The Philosophy of Viktor Emil Frankl
Attitude
It is not the load that will break you, but the attitude with which you carry it.
Everything can be taken from you except one thing, the last of your human freedoms: to choose your own attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose your own way, and choose your own thoughts.
You are never free from conditions, but you are free to take a stand, either in the choices you make to change the condition or, when that is not possible, in your attitude towards it.
No matter how desperate a situation appears you always have the ultimate freedom to choose your attitude.
Even the negative aspects of human existence such as suffering, guilt and death can still be turned into something positive provided they are faced with the right attitude.
Becoming
There is a dimension in which you not only are, but in each moment can decide what you are going to become. No one can take from you the freedom to decide on what you are to become, because this freedom is not something you have, but rather it is something that you are.
It is not the the past which holds us back, it is the future and how we undermine it today.
It is terrible to know that at every moment you bear responsibility for the next moment; that every decision from the smallest to the largest, is a decision for all eternity; that in every moment you can actualise the possibility of a moment, of that particular moment, or forfeit it. Every single moment contains thousands of possibilities, and you can only choose one to actualise. But in making the choice you have condemned all the others and sentenced them to “never being” for all eternity.
However, it is wonderful to know that the future, your own future and with it the future of the things, the people around you, is somehow, albeit to a very small extent, dependent on your decisions in every moment.
Change
When you are no longer able to change a situation, you are challenged to change yourself and you have the freedom to change at any instant.
Be the change you wish to see in your surroundings.
Choice
Since you only live once, the choices you make matter.
The demands you meet and the choices you make will, over the course of your life, define the character of the person that you become. With each meaningful choice, you build up a past that is a permanent part of who you are.
There are choices to be made every day, every hour. At any given moment you must decide and choose, for better or for worse, what will be the monument of your individual existence; tolerance/jealousy, benevolence/selfishness, hatred/love, decency/obscenity, et al. The choice is yours.
Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is your power to choose your response. In your response lies your growth and your freedom.
Community
No person is an island, we are profoundly social beings. Every man and woman has a basic need for connection, collaboration, and cooperation in order to flourish. Such flourishing comes to fulfilment in the community.
Conscience
Life is not regulated at every crossing by a red light that tells you to stop, or a green light that tells you to go ahead. We live in an era of flashing lights that leave the decision to you as an individual, unique human being.
Your conscience is not simply what your parents, religion or society have exemplified or dictated. These influences are real, but at your core you still have this little voice which plays a significant role in your life. How you listen, and how you act upon what you hear, can make life meaningful or empty, generate happiness and fulfilment or tension, conflict, and frustration.
Death
Death forms the background against which your act of being becomes a responsibility.
In the face of death, as the absolute finish to your future and boundary to your possibilities, you are under the imperative to use your lifetime to the utmost, not letting the singular opportunities, whose finite sum constitutes the whole of your life, pass by unused.
At any time, each of the moments of which your life consists is in the process of dying, and that moment will never recur. This transitoriness is a reminder that challenges you to make the best possible use of each moment in your life.
Death does not cancel the meaning of life, but rather is the very factor that constitutes its meaning.
Death is a meaningful part of life, just like suffering. Neither rob the existence of human beings of meaning, but rather make it meaningful in the first place. Thus, it is precisely the uniqueness of your existence in the world, the irretrievability of your lifetime, the irrevocably of everything with which you fill it, or fail to fill it, that has a significance for your existence.
As the end belongs to the story, so death belongs to life and has a meaning until the last breath.
Decisions
A human being is a deciding being.
It is terrible to know that at every moment you bear responsibility for the next; that every decision from the smallest to the largest, is a decision for all eternity; that in every moment you can actualise the possibility of a moment, of that particular moment, or forfeit it. Every single moment contains thousands of possibilities, and you can only choose one to actualise. But in making the choice you have condemned all the others and sentenced them to “never being” for all eternity.
However, it is wonderful to know that the future, your own future and with it the future of the things, the people around you, is somehow, albeit to a very small extent, dependent on your decisions in every moment.
See also Becoming
Despair
D = S-M Despair = Suffering without Meaning.
When you are faced with unavoidable suffering, you are also faced with the task of transforming it into a heroic and victorious achievement.
