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 become somehow questionable? 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 a propaganda against all possible meaning and against the questionable value of existence itself! 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 judgment—that a state intends somehow to make use of all the people it has condemned to death, to exploit their capacity for labor 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. So, just as our lives were not worth a bowl of soup, our deaths were also of minimal value, not even worth a lead bullet, just some Zyklon B.¹

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 postwar period. Although I am using a somewhat journalistic phrase here, the state of mind and the spiritual condition of an average person today is 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 prewar 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 toward 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 has become a concern only affecting 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 what and how far something “progresses.” 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!

How steadfast would a person’s belief in the meaningfulness of life have to be, so as not to be shattered by such skepticism. How unconditionally do we have to believe in the meaning and value of human existence, if this belief is able to take up and bear this skepticism and pessimism? And just at a time when all idealism has been so disappointed, and all enthusiasm so abused; but when we cannot do other than appeal to idealism or enthusiasm. But the present generation, the youth of today—and it is in the younger generation that we would most likely find idealism and enthusiasm—no longer has any role models. Too many upheavals had to be witnessed by this one generation, too many external—and in their consequences, internal—breakdowns; far too many for a single generation for us to count on them so unquestioningly to maintain their idealism and enthusiasm.

All the programs, all the slogans and principles have been utterly discredited as a result of these last few years. Nothing was able to survive, so it should not be a surprise if contemporary philosophy perceives the world as though it has no substance. But through this nihilism, through the pessimism and skepticism, through the soberness of a “new objectivity” that is no longer that “new” but has grown old, we must strive toward a new humanity. The past few years have certainly disenchanted us, but they have also shown us that what is human is still valid; they have taught us that it is all a question of the individual human being. After all, in the end, what was left was the human being! Because it was the human being that survived amid all the filth of the recent past. And equally it was the human being that was left in the experiences of the concentration camps. (There was an example of this somewhere in Bavaria in which the camp commander, an SS man, secretly spent money from his own pocket to regularly buy medicines for “his” prisoners from the pharmacy in the nearby Bavarian market town; while in the same camp, the senior camp warden, so himself a prisoner, mistreated the camp inmates in the most appalling way: it all came down to the individual human being!)

What remained was the individual person, the human being—and nothing else. Everything had fallen away from him during those years: money, power, fame; nothing was certain for him anymore: not life, not health, not happiness; all had been called into question for him: vanity, ambition, relationships. Everything was reduced to bare existence. Burnt through with pain, everything that was not essential was melted down—the human being reduced to what he was in the last analysis: either a member of the masses, therefore no one real, so really no one—the anonymous one, a nameless thing (!), that “he” had now become, just a prisoner number; or else he melted right down to his essential self. So, in the end, was there something like a decision that needed to be made? It does not surprise us, because “existence”—to the nakedness and rawness of which the human being was returned—is nothing other than a decision.

However, help was at hand for the human being in making this decision; the critical factor was the existence of others, the being of others, specifically their being role models. This was more fruitful than all that talk and all that writing. Because the fact of being is always more pivotal than the word. And it was necessary, and will always remain so, to ask oneself whether this fact is not far more important than writing books or giving lectures: that each of us actualizes the content in our own act of being. That which is actualized is also much more effective. Words alone are not enough. I was once called upon to attend a woman who had committed suicide. On the wall above her couch, neatly framed, a saying hung on the wall: “Even more powerful than fate is the courage that bears it steadfastly.” And this fellow human being had taken her own life right under this motto. Certainly, those exemplary people who can and ought to be effective simply by being, are in the minority. Our pessimism knows this; but that is precisely why the concurrent activism matters, that is precisely what constitutes the tremendous responsibility of the few. An ancient myth tells us that the existence of the world is based on thirty-six truly just people being present in it at all times. Only thirty-six! An infinitesimal minority. And yet they guarantee the continuing moral existence of the whole world. But this story continues: as soon as one of these just individuals is recognized as such and is, so to speak, unmasked by his surroundings, by his fellow human beings, he disappears, he is “withdrawn,” and then dies instantly. What is meant by that? We will not be far off the mark if we express it like this: as soon as we notice any pedagogical tendency in a role model, we become resentful; we human beings do not like to be lectured to like children.

