Facing our hardships with hope: lessons from Viktor Frankl

I’ve been thinking about Viktor Frankl a great deal in recent days as I listen to people who are confronting fear and despair because of the coronavirus.

For many years, my students at Boston College have read Viktor Frankl’s sublime work Man’s Search for Meaning, a reflection on his experience at Auschwitz and a sketch of the psychotherapeutic technique he developed from that experience. I’ve wanted them to meet this remarkable man, and to learn something about how his experience of extremity forced him to confront the stark choice between despair and hope — and to choose hope. The quote above is a snapshot of how he responded: to retain what he describes as “the last of human freedoms: to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

Frankl was a sober realist: he details the horrors of Auschwitz and the moral corruption of those who worked there. His philosophy was not about wishing away problems or pretending they do not exist, but rather to acknowledge them in their grim reality. Yet in spite of this realism, or rather because of it, he describes how holding onto hope was literally a life-or-death choice. Those who lost hope, he said, developed a certain look in their eye, a fatalism that inevitably ended in death. They experienced an “existential vacuum” — his term for a complete loss of meaning, a loss of hope, a sense that nothing really mattered any more.

Fight that, he says: and find that which is a source of meaning. Perhaps it is a relationship with a loved one, or perhaps it is a task which one is called to do. Whatever it is, he writes, live into that meaning, and discern what life demands of you. For in choosing to hold onto meaning, one’s life will (perhaps surprisingly!) unfold with beauty and purpose, even if the road is difficult.

If you have four minutes, listen to this rare 1972 clip.

In the clip, Frankl argues that human beings must believe that they are greater than they think they are: they must strive for great things. Even if they fall short, he argues, they will nevertheless have lived well.

I believe that we are in a Viktor Frankl moment. We must believe that we are called to greatness.

I do not mean this in the way you might learn at a leadership seminar, or under the tutelage of a professional coach or personal trainer. I mean rather that our greatness must be rooted in a profound commitment to love with generosity, serve with passion, and work together in solidarity for a common good. Now is the time for a spirituality that extols the unique gifts that each of us have to reach out to one another in care and concern.

Frankl developed his theory of life’s meaning in the most dire circumstances in modernity, the crucible that was Auschwitz. And yet it is a profoundly hopeful and forward-reaching philosophy of how to live in love. Life demands it of us. Yes, there will be suffering all around us, and we must never turn our eyes from the opportunity to love those who are hurting. Frankl himself served many in the camp, including countless souls who died. And yet in the midst of that horror, he retained the capacity to exercise the last of the human freedoms, to choose his own way. And he chose to love.

Here is how he reflects on such a choice. It is a reminder and an invitation. Let us not fall prey to what we fear, but rather live into the direction of hope.

A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth — that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.