Those who have a 'why' to live can bear with almost any 'how.'
- Viktor Frankl
On the verge of death, legendary psychiatrist and Holocaust-survivor Viktor Frankl endured brutal beatings, malnutrition and depression with the hope that he would one day be reunited with his wife. This is the true story of how love conquers all.
Viktor Frankl: Discovering the Deepest Meaning of Love in a Concentration Camp
"In between stimulus and response is choice."
Despair is suffering without meaning. The moment a person can see a meaning in their suffering, they can turn their tragedies into a personal triumph - but they must know for what. We need something to live for, not merely by.
A text from Viktor Frankl’s book Man's Search for Meaning
The context: Viktor Frankl, psychiatrist, is thinking about the love he has for Tilly, his wife, while being marched by soldiers to forced labour in a Nazi concentration camp on a cold, winter morning.
"We stumbled on in the darkness, over big stones and through large puddles, along the one road leading from the camp. The accompanying guards kept shouting at us and driving us with the butts of their rifles. Anyone with very sore feet supported himself on his neighbor's arm. Hardly a word was spoken; the icy wind did not encourage talk. Hiding his hand behind his upturned collar, the man marching next to me whispered suddenly: ‘If our wives could see us now! I do hope they are better off in their camps and don't know what is happening to us.’
"That brought thoughts of my own wife to mind. And as we stumbled on for miles, slipping on icy spots, supporting each other time and again, dragging one another up and onward, nothing was said, but we both knew: each of us was thinking of his wife. Occasionally I looked at the sky, where the stars were fading and the pink light of the morning was beginning to spread behind a dark bank of clouds. But my mind clung to my wife's image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look was then more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise.
"A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth - that love is the ultimate and highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love."
Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 3rd ed. (New York, N.Y.: Simon and Schuster, 1984), pp. 48-49. Italics are the publisher's.
The wisdom that Frankl derived from his experiences in the concentration camps, in the middle of unimaginable human suffering, is just as relevant now as it was then. The lessons of his work, and the way he exemplified them in his life, are of enduring significance:
"Being human always points, and is directed, to something or someone, other than oneself — be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter. The more one forgets himself — by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love — the more human he is."
In the bestselling 1946 book about his experiences in the camps, Man's Search for Meaning, Frankl delivered the lesson that the difference between those who lived and those who died in the camps came down to one thing: the finding of meaning in one's life. This was an insight he developed early in life. When he was a high school student, he heard his science teacher state to the class that "Life is nothing more than a combustion process, a process of oxidation." Frankl objected, "Sir, if this is so, then what can be the meaning of life?"
To scientists, of course, the question of meaning is objectively meaningless, and merely concerns the subjective states, even delusions, of human beings. There is no point to the game of life other than staying in the game - survival. But that, Frankl understood from the first, and went on to argue at length, depends upon meaning - a meaning that involves questions of value and significance beyond the remit of science.
As Frankl saw in the death camps, those who found meaning even in the most horrendous circumstances were far more resilient to the suffering they experienced than those who did not. "Everything can be taken from a man but one thing," Frankl wrote in Man's Search for Meaning, "the last of the human freedoms — to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way." Reason and the objective facts of life can tell us that our situation is hopeless, that we are defeated and doomed - meaning is a transcendent hope that says otherwise and has us persevering against seemingly impossible odds.
Frankl worked as a therapist in the camps. In his book he gives the example of two suicidal inmates he encountered there. Like many others in the camps, these two men were hopeless and thought that there was nothing more to expect from life, that there was nothing for them to live for.
"In both cases," Frankl writes, "it was a question of getting them to realize that life was still expecting something from them; something in the future was expected of them." For one man, it was his young child, who was then living in a foreign country. For the other, a scientist, it was a series of books that he needed to finish. Frankl writes:
'This uniqueness and singleness which distinguishes each individual and gives a meaning to his existence has a bearing on creative work as much as it does on human love. When the impossibility of replacing a person is realized, it allows the responsibility which a man has for his existence and its continuance to appear in all its magnitude. A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the "why" for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any "how."'
There is no escaping social experience and no escaping that moral choice first formulated with force, clarity and vigour by Socrates. Human beings are not automata. If we have learned nothing else from history, we ought to have learned this. that much should be clear by now. But any lingering doubt that remains should be removed by the work and example of Viktor Frankl.
Viktor Frankl was a neurologist and psychiatrist of distinction. He was also a Jew who spent three years in concentration camps, a prisoner of the Nazis. Knowing that it is meaning that makes life worth living, Frankl held onto his sanity by observing his fellow prisoners, as though he and they were part of an experiment.
Frankl observed first the shock and disillusionment as the Nazis dehumanised their prisoners, stripping them of every vestige of humanity: clothes, shoes, hair, names, everything but their bodies. Here is the dehumanised reality of human beings shorn of culture and reduced to their biology. The Nazis also seized Frankl's most precious possession, a manuscript containing his life's work as a scientist.
The next stage was characterised by apathy, a complete dulling of the emotions. The prisoners no longer lived, they merely survived from day to day; they had become automata. The eighteenth century materialist La Mettrie wrote of ‘man the machine’. Here were men and women reduced to machines, to their mere physical operation. It was at this point that Frankl asked the fateful question that all biological determinists and reductionists should be made to answer – what freedom is left to a person who has been robbed of everything: dignity, possessions, even the power of decision itself? The Jews had been persecuted throughout history but where formerly there had been a choice either to convert or die now, during the Holocaust, even that had been removed - there was no choice.