What does all this prove? What has come through to us from the past? Two things: everything depends on the individual human being, regardless of how small a number of like-minded people there is, and everything depends on each person, through action and not mere words, creatively making the meaning of life a reality in his or her own being. Therefore, we must counter the negative propaganda of recent times, the propaganda of “Non-Sense,” of “Non-Meaning,” with another propaganda that must be, firstly, individual and, secondly, active. Only then can it be positive.

So much for our initial question as to whether, and in what sense, and in what spirit, one is still able today to be an advocate for meaning and value in life. But as soon as we speak of the meaning of existence, at that moment it is somehow called into question. Once we ask about it explicitly, it has somehow already been doubted. Doubt about the meaningfulness of human existence can easily lead to despair. We then encounter this despair as the decision to commit suicide.

When we are talking about suicide, we must distinguish between four essential, but essentially different, reasons from which the inner will to commit suicide arises. Firstly, suicide can be a consequence—a consequence not of a primarily mental but of a physical, bodily state. This group includes those cases in which someone experiencing a physically determined change of mental state tries to kill themselves almost as if compelled to do so. Naturally, such cases are excluded at the outset from those considered in today’s lecture. Then there are people whose determination to commit suicide feeds on a calculation of its effect on their surroundings: people who want to take revenge on someone for something that has been done to them, and who want their urge for revenge to result in the others in question being weighed down by a guilty conscience for the rest of their lives: they must be made to feel guilty for the suicide’s death. These cases must also be eliminated when we consider the meaning of life. Thirdly, there are people whose desire to commit suicide comes from the fact that they simply feel tired, tired of life. But this tiredness is a feeling—and we all know that feelings are not reasons. That someone is tired, feels exhausted, is in itself not a reason for them to stop in their tracks. Rather, everything depends on whether carrying on does actually have meaning, whether that makes it worth overcoming the tiredness. What is needed here is simply an answer to the question of the meaning of life, of continuing to live despite persistent world-weariness. As such, the latter is not a counterargument to living on; this continuing to live, however, will only be possible in the knowledge of life’s unconditional meaning.

But in truth, a fourth group of people belong here, those who seek to commit suicide because they just cannot believe in the meaning of living on, in the meaning of life itself. A suicide with that kind of motivation is commonly called a “balance-sheet suicide.” In each case it results from a so-called negative life balance. Such a person creates a “balance sheet” and compares what they have (credit) with what they feel they ought to have (debit); they weigh up what life still owes them against what profit they believe they can still derive from life, and the negative balance that they then calculate induces them to commit suicide. We will now set about inspecting this balance sheet.

Normally, the credit column contains all the suffering and pain; the debit column lists all the happiness and good fortune that one did not attain. But this balance is fundamentally incorrect. For, as the saying goes, “We are not in this world for fun.” And this is true in the double sense of what is (being) and what ought to be. Anyone who has not felt this for themselves may wish to refer to the writings of a Russian experimental psychologist, who once proved that the average person experiences significantly more feelings of dissatisfaction than feelings of pleasure. Therefore, from the outset, it would not be possible to live only for the sake of pleasure. But is that even necessary—is that what life stands for? Let us imagine a man who has been sentenced to death and, a few hours before his execution, has been told he is free to decide on the menu for his last meal. The guard comes into his cell and asks him what he wants to eat, offers him all kinds of delicacies; but the man rejects all his suggestions. He thinks to himself that it is quite irrelevant whether he stuffs good food into the stomach of his organism or not, as in a few hours it will be a corpse. And even the feelings of pleasure that could still be felt in the organism’s cerebral ganglia seem pointless in view of the fact that in two hours they will be destroyed forever.

But the whole of life stands in the face of death, and if this man had been right, then our whole lives would also be meaningless, were we only to strive for pleasure and nothing else—preferably the most pleasure and the highest degree of pleasure possible. Pleasure in itself cannot give our existence meaning; thus the lack of pleasure cannot take away meaning from life, which now seems obvious to us.

