Yes to Life by Viktor E. Frankl

Author:Viktor E. Frankl
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Beacon Press

At this point, none of you can reproach me any longer and suggest that it was easy for me to talk, but you would like to see a patient who really holds to their attitude in the face of death, in the manner in which I presented it as possible and therefore as necessary: it was not easy for the writer of that letter to talk, and yet he acted and thereby showed that what is demanded can also be realized.

It will now be clear to you that the meaning that can ensue from illness and dying cannot be affected by any external lack of success or any failure in this world, that this is rather an internal success, and this inner success exists despite external failure. What may also be clear is perhaps that all this is not only true for special cases, but we can apply it to all our lives and the whole of our lives. For somehow all our lives are ultimately unsuccessful, to the extent that we understand success as only being external success: no external success, no effect, that is to say, no biological or sociological influence out there in the world, is guaranteed to outlive us or even to last forever. However, inner success, the inner fulfillment of life’s meaning, is something that, if at all, has been achieved “once and for always.” The fact that this goal is often only reached at the end of our existence does not detract from the meaning of life but rounds off this “end” to become a true completion. It is hard to make these things visible and believable using everyday examples. Art offers us more opportunities in this regard. For example, I would like you to remind you of the novella by Werfel, The Man Who Conquered Death (Der Tod des Kleinbürgers). Werfel describes the figure of the everyday, small, petty bourgeois man, whose entire life consists of misery and worry and seems to be absorbed by it. This man falls ill and is taken to the hospital. And now Werfel shows us how the man leads a heroic fight against his approaching death, because his family would receive an insurance premium if he only dies after New Year’s Day, but otherwise no claim could be made on the insurance. And in this fight against death, in this striving to experience New Year’s Day, in this struggle for the financial security of his family, this plain and simple man takes on a human greatness that only a poet can portray. Or think of the more or less parallel event in the novel The Death of Ivan Ilyich, by Tolstoy. Here, too, we are dealing with a petty bourgeois man who at first despairs when facing death and the unfathomable meaninglessness of his previous existence as he now perceives it, but in his despair over this meaninglessness, he changes, and in this change, with this change, he somehow retrospectively gives his futile life meaning; in fact,

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