Viktor Frankl was an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist who, because of his Jewish descent, spent the last six months of World War II in a German concentration camp, which he barely survived. His family was killed, and he thought he would be too, but in the end he wasn’t. Instead, he died more than fifty years later, at the age of 92, after enjoying a distinguished international career.
In 1946, Frankl published, in German, an account of his time in the camp and how to find meaning in life even amid the most adverse circumstances. It was translated into English in 1959 under the title From Death-Camp to Existentialism, but is best known under its later title Man’s Search for Meaning.
In Frankl’s own estimation, his account had one primary purpose: “To convey to the reader by way of a concrete example that life holds a potential meaning under any conditions, even the most miserable ones.” Among the things that made the miserable conditions of the concentration camps bearable were love (even to people who are no longer alive), which Frankl describes as “the highest goal to which man can aspire”, beauty, or the ongoing possibility thereof, and humour, all of which are ways in which human life and human dignity can be reaffirmed even in situations that are destined to undermine and ultimately destroy both.
Whatever happens to us, Frankl insists, we always have a choice. We may not be able to choose what happens to us, but even then we are able to choose how we deal with and respond to what happens to us: “Everything can be taken away 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.”
We may not be able to avoid suffering, but we can relate to it and bear it in different ways, and it is this choice and the inner, spiritual freedom that makes this choice possible and that cannot be taken away from us, that “makes life meaningful and purposeful.”
According to Frankl, a life can be meaningful (or be experienced as such) in three different ways.
It can, first, be meaningful if it provides sufficient passive enjoyment through, for instance, the experience of “beauty, art, or nature” or the experience of “another human being in his very uniqueness – by loving him”. It can also be meaningful by being creative, giving us the opportunity to realize values. And finally, there is the meaning that results from the attitude we have to our existence, and that meaning can be had and preserved even if the other two sources of meaning are blocked and no or little enjoyment is available and no or little creative work is possible.
Meaning, therefore, is unconditional in the sense that it does not depend on favourable external conditions. Existence, for Frankl and in this context, means primarily suffering, which he insists is “an ineradicable …
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