A man whose life was saved after a suicide attempt told me one day how he wanted to get out of town to put a bullet through his head, and how, as it was already late in the evening and the trams were no longer running, he felt obliged to take a taxi, and how he found himself fretting about how he did not want to waste money on taxi rides, and how he finally had to smile about the fact that he could have such qualms shortly before his death. It must have seemed pointless to this man who was bent on committing suicide to be stingy about spending money—in the face of death. How beautifully Rabindranath Tagore expressed all this, the disappointment human beings feel toward their claim to happiness in life, in this poem in which he says:

I slept and dreamt

that life was joy.

I awoke and saw

that life was duty.

I worked—and behold,

duty was joy.

And by this, we are indicating the direction we will take in our further deliberations.

So, life is somehow duty, a single, huge obligation. And there is certainly joy in life too, but it cannot be pursued, cannot be “willed into being” as joy; rather, it must arise spontaneously, and in fact, it does arise spontaneously, just as an outcome may arise: Happiness should not, must not, and can never be a goal, but only an outcome; the outcome of the fulfillment of that which in Tagore’s poem is called duty, and that we will later try to define more closely. In any case, all human striving for happiness, in this sense, is doomed to failure as luck can only fall into one’s lap but can never be hunted down. It was Kierkegaard who told the wise parable that the door to happiness always opens “outward,” which means it closes itself precisely against the person who tries to push the door to happiness “inward,” so to speak.

I once had two world-weary people sitting opposite me—as chance would have it, at the same time—a man and a woman. Both had stated, in complete agreement, word for word, that their own lives were meaningless, that they “no longer expected anything of life.” Somehow both seemed to be right. It soon emerged, however, that, conversely, something was waiting for each of them: for the man, a scientific work that was unfinished, and for the woman, a child who was living abroad, far away and out of reach. At this point it would be helpful, as we might say with Kant, to “perform a Copernican revolution,” a conceptual turn through 180 degrees, after which the question can no longer be “What can I expect from life?” but can now only be “What does life expect of me?” What task in life is waiting for me?

Now we also understand how, in the final analysis, the question of the meaning of life is not asked in the right way, if asked in the way it is generally asked: it is not we who are permitted to ask about the meaning of life—it is life that asks the questions, directs questions at us—we are the ones who are questioned! We are the ones who must answer, must give answers to the constant, hourly question of life, to the essential “life questions.” Living itself means nothing other than being questioned; our whole act of being is nothing more than responding to—of being responsible toward—life. With this mental standpoint nothing can scare us anymore, no future, no apparent lack of a future. Because now the present is everything as it holds the eternally new question of life for us. Now everything depends on what is expected of us. As to what awaits us in the future, we don’t need to know that any more than we are able to know it. In this connection, I often tell the following story that appeared in a short newspaper article many years ago: A black man who had been sentenced to life imprisonment was deported to Devil’s Island. When the ship, the Leviathan, was on the high seas, a fire broke out. Due to the calamitous situation the prisoner was released from his shackles and took part in the rescue work. He saved ten lives. As a result, he was later pardoned. I ask you: if one had asked this man before embarking, in fact on the quay at Marseilles, whether continuing to live could have any kind of meaning for him, he would have had to shake his head: What could possibly be waiting for him? But none of us knows what is waiting for us, what big moment, what unique opportunity for acting in an exceptional way, just like the rescue of ten people by that black man aboard the Leviathan.

The question life asks us, and in answering which we can realize the meaning of the present moment, does not only change from hour to hour but also changes from person to person: the question is entirely different in each moment for every individual.

We can, therefore, see how the question as to the meaning of life is posed too simply, unless it is posed with complete specificity, in the concreteness of the here and now. To ask about “the meaning of life” in this way seems just as naive to us as the question of a reporter interviewing a world chess champion and asking, “And now, Master, please tell me: which chess move do you think is the best?” Is there a move, a particular move, that could be good, or even the best, beyond a very specific, concrete game situation, a specific configuration of the pieces?