Dignity
Modern western society defines usefulness in terms of youth and financial achievement, and not in terms of functioning for the benefit of society. It virtually ignores the dignity and value of those who are not successful, the old, those with an incurable illness, mental deterioration, serious addiction, or physical disability who are seen as having little social usefulness.
Education
The mission of education is not merely to pass on knowledge, but also to be a beacon for, rather than a mirror to, society.
Expectation
It does not really matter what you expect from life, but rather what life expects from you.
Fate
Fate is something that happens to you which is beyond your control. However, you are personally responsible for how you relate to these events.
Faith
Just as a small fire is extinguished by a storm while a large fire is enhanced by it, likewise a weak faith is weakened by predicaments and catastrophes whereas they strengthen a strong faith.
Freedom
Your freedom comes to the fore in the way you respond to each personal crisis that confronts you.
Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation. Everything can be taken from you but one thing; the last of the human freedoms, to choose you attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose your own way.
Freedom is an exclusively human quality that allows you to rise above biological, psychological and environmental limitations. However, it can degenerate into arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of r responsibleness. True freedom consists of a “freedom to” as opposed to a “freedom from”. It is consent to productive activity, performing a self-chosen task.
God
God is not dead not even after Auschwitz. For either belief in God is unconditional or it is not belief at all.
Guilt
It is a prerogative and a constituent of your being human to be capable of shaping and reshaping yourself. In the case of guilt, one takes a stand towards oneself. In other words, it is not abnormal for you to experience guilt, but it is your responsibility to overcome such guilt.
Happiness
Human beings yearn for a reason to be happy. If they can find and fulfil a meaning their lives they become happy.
The door to happiness always opens outwards. It closes itself precisely against you when you try to push it inwards.
It is the very pursuit of happiness that thwarts happiness.
Happiness cannot be pursued, it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of a dedication to a cause greater than oneself, or as the by-product of a surrender to a person other than oneself.
Happiness is the reward when one does something meaningful.
Heredity
You are by no means a product of inheritance and environment. They exist but are not more than the material from which to build yourself. You are ultimately self-determining. What you have become is what you have made out of yourself.
In every moment you are steadily moulding and forging your own character.
Human Spirit
In addition to your physical and psychological dimensions, you also possess a specifically human dimension called the human spirit. All three are inseparable and must be considered if you are to fully understand yourself.
The term “spiritual” does not have a religious connotation but refers to the specifically human dimension in contrast to the phenomena that we share with other animals. In other words, “the spiritual” is what is human in men and women.
The dimension of the human spirit contains such qualities as our will to meaning, our goal orientation, ideas and ideals, creativity, imagination, self-transcendence, commitment, responsibility, a sense of humour and the freedom of choice making.
In the dimension of the human spirit, we are free. We do not merely exist; we can influence our existence. We can decide not only what kind of person we are, but also what kind of person we still can become.
Disregarding the human spirit, as is often done in healthcare, leads to reductionism, creating a shadow caricature of a human being and facilitating the development of a plumbing mentality, repairing patients as if they were faulty taps.
Being human means always being directed toward something other than oneself. It is only through others that we become truly fulfilled
Humanity
We are all members of a single humanity, regardless of colour, religion, and political beliefs.
The pursuit of meaning is more that an inalienable right, it is the essence of humanity.
Humour
No other animal can laugh, least of all at itself.
The attempt to develop a sense of humour and to see things in a humorous light is a trick learned while mastering the art of living.
Viewing your life with humour helps you to accept your imperfections and cope with uncomfortable events that arise.
Laughing at low moments encourages you to forgive yourself and develop compassion towards yourself.
If
If not you, who?
Therein lies your personal uniqueness.
If you are not for yourself, who will be for you?
Therein lies the uniqueness of human community.
If not now, when?
Therein lies the uniqueness of every individual situation.
If only for yourself?
Therein lies the possible worthlessness and meaninglessness of such uniqueness.
Imperfection
Every man and woman is imperfect, but imperfect in their own way. It is your unique strengths and weaknesses that make you irreplaceable.
Judgement
Everyone must be judged on his or her own merits. To condemn a group wholesale, as if it were a factory of defective cisterns, is to dehumanise them, to treat them as things.
