Like his fellow Viennese Jews Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler, Viktor Frankl was a pioneer in the field of psychiatry, distinguishing himself particularly with his work in suicide prevention. But he is best known for his Holocaust memoir—first published in German in 1946 as A Psychologist Survives the Concentration Camp, and later in English as Man’s Search for Meaning. Samuel Kronen investigates Frankl’s philosophy, and its fundamental hypothesis: only a sense of purpose that transcends the self can make life worth living and suffering tolerable:
In Yes to Life, Frankl takes us through the counterarguments to the proposition that life has intrinsic value, going through all the ways that life could be stripped of sense—incurable or terminal illness, mental illness, disability, loss, imprisonment, sterility—to make a case for the inherent sanctity of life. No amount of anguish or adversity can truly take away our humanity, he says. Being human precedes our capacity to be productive, functional, or even mentally sound.
Frankl tells many stories of seemingly hopeless situations in which a person was ultimately able to transcend his circumstances—not by changing them but by changing his attitude toward them.
Frankl’s contentions with modern culture were twofold: the nihilism of the modern age, in which nothing means anything, so you might as well do whatever; and the reductionism that removes will from the equation so that it doesn’t matter what you do, anyway. His solution to both was to forge a culture of meaning based on the margin of freedom and responsibility available to us. Meaning does not simply appear; it must be forged. It is ultimately self-generating, and we are self-determining creatures.
Frankl’s relationship with faith was more complicated. He came in for criticism from theologians by remaining publicly agnostic, positing a form of humanism that can be either religious or nonreligious. It wasn’t discovered until after his death that he prayed several times a day and regularly attended synagogue. He would have been the first to say that religious people are predisposed to finding deeper truths under difficult circumstances.
Read more on City Journal: https://www.city-journal.org/article/yes-to-life