Viktor E. Frankl

Eleven months after his liberation from Auschwitz, Viktor E. Frankl held a series of public lectures in Vienna, published here for the first time. The psychologist explained his central thoughts on meaning, resilience and the importance of embracing life even in the face of great adversity

In Spite of Everything

Yes to Life

Jessica Hsu

Individuality can only be valuable when it is not individuality for its own sake but individuality for the human community.

… the eternal refers back to the temporal—to the temporal, the everyday, and the point of an ongoing encounter between the finite and the infinite.

Laura Mei

Rather than just seeking happiness, we can seek a sense of purpose that life offers us. Happiness in itself does not qualify as such a purpose; pleasures do not give our life meaning. Even dark and joyless episodes of our lives can be times when we mature and find meaning. [Frankl] posits that the more difficult, the more meaningful troubles and challenges can be. How we deal with the tough parts of our lives, he observes, "shows who we are". If we can't change our fate, at least we can accept it, adapt, and possibly undergo inner growth even in the midst of troubles.

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.

It is never a question of where someone is in life or which profession he is in, it is only a matter of how he fills his place, his circle. Whether a life is fulfilled doesn't depend on how great one's range of action is, but rather only on whether the circle is filled out. In his specific life circle, every single human being is irreplaceable and inimitable, and that is true for everyone. The tasks that life has imposed are only for him, and only he is required to fulfill them. A person who has not completely filled his (relatively) larger circle remains more unfulfilled than that of a person whose more closely drawn circle is sufficient.

Let us not forget that each individual person is imperfect, but each is imperfect in a different way, each "in his own way." And as imperfect as he is, he is uniquely imperfect. So, expressed in a positive way, he becomes somehow irreplaceable, unable to be represented by anyone else, unexchangeable. We can now see that the imperfect nature of human beings is meaningful since — now regarded positively — it represents the 𝘪𝘯𝘥𝘪𝘷𝘪𝘥𝘶𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘵𝘺 𝘰𝘧 𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘢𝘭 𝘪𝘯𝘯𝘦𝘳 𝘣𝘦𝘪𝘯𝘨. However, this uniqueness as a positive value cannot be based on itself alone. Individuality can only be valuable when it is not individuality for its own sake but individuality for the human community.

The fulfillment of meaning is possible in three main directions: human beings are able to give meaning to their existence, 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 being are able to find meaning even where finding value in life is not possible for them in either the first or 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.

No human suffering can be compared to anyone else's because it is part of the nature of suffering that it is the suffering of a particular person, that it is 𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘰𝘳 𝘩𝘦𝘳 𝘰𝘸𝘯 suffering — that its "magnitude" is dependent solely on the sufferer, that is, on the person; a person's solitary suffering is just as unique as is every person. Therefore, it would be pointless to speak of differences in the magnitude of suffering; but a difference that truly matters is that between meaningful and meaningless suffering.

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