Kopernicus
Nikolaus Kopernicus revolutionised astronomy with his discovery that the planets orbit around the Sun and not around the Earth, and that the Earth is, in fact, a planet that orbits the Sun annually, whilst also turning once daily on its own axis.
A comparable revolution takes place in relation to finding personal meaning in your life, when a radical shift occurs away from “What can you expect from life?” to “What does life expect from you?,” “What task in life is waiting for you?”.
Life
Life is a task, a mission, not a career.
Each man and woman has their own vocation or mission in life. Every man and woman must carry out a concrete assignment that demands fulfilment. Therein you cannot be replaced, nor your life be repeated. Thus, everyone’s task is unique as is their opportunity to implement it.
Life can be pulled by goals just as surely as it can be pushed by drives.
There is a difference between living and existing.
Existing is simply travelling through life on autopilot, acting in an unthinking manner, plodding through the drudgery of life. Living is recognising what is, adapting to change and embracing life in all its messy glory. In rowing terminology, it is the difference between drifting and rowing the best that you can.
Look at your life as a series of film frames. The ending and meaning may not be apparent until the very end of the film, and yet each of the hundreds of individual frames has meaning within the context of the entire film.
Life asks for a contribution from every individual, and it is up to that individual to discover what it should be.
Life is so infinitely meaningful that, even in suffering and even in failure, there still has to be meaning.
Life has meaning under all conditions. The point is not what you expect from life, but rather what life expects from you.
Life, ultimately, means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems, and to fulfil the tasks which it constantly sets for you.
Life is not something; it is an opportunity for something. The rules of life do not require you to win at all costs, but they do demand that you do not give up the fight.
A life of short duration could be so rich in joy and love that it could contain more meaning than a life lasting eighty years.
Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.
A pessimist resembles a person who observes with fear and sadness that their wall calendar, from which they daily tear a sheet, grows thinner with each passing day. On the other hand, the person who attacks the problems of life actively, is like a person who removes each successive leaf from their calendar and files it neatly and carefully away with its predecessors, after first having jotted down a few diary notes on the back. They can reflect with pride and joy on all the richness set down in these notes, on all the life they have already lived to the fullest.
Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!
Loneliness
Loneliness is a part of being human.
People need the courage to be lonely. As we traverse life’s inevitable difficulties, which encompass work or relationship transitions, social circle evolutions and the death of friends and loved ones, we experience loneliness. It is during these struggles that we can find opportunities to gain experience as a person.
Love
Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of their personality.
The salvation of humankind is through love and in love. This is the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart.
Meaning
Meaning is the controlling principle of the universe; it is at the centre of life toward which we all move, consciously or unconsciously.
The quest for meaning is the key to mental health and human flourishing.
The striving to find a meaning in life is a primary motivational force in human beings.
The so-called life not worth living, does not exist. Your life has a meaning, an unconditional meaning, under any conditions, even the most miserable ones; and it remains unconditionally meaningful up to its last moment, to your last breath.
Meaning is something to be found rather than to be given. Meaning may be found in your life through deeds, through work, through achievement and accomplishment, through creativity and, most important, though attitude.
Meaning is “what is meant” for you in your present situation. It is specific, unique and personal. You cannot take someone else’s meaning or recover the meaning of a situation once it is past. Life and its string of meanings keep rolling along.
The meaning of life differs from person to person, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general, but rather the specific meaning of a person’s life at any given moment.
An appeal to continue life, to survive the most unfavourable conditions, can only be made when such survival appears to have a meaning, which must be specific and personal, a meaning that can be realised by this one person alone. We must never forget that every man and woman is unique in the universe.
Even more people today have the means to live but no meaning to live for.
No- thingness
A human being is not a thing. This no-thingness, rather than nothingness, is one of the primary lessons to be learned from life.
Novel
The “novel” which everyone has lived remains an incomparable greater composition than any that has ever been written down.
Old Age
Having been is the surest kind of being. There is no need to pity a person as he or she grows old. Instead of possibilities in the future, they have their realities in the past. Their deeds are done, loves loved, and, last but not least, the sufferings that they have endured, hopefully with courage and dignity. Nothing or nobody can ever remove those assets from their past.
What will it matter to you if you notice that you are growing old? Have you any reason to envy the young people whom you see, or wax nostalgic over your own lost youth? What reasons have you to envy a young person? For the possibilities that a young person has, the future which is in store for him or her? No, thank you! Instead of possibilities, you have realities in your past, not only the reality of work done and of love loved, but of sufferings bravely suffered.
