The Thammasat University Library has acquired a new book that should be useful for students interested in philosophy, psychology, literature. European history, ethics, sociology, and related subjects.

Yes To Life In Spite of Everything is by Dr. Viktor Emil Frankl, an Austrian psychiatrist who founded a school of psychotherapy that describes a search for a life’s meaning as the central human motivational force.

During the Second World War, Dr. Frankl was arrested and imprisoned in four concentration camps, where he spent three years. Most of his family was murdered in these camps, but Dr. Frankl survived. He concluded that it was important to find meaning in all forms of existence, even the most negative ones, as a way of finding a reason to continue living.

The TU Library collection includes some books by Dr. Frankl and other books about different aspects of the Holocaust.

Dr. Frankl wrote in a book in the TU Library collection:

There is nothing in the world, I venture to say, that would so effectively help one to survive even the worst conditions, as the knowledge that there is a meaning in one’s life.

• Man’s Search for Meaning (1946)

And here is an excerpt from Yes To Life In Spite of Everything:

On the Meaning and Value of Life I

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 somehow been called into question? 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 practically a propaganda against any kind of meaning and against the value of existence itself, which had been called into question! 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 to an end.

And then came the war – the war in which the man and his life were now even made a means for death. And then there were the concentration camps. In the camps, even the life that was considered worthy only of death was fully exploited to its absolute limit. What a devaluation of life, what a debasement and degradation of humankind! Let us try to imagine – so that we can make a judgement – that a state intends somehow to make use of all the people it has condemned to death, to exploit their capacity for labour right up to the very last moment of their lives – perhaps considering that this would be more sensible than simply killing such people immediately, or even feeding them for the rest of their lives. And were we not told often enough in the concentration camps that we were ‘not worth the soup’, this soup that was doled out to us as the sole meal of the day, and the price of which we had to pay with the toil of digging through the earth? We unworthy wretches even had to accept this undeserved gift of grace in the required manner: as the soup was handed to him, each prisoner had to doff his cap. […]

Finally, it came to the mass murders in mental institutions. Here, it became obvious that any person whose life was no longer ‘productive’, even if only in the most wretched manner, was literally declared to be ‘unworthy of life’.

But, as we said earlier, even ‘Non-Sense’ was propagated at that time. What do we mean by this?

Today, our attitude to life hardly has any room for belief in meaning. We are living in a typical post-war period. Although I am using a somewhat journalistic phrase here, the state of mind and the spiritual condition of the average person today are most accurately described as ‘spiritually bombed out’. This alone would be bad enough, but it is made even worse by the fact that we are overwhelmingly dominated, at the same time, by the feeling that we are yet again living in a kind of pre-war period. The invention of the atomic bomb is feeding the fear of a catastrophe on a global scale, and a kind of apocalyptic ‘end-of-the-world’ mood has taken hold of the last part of the second millennium. We already know such apocalyptic moods from history. They existed at the beginning of the first millennium and at its end. And, famously, in the last century there was a fin-de-siècle feeling, and this was not the only one that was defeatist; at the root of all these moods lies fatalism.

However, we cannot move towards any spiritual reconstruction with a sense of fatalism such as this. We first have to overcome it. But in doing so we ought to take into account that today we cannot, with blithe optimism, just consign to history everything these last years have brought with them. We have become pessimistic. We no longer believe in progress in itself, in the higher evolution of humanity as something that could succeed automatically. The blind belief in automatic progress became a matter only for the self-satisfied stuffed shirts – today such a belief would be reactionary. Today, we know what human beings are capable of. And if there is a fundamental difference between the way people perceived the world around them in the past and the way they perceive it at present, then it is perhaps best identified as follows: in the past, activism was coupled with optimism, while today activism requires pessimism. Because today every impulse for action is generated by the knowledge that there is no form of progress on which we can trustingly rely. If today we cannot sit idly by, it is precisely because each and every one of us determines exactly what ‘progresses’ and how far. In this, we are aware that inner progress is only actually possible for each individual, while mass progress at most consists of technical progress, which only impresses us because we live in a technical age. Our actions can now only arise from our pessimism; we are still only able to seize the opportunities in life from a standpoint of skepticism, while the old optimism would just lull us into complacency and induce fatalism, albeit a rosy fatalism. Give me a sober activism anytime, rather than that rose-tinted fatalism!

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)