One time I preached how to gain happiness after reading the book “Flow-how to achieve happiness”, using Frankl’s quotes: “Don’t 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 dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself.”
Frankl starts his book, sharing his experiences in a concentration camp, admitting that something he cannot be objective because of his involvement in it, but at the same time he could describe it as real as possible because of his experiences. Frankl writes,
Another time we were at work in a trench. The dawn was grey around us; grey was the sky above; grey the snow in the pale light of dawn; grey the rags in which my fellow prisoners were clad, and grey their faces. I was again conversing silently with my wife, or perhaps I was struggling to find the reason for my sufferings, my slow dying. In a last violent protest against the hopelessness of imminent death, I sensed my spirit piercing through the enveloping gloom. I felt it transcend that hopeless, meaningless world, and from somewhere I heard a victorious “Yes” in answer to my question of the existence of an ultimate purpose. At that moment a light was lit in a distant farmhouse, which stood on the horizon as if painted there, in the midst of the miserable grey of a dawning morning in Bavaria. The light shines in the darkness. For hours I stood hacking at the icy ground. The guard passed by, insulting me, and once again I communed with my beloved. More and more I felt that she was present, that she was with me; I had the feeling that I was able to touch her, able to stretch out my hand and grasp hers. The feeling was very strong: she was there. Then, at that very moment, a bird flew down silently and perched just in front of me, on the heap of soil which I had dug up from the ditch, and looked steadily at me.
This is the very moment in which salvation arrives in Frankl. Without seeing beyond human conditions, humans are easily bound by environments and surroundings. However, Frankl suddenly glimpses eternity that lifts him up to more than he could do. It is the enlightened moment to realize the spiritual freedom which cannot be taken away that makes life meaningful and purposeful. Frankl is convinced, “If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete.”
Frankl’s shares the insight with a little funny analogy: “Life is like being at the dentist. You always think that the worst is still to come, and yet it is over already.” Varying this, we could say that most men in a concentration camp believed that the real opportunities of life had passed. Yet, in reality, there was an opportunity and a challenge. One could make a victory of those experiences, turning life into an inner triumph, or one could ignore the challenge and simply vegetate, as did a majority of the prisoners…Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it.
Frankl often quotes Nietzsche’s. Among them, this is the best that could also summarize the reason to explain how to survive in the experiences of the concentration camp: “He who has a why to life for can bear with almost any how.” With a meaning to live for, how-to does not matter at all. Furthermore, what has struck me most is that “It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—daily and hourly.” It certainly makes me think and ashamed as I find myself grumbling, complaining so often because of my unrealistic expectation from life.
It is truly valuable to hear that “When a man finds that it is his destiny to suffer, he will have to accept his suffering as his task; his single and unique task. He will have to acknowledge the fact that even in suffering he is unique and alone in the universe. No one can relieve him of his suffering or suffer in his place. His unique opportunity lies in the way in which he bears his burden.” Frankl quotes Nietzsche again: “That which does not kill me, makes me stronger.”
Frankl talks about the American culture: “Our current mental-hygiene philosophy stresses the idea that people ought to be happy, that unhappiness is a symptom of maladjustment. Such a value system might be responsible for the fact that the burden of unavoidable unhappiness is increased by unhappiness about being unhappy. And logotheraphy may help counteract certain unhealthy trends in the present-day culture of the United States, where the incurable sufferer is given very little opportunity to be proud of his suffering and to consider it ennobling rather than degrading so that he is not only unhappy, but also ashamed of being unhappy.” And “To Europeans, it is a characteristic of the American culture that, again and again, one is commanded to be happy. But happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to be happy. Once the reason is found, however, one becomes happy automatically.”
Frankl’s final remarks are critical: “A human being is not one thing among others; things determine each other, but man is ultimately self-determining. What he becomes—within limits of endowment and environment—he has made out of himself. In the concentration camp, we watched and witnessed some of our comrades behave like swine while others behaves like saints. Man has both potentials within himself; while one is actualized depends on decisions but not on conditions.”
He emphasizes that Life is potentially meaningful under any conditions, even those which are most miserable such as pain, guilt and death. And this in turn presupposes the human capacity to creatively turn life’s negative aspects into something positive and constructive.
I remember North Koreans in South Korea who have not given up their belief in the ideology of communism more than thirty years although they have been captured by South Koreans. They have endured all kinds of threatens and tortures to keep “the defiant power of the human spirit.”
I would like to say to the young: “Live as if you were living for the second time and had acted as wrongly the first time as you are about to act now.” And to the old: “There is no reason to pity old people. Instead, young people should envy them. It is true that the old have no opportunities, no possibilities in the future. But they have more than that. Instead of possibilities in the future, they have realities in the past—the potentialities they have actualized, the meanings they have fulfilled, the values they have realized—and nothing and nobody can ever remove these assets from the past.”
In the end, man is responsible and must actualize the potential meaning of his life. To achieve personal meaning, one must transcend subjective pleasures by doing something that points and is directed to something or someone other than oneself by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love. And suffering is not necessary to find meaning, only that meaning is possible in spite of suffering.
Frankl was once asked to express in one sentence the meaning of his life. He says, “The meaning of my life is to help others find the meaning of theirs.” I see my mission here as well.