Is there anything left to a person once everything there was to lose is about to be taken away? Frankl came to the understanding that there was one freedom that could never be taken away:
"We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."
Frankl 1986: 86
This is Socrates' case for the moral dignity of human beings, that moral capacity above both mind and body as purely physical, bio-chemical things and processes. Even in the most adverse of circumstances, human beings retained freedom in the form of the decision how to respond. Many reject Socrates and argue that human life is meaningless. Bertrand Russell justifies an heroic despair in face of the meaninglessness of the universe. Viktor Frankl knew better and taught meaning. It takes greater heroism and courage to continue to hope in the face of the adversity of the concentration camps. That is what Viktor Frankl teaches. The complete absence of hope created a condition which Frankl called ‘futurelessness’, a deadening experience that denies life all meaning and all hope. Frankl recalls, 'A prisoner marching in a long column to a new camp remarked that he felt as if he were walking in a funeral procession behind his own dead body.' Human beings need meaning, a hope, a sense of direction towards something bigger and better, a feeling of being part of something greater than the individual ego and its concerns.
And that, I argue, is greater than simply fitting into an amoral, indifferent nature, conceived in terms of cycles and imperatives, leaving us with nothing more than species interest in reproduction. Human beings need to do more than survive, they need to thrive.
Frankl found his meaning in these most dehumanised of environments by observing others and by helping them find a reason to continue living.
Frankl persuaded two of his fellow prisoners against suicide by convincing each that they still had work to do in life. Reduced to self-seeking automata, the lives of both prisoners were already over. Without hope survival is not possible. But as part of a greater whole, their lives still had unfulfilled purpose and potentiality. Frankl convinced both that something remained for them to do in life’s bigger picture, work that could be done only by them and no one else. Many in these disillusioned, dispirited times may dismiss the self as a delusion, but both prisoners survived. That is how human beings transcend biological necessity to come to lead the good life and flourish.
Frankl also survived and drew on his experiences to develop a new school of psychotherapy, logotherapy, from the Greek logos, meaning 'word' in the broadest sense, including the spiritual dimension of human life, that which endows life with a sense of purpose. That’s transcendence in the best sense, offering an ideal to inspire hope. After the war Frankl wrote the book, Man's Search for Meaning.
Homo sapiens is the rational species that seeks meaning. The idea that the human being is the meaning-seeking animal is an integral part of an understanding of our biological nature. To preserve meaning, no matter how adverse the circumstances, human beings must be able to do three things.
Human beings must refuse to believe that they are victims of fate. Within limits, human beings are free, authors of their own lives.
Human beings must understand that there is more than one way of interpreting what happens to them. There is more than one way of telling the story of life.
Human beings must realise that meaning lies outside them as a call from somewhere else.
In the last resort, man should not ask, 'What is the meaning of my life?' but should realise that he himself is being questioned. Life is putting its problems to him, and it is up to him to respond to these questions by being responsible; he can only answer to life by answering for his life. Life is a task. The religious man differs from the apparently irreligious man only by experiencing his existence not simply as a task, but as a mission. This means that he is also aware of the taskmaster, the source of his mission. For thousands of years that source has been called God.
Frankl 1986:13
Ethics, as a system of moral thought, entails practical suggestions concerning how human beings ought to live and, as such, is founded on a view as to what human nature is.
This search for meaning is a constant of the human condition. The challenge is to ensure its embodiment in terms of a genuine teleology that concerns the realisation of the natural human essence.
Viktor Frankl’s 1946 psychological memoir Man’s Search for Meaning is one of the most vital books ever written, and one of the most vitalizing one could ever read — a wealth of insight on how to persevere through troubled times and what it means to live fully.
In the end, a truly human life must have meaning, whether this meaning is found through favourable circumstances, or in the face of recalcitrant facts. Since human beings are social being, the individual can never find this meaning alone, in isolation from others. We need others in order to be ourselves. To find fulfilment, our lives must be joined to others, in families, neighbourhoods, communities, in whole cultures and ways of life. In an age of atomistic individualism, this simple truth is in danger of being lost – lives mired in misery and meaninglessness serve to supply the reminder. We must expand our being outwards through union with something greater than we are - the society of others, Nature and God. "The salvation of man is through love and in love."
"Human freedom is not a freedom from but freedom to." (Frankl 1988, p. 16).
“What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost, but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.”
http://www.pursuit-of-happiness.org/history-of-happiness/viktor-frankl/
Only when the emotions work in terms of values can the individual feel pure joy (Frankl 1986, p. 40).
“Ever more people today have the means to live, but no meaning to live for.” —Victor Frankl
The Unconscious God
Video
Bibliography
Frankl, Victor (1992). Man's Search for Meaning. (4th ed.). Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Frankl, Victor (1986). The Doctor and the Soul. (3rd ed.). New York, NY: Vintage Books.
Frankl, Victor (1967). Psychotherapy and Existentialism. New York, NY: Washington Square Press.
Frankl, Victor (1988). The Will to Meaning: Foundations and Applications of Logotherapy. New York, NY: Penguin Books.
Frankl, Victor (2000). Recollections: An Autobiography. New York, NY: Perseus Books.
Recommended reading:
The Unheard Cry for Meaning: Psychotherapy and Humanism (Touchstone Books)
The Will to Meaning: Foundations and Applications of Logotherapy (Meridian)