No less naive was the young man who spoke to me one day, many years ago, as I was about to give a little seminar somewhere on the meaning of life. His words went roughly like this: “Hey Frankl, don’t be angry with me, I’ve been invited to my future in-laws tonight. I really do have to go, and I can’t stay for your lecture; please be so kind and tell me quickly, what is the meaning of life?”

Whatever is waiting for us now, this specific “challenge of the hour” may demand an answer in a different sense. First of all, our answer can be an active answer, giving an answer through action, answering specific life questions with a deed that we complete or a work that we create. But here, too, we have a number of things to bear in mind. And what I mean now is perhaps best expressed by referring to a concrete experience: one day, a young man sat in front of me who had just confronted me about the question of the meaning or meaninglessness of life. His argument was as follows: “It’s easy for you to talk, you have set up counseling centers, you help people, you straighten people out; but I—who am I, what am I—a tailor’s assistant. What can I do, how can I give my life meaning through my actions?” This man had forgotten that it is never a question of where someone is in life or which profession he is in, it is only a matter of how he fills his place, his circle. Whether a life is fulfilled doesn’t depend on how great one’s range of action is, but rather only on whether the circle is filled out.

In his specific life circle, every single human being is irreplaceable and inimitable, and that is true for everyone. The tasks that his life imposes are only for him, and only he is required to fulfill them. And a person who has not completely filled his (relatively) larger circle remains more unfulfilled than that of a person whose more closely drawn circle is sufficient. In his specific environment, this tailor’s assistant can achieve more, and, in the things he does and the things he leaves undone, he can lead a more meaningful life than the person he envies, as long as that person is not aware of his greater responsibility in life and does not do justice to it.

“So, how about the unemployed?,” you may now object, overlooking the fact that work is not the only field in which we can actively give meaning to our lives. Does work alone make life meaningful? Let’s ask the many people who complain to us (not without reason) about how meaningless their (often mechanical) work is, the endless adding up of columns of numbers or the monotonous pushing and pulling of machine levers on a never-ending production line. These people can only make their lives meaningful in their all too scant spare time, filling it with personal human meaning. On the other hand, the unemployed person, who has an abundance of free time, also has the chance to endow their life with meaning. No one should believe that we are so frivolous as to underestimate economic difficulties, an economically desperate situation, or, in fact, the sociological or economic factors in such contexts. We know today more than ever, how far “First the grub, then the morals”² can take us. We have no illusions about that anymore. But we know how meaningless it is to guzzle away without any morality and how catastrophic this meaninglessness can be to anyone who is fixated only on consumption. And, lastly, we know how much “morality” means: the unshakeable belief in an unconditional meaning to life that, one way or another, makes life bearable. Because we have experienced the reality that human beings are truly prepared to starve if starvation has a purpose or meaning.

However, we have not only witnessed how hard it is to starve if one has no “morality,” but we have also seen how hard it is to demand morality from a human being if one lets him starve. Once I had to give the court a psychiatric report on an adolescent boy, who—in the midst of an extremely desperate situation—had stolen a loaf of bread; the court concerned had asked the precise question of whether the boy was “inferior” or not. In my report I had to admit that, from a psychiatric point of view, he could not be considered inferior in any way. But I did not do this without, at the same time, explaining that in his specific situation he would have had to have been “superior” in order to withstand temptation in the face of such hunger!

It is not only through our actions that we can give life meaning—insofar as we can answer life’s specific questions responsibly—we can fulfill the demands of existence not only as active agents but also as loving human beings: in our loving dedication to the beautiful, the great, the good. Should I perhaps try to explain for you with some hackneyed phrase how and why experiencing beauty can make life meaningful? I prefer to confine myself to the following thought experiment: imagine that you are sitting in a concert hall and listening to your favorite symphony, and your favorite bars of the symphony resound in your ears, and you are so moved by the music that it sends shivers down your spine; and now imagine that it would be possible (something that is psychologically so impossible) for someone to ask you in this moment whether your life has meaning. I believe you would agree with me if I declared that in this case you would only be able to give one answer, and it would go something like: “It would have been worth it to have lived for this moment alone!”

