.
So, there I am, cruising down University Avenue in my pumpkin orange 1975 Cadillac El Dorado convertible, and I do something that is relatively normal for me, but unthinkable for most. I saw two men at the bus shelter near Gleason Works, drove by, and turned around. I was intrigued that one of them was a large man with what appeared to be several bags of belongings. The other man could have been a jockey, due to his modest height and wiry frame. I waved them over to the parking lot behind the bus shelter and asked them if I could give them a ride downtown. The looks on their faces were priceless, as if they had suddenly been thrust into an alternate reality. That is, a Caucasian asking an African-American and a Latino to take a ride in a classic car. Needless to say, they were both over the moon as they ran towards my car. It was as if the thought crossed their minds that if they didn’t get there fast enough, I might drive away.
While that two-minute interaction satisfied my emotional and spiritual need for the weekend, what followed was even more incredible. The big guy was in the front seat, and the little guy was in the back seat. The little guy, whose name was Reuben, pulled out his cell phone and started a video as we drove down University Avenue. About 30 seconds in, he said, “Good God, who would ever expect a white man, a black man, and a Latino driving together in a Cadillac convertible!” Both of them started waving to strangers as though they were in a parade. It was great fun.
It gets better. After our brief introduction, James, the big guy, told me that he is a homeless veteran, with 12 years in the Marine Corps, and three tours of duty in Bosnia, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He was shot three times, and his monthly check has been going to his wife and two kids who live in the Finger Lakes region. There is far more to this story than what I can include in this column. Suffice it to say that in the less than 10 minutes it took to drive down to the Liberty Pole, I gained a new and expanded appreciation for just how badly our community of Monroe continues to suffer from societal inequities.
In the course of the ride, James thanked and blessed me at least 20 times. Interestingly, his first comment when he got in the car was, “My father, who has passed, used to have a Cadillac.”
As I was dropping James off, he asked if I could provide him some money for food, since he had not eaten since the previous afternoon. I took out my binder clip of credit cards and cash, and unfortunately there was a $50 bill on top. James said politely, “I’ll definitely take the $50!” After we both had a good laugh, I gave him a $10, wished him well, and apologized on behalf of myself and other clueless Americans that he should not be living the life of a homeless vet.
As James exited the car, Reuben shouted, “Can I get in the front seat?” He hopped over the side of the car and jumped in the front seat. I asked him how long he had been in the country, and he said four months. He proceeded to tell me that he was a drug addict who came here from Central Puerto Rico to quote “get clean”. Since he did not have Medicaid or any type of insurance, I surmised that he was put on waiting lists for different substance abuse clinics in Rochester. He mentioned one by name that he had visited every day during the past week, only to be told there was “no room for him”.
Before those reading this accuse me of being naïve and gullible, I certainly understand that not everything I heard in this 20-minute drive was the God’s honest truth.
I laughed when I asked Reuben where I could drop him off, thinking he was going down to the Main Street Bus Depot. On the contrary, he acted as though I was an Uber driver and proceeded to have me drive him and drop him off on La Avenida, otherwise known as North Clinton Avenue. I pulled into the Valero gas station, and he asked if I could help him out with a few dollars. He said that if I gave him the $50, he would get change at the gas station. I said that was a great idea for him, but not necessarily a great idea for me, knowing that he was an addict. I gave him a $10 as well and asked him to never give up on his desire to get clean. The collection of people around the gas station and across the street were clearly flabbergasted that a white man driving a Cadillac El Dorado convertible was dropping off one of their own.
The experience above prompted me to inform each of you that every one of us can do something either financially or through volunteerism to help close the open wounds of societal inequity. If a mere 50% of us donated our time and/or money to improve the inequities in our community, each of us would be happier and more satisfied, while reinforcing the “Golden Rule”. Therefore, in my usual Top 10 format, please select one or more of the following opportunities.
Almost every nonprofit health, social, and human service organization in our community is struggling with continuation of services and financial viability. If you already have a favorite charity, call them up and ask what you can do. Almost all of them have “Wish Lists”.
Foodlink (led by Julia Tedesco), our regional connection to combating hunger in our community, will definitely use donated food and/or money to maximum benefit.
United Way (led by Jaime Saunders) has long been the largest philanthropic supporter of basic needs in our community, and the need continues to grow. The United Way website at https://www.uwrochester.org/ lists volunteer opportunities and current needs.
Common Ground Health (led by Wade Norwood) has been instrumental in conducting a “food insecurity” assessment that will clearly define the scope and breadth of our challenges.
Most churches have been closed for 10 weeks. However, the ministries supported and sponsored by those churches are in desperate need of funds to continue their efforts at alleviating societal ills.
Action for a Better Community (led by Jerome Underwood), the Urban League (led by Seanelle Hawkins), and Ibero-American Action League (led by Angelica Perez-Delgado) desperately need more financial and volunteer support from the wealthy, mostly white suburbanites to address the issues described in this column that are central to daily life in the City of Rochester.
You should all know that the challenges of educating our youth and breaking the cycle of poverty rests with the success or failure of our public education system.
House of Mercy and our regional homeless shelters will be experiencing significant demand as we approach this fall and winter.
Healthcare service delivery providers have been devastated by the 10-week shutdown. No one has escaped the economic decline, including the range of providers from health systems to community-based health centers.
Finally, as a 67-year old Catholic, I must give a shout-out to the Sisters of St. Joseph and Sisters of Mercy, who continue to provide social supports in education, homelessness, and poverty, with impact far beyond their number of active Sisters and associates.
I know I will never see James or Reuben again. When I told this story to my daughter, a front-line nurse who should have been a comedienne, she suggested that the title of the article should be “I’ll take the fifty”!
If you are still questioning the massive needs described above, please consider the following quotation from Mahatma Gandhi: “The world has enough for everyone’s need, but not for everyone’s greed.”
Gerald Archibald
"Rochester Business Journal" Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view. You may access Gerald's archived "RBJ" articles at: https://rbj.net/tag/gerald-archibald/
Adjusting for population, South Korea has had 1605 "American equivalent" deaths. If my math is correct (and please inform me if I'm wrong) this means COVID-19 mortality in the United States - when compared to mortality in South Korea - has added up to 91,724 needless deaths under Donald Trump's "leadership. That is a lot of blood to have on one's hands. To contextualize the meaning of this tally, please recall that 58,220 Americans died during two decades of war in Vietnam. The needless blood on Trump's hands is equivalent to the entire GI death tally during the Vietnam War, plus ANOTHER 33,504 dead.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view. "Compendium Of Best Pax Posts About The Pandemic And Trump's Grotesque Mismanagement"
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view. What the hell?!?
Conservative writer (and former Republican) Matt Lewis concludes the penetrating article below with a quotation from C.S. Lewis: “We must picture hell as a state where everyone is perpetually concerned about his own dignity and advancement, where everyone has a grievance, and where everyone lives with the deadly serious passions of envy, self-importance, and resentment.”