It is irrelevant how long a human life lasts. Its long duration does not automatically make it meaningful, and its brevity makes it far from meaningless. We do not judge the life history of a particular person by the number of pages in the book that portrays it, but by the richness of the content it contains.
Opportunity
None of us knows what is waiting for us, what big moment, what unique opportunity for acting in an exceptional way will present itself to us.
People
If you take people as they are you make them worse. If you treat other people as if they were what they ought to be, you can help them to become what they are capable of becoming.
Present
Nothing can scare us, no future, and no apparent sense of futility. Because now the present is everything, it holds the eternally new question of life for us. Now everything depends on what is expected of us. As to what awaits us in the future, we do not need to know that any more than we are able to know it.
Purpose
The two most important days in your life are the day you were born and the day you figured out why.
Every man and woman is invaluable to the world. Every man and woman has their unique purpose for existing.
Your purpose can only be found in the context of your individual life, consciously forging your own path.
Serving others ennobles that purpose.
This purpose and meaning will only be fully and completely revealed at the point of your death. Whatever you have made of your life, whether the potential meaning of each individual single situation has been actualised to the best of your knowledge and beliefs, is determined at that point and amounts to the purpose and meaning of your life.
Questions
Each individual man and woman is questioned by life, and you can only answer to life by answering for your own individual life. To life you can only respond by being responsible.
The question of the meaning of life is rarely asked in the right way. It is not we who are permitted to ask about the meaning of life, it is life that asks the questions, directs question at us. We are the ones who are questioned. 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 that responding to, of being responsible towards life.
In answering the questions life asks of you, you can realise the meaning of the present moment. This 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.
As long as you have breath, as long as you are still conscious, you are responsible for answering life’s questions.
Life has meaning until the last breath. The possibility of realising values by the very attitude with which we face unchangeable suffering exists to the very last moment, The right kind of suffering, facing your fate without flinching it, is the highest achievement that has been granted to human beings.
Religion
The search for meaning leaves the door open to religion, in the widest possible sense of the word, as an expression of the search for ultimate meaning, as a human rather than a divine phenomenon. Such religion is an important ingredient of human existence, and it is left up to the individual whether to go through that door or not.
Responsibility
To be meaningful life must be lived freely and responsibly.
You are responsible for what you are, for what you do, whom you love and how you suffer.
The great fundamental truth of being human is that it is nothing other than being conscious and being responsible. Being human means being responsible, existentially responsible, responsible for your own existence.
You should not ask what the meaning of your life is. It is you that is being questioned. Life is putting its problems to you, and it is up to you to respond to these questions by being responsible. You can only answer to life by answering for your life.
Your response should be given not in words, but in action, by doing. Moreover, the correct response depends upon the situation and yourself in all your concreteness. Your response must be incorporated into that concreteness itself. The right response will therefore be an active response within the actual conditions of your everyday living, within the area of your human responsibility. Within that area you are indispensable and irreplaceable.
There is a distinction between responsibility and responsibleness. Responsibility is imposed from the outside; Responsibleness is freely chosen and comes from within and requires inner discipline. We respond not because we are forced to, but because we so decide.
It is fearful to know that at this very moment you bear the responsibility for the next moment. Every decision from the smallest to the largest is a decision for all eternity. At every moment you bring into reality, or miss, a possibility that exists only for that moment. Every moment holds thousands of possibilities, but you can only choose one of them. All of the others are condemned to never being, and that too for all eternity.
But it is glorious to know that the future, your own, and therewith the future of the things and people around you, are dependant, even if only to a tiny extent, upon your decision at any given moment. What you actualise by that decision, what you thereby bring into the world is saved. You have conferred reality upon it and preserved it from passing.
Self Transcendence
Self transcendence, reaching out beyond ourselves, is the ultimate goal of our existence.
The self-transcendence of human existence denotes the fact that being human always points, and is directed, to something or someone, other than oneself, be it a meaning to fulfil or another human being to encounter. The more men and women forget themselves, by giving themselves to a cause to serve or another person to love, the more human they are and the more they actualise themselves.