Those who experience, not the arts, but nature, may have a similar response, and also those who experience another human being. Do we not know the feeling that overtakes us when we are in the presence of a particular person and, roughly translates as, The fact that this person exists in the world at all, this alone makes this world, and a life in it, meaningful.

We give life meaning not only through our actions but also through loving and, finally, through suffering. Because how human beings deal with the limitation of their possibilities regarding how it affects their actions and their ability to love, how they behave under these restrictions—the way in which they accept their suffering under such restrictions—in all of this they still remain capable of fulfilling human values.

So, how we deal with difficulties truly shows who we are, and that, too, can enable us to live meaningfully. And we should not forget the sporting spirit, that uniquely human spirit! What do athletes do but create difficulties for themselves so that they can grow through overcoming them? In general, of course, it is not advisable to create difficulties for oneself; in general, suffering as a result of misfortune is only meaningful if this misfortune has come about through fate, and is thus unavoidable and inescapable.

Fate, in other words, what happens to us, can certainly be shaped, in one way or another. “There is no predicament which cannot be ennobled either by an achievement or by endurance,” said Goethe.³ Either we change our fate, if possible, or we willingly accept it, if necessary. In either case we can experience nothing but inner growth through such misfortune. And now we also understand what Hölderlin means when he writes: “If I step onto my misfortune, I stand higher.”⁴

How misguided it now seems to us when people simply complain about their misfortune or rail against their fate. What would have become of each of us without our fate? How else would our existence have taken shape and form than under its hammer blows and in the white heat of our suffering at its hands? Those who rebel against their fate—that is, against circumstances they cannot help and which they certainly cannot change—have not grasped the meaning of fate. Fate really is integral in the totality of our lives; and not even the smallest part of what is destined can be broken away from this totality without destroying the whole, the configuration of our existence.

So, fate is part of our lives and so is suffering; therefore, if life has meaning, suffering also has meaning. Consequently, suffering, as long as it is necessary and unavoidable, also holds the possibility of being meaningful. It is actually universally recognized and appreciated as such. Several years ago, the news reached us that the English boy scouts’ organization had given awards to three boys for their greatest achievements; and who received these awards? Three boys who were terminally ill in the hospital and who nevertheless endured their burdensome fate with bravery and dignity. This was a clear acknowledgment that true suffering of an authentic fate is an achievement, and, indeed, is the highest possible achievement. The alternative given in the Goethe sentence quoted above is therefore no longer entirely true when examined more closely: in the final analysis, it is not a question of either achievement or endurance—rather, in some cases, endurance itself is the greatest achievement.

The essence of achievement in true suffering, in my opinion, has perhaps been expressed most clearly in Rilke’s words, who once cried out: “How much we must suffer through!” The German language only knows the term “work through.” But Rilke grasped that our meaningful achievements in life can be fulfilled at least as well in suffering as in working.

One way or another, there can only be one alternative at a time to give meaning to life, meaning to the moment—so at any time we only need to make one decision about how we must answer, but, each time, a very specific question is being asked of us by life. From all this follows that life always offers us a possibility for the fulfillment of meaning, therefore there is always the option that it has a meaning. One could also say that our human existence can be made meaningful “to the very last breath”; as long as we have breath, as long as we are still conscious, we are each responsible for answering life’s questions. This should not surprise us once we recall the great fundamental truth of being human—being human is nothing other than being conscious and being responsible!

But if life always has meaning in accordance with the possibilities, if it only depends on us whether it is filled in every instant with this possible, ever-changing, meaning, if it is entirely our responsibility and our decision to actualize this meaning, then we also know one thing for certain: the one thing that is certainly senseless and has absolutely no meaning is . . . to throw away your life. Suicide is in no way the answer to any question; suicide is never able to solve a problem.

Earlier, we needed to use the game of chess as an allegory for the position of the human being in existence, for his always being confronted by the questions of life; with our example of the “best chess move,” we wanted to show how the question of life can only be thought of as a concrete, specific one: as a single question that relates to one person and one situation, one particular person and one particular moment—one question in the here and now. So, once again, we must take the game of chess as an allegory, now when we must show how completely absurd it