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In Dark Times, We Must Say Yes to Life
An excerpt from a lecture Viktor Frankl gave 11 months after liberation from a concentration camp
In 1945, psychiatrist Viktor Frankl was liberated from a Nazi concentration camp. The next year, he would publish one of the most influential texts of all time, Man’s Search for Meaning, about purpose and suffering. Now, in the midst of another period of global suffering, a book Frankl wrote based on public lectures he gave in Vienna in 1946 is being published in English for the first time in a companion volume, Yes to Life. What follows is an excerpt from a lecture Frankl gave just 11 months after his release from Dachau. Frankl died in 1997 at the age of 92.
To speak about the meaning and value of life may seem more necessary today (1946) than ever; the question is only whether and how this is “possible.” In some respects it is easier today: We can now speak freely again about so many things — things that are inherently connected with the problem of the meaningfulness of human existence and its value, and with human dignity. However, in other respects, it has become more difficult to speak of meaning, value, and dignity. We must ask ourselves: Can we still use these words so easily today? Has not the very meaning of these words become somehow questionable? Have we not seen, in recent years, too much negative propaganda railing against everything they mean, or once meant?
The propaganda of these last years was a propaganda against all possible meaning and against the questionable value of existence itself! In fact, these years have sought to demonstrate the worthlessness of human life.
Since Kant, European thought has succeeded in making clear statements about the true dignity of human beings: Kant himself, in the second formulation of his categorical imperative, said that everything has its value, but man has his dignity — a human being should never become a means to an end. But already in the economic system of the last few decades, most working people had been turned into mere means, degraded to become mere tools for economic life. It was no longer work that was the means to an end, a means for life, or indeed a food for life — rather it was a man and his life, his vital energy, his “man power,” that became this means…