Spirituality
The term “spiritual” does not have a religious connotation but refers to the specifically human dimension in contrast to the phenomena that we share with other animals. In other words, “the spiritual” is what is human in men and women.
The spirituality of human beings is a thing in itself; it is irreducible.
True human wholeness must include the spiritual as an essential element.
Human beings can understand animals, but animals cannot understand human beings. The ratio between human beings and animals is somewhat like the ratio between God and human beings. God can understand human beings, human beings cannot understand God.
Success
Do not aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued, it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself, or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success. You must let it happen by not caring about it. Listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that, in the long-run, success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it.
Suffering
Suffering is an inherent part of human life.
There is no need to seek suffering as a source of meaning; that would be meaningless masochism. Suffering, in itself, has no meaning, but we can assume meaningful attitudes towards events that in themselves are meaningless.
If there is meaning to life at all, then there must be meaning in suffering. To survive such suffering is to find meaning in it.
Illness is part of suffering but suffering and illness are not the same thing. A person can suffer without being ill and they can be ill without suffering.
If you can find something to live for, if you can find some meaning to put at the centre of your life, even the worst kind of suffering becomes bearable. This is the core of the human spirit.
Tension
The search for meaning may arouse inner tension rather than inner equilibrium. However,
precisely such tension is an indispensable prerequisite of mental health. There is nothing that
would so effectively help one to survive even the worst conditions, as the knowledge that
there is a meaning in one's life.
What people need is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a
worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. What they need is not the discharge of tension at any
cost but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by them.
Tolerance
You should never judge another person’s actions unless you ask yourself, in absolute honesty, whether, in a comparable situation, you might not have done the same.
Being tolerant does not mean that you share another person’s belief. But it does mean that you acknowledge his or her right to believe and obey their own conscience.
Truth
If absolute truth is not available to us (and it never will be), relative truths have to function as mutual correctives. Approaching the one truth from various sides, sometimes even in opposite directions, you cannot attain it, but you may at least encircle it.
Uniqueness
Every man and woman is unique in the universe.
We are as distinct as our fingerprints; even identical twins have different fingerprints.
To compare yourself to someone else is to do an injustice to either yourself or the other person.
It is precisely the uniqueness of your existence in the world, the irretrievability of your lifetime, and the irrevocability of everything with which you fill, or fail to fill it, that gives significance to your existence.
You are, in the context of your unique situation in life, irreplaceable and inimitable, and that is true for everyone. It is never a question of where you are in life, or which profession you may practice, it is a matter of how you occupy your circle in life and fill your place.
Whether your life is fulfilled does not depend on how great your radius of action is, but rather only on whether your circle is fully filled out.
You live your unique life, have your unique opportunities, potentials and shortcomings. You create unique relationships and accept unique tasks, face unique sufferings, experience unique guilt feelings and die a unique personal death.
Values
Men and women can give meaning to their lives by realising creative values. The can also give meaning by way of experiential values, by experiencing the Good, the True and the Beautiful, or by knowing one single human being in all his or her uniqueness. To experience one human being as unique means to love him or her.
Values cannot be taught; they must be lived. Example given is both watched and witnessed.
Work
Your work represents the area in which your uniqueness stands in relation to society, and thus acquires meaning and value. However, this meaning and value is attached to your contribution to society, not to your actual occupation as such.
A healthcare professional (doctor, nurse, therapist, care assistant, cleaner, kitchen staff, porter etc) can conduct their tasks without engaging with the patient on an emotional level. Alternatively, they can connect with the patient through empathy and compassion. The latter approach brings meaning to their work.
Every occupation allows us to give of ourselves in a manner that engages who we are, with our unique insights, understanding, genetics and experiences. When these complex parts of our identities, values, beliefs, and capabilities are put to work in a meaningful, purposeful way we become indispensable and irreplaceable.
eXistence
Existence is a way of being, characteristic to human beings, which is not a factual but rather a facilitative way of being. It is not a static way of being, but rather offers the possibility to always change oneself.
Three factors characterise human existence; spirituality, freedom and responsibility.
Yes
You can, despite the existence of personal illness and suffering, despite being subject to the fate of adverse events, despite the certainty of your death, say Yes to life.
AuschwitZ
Since Auschwitz you know what human beings are capable of
And since Hiroshima you know what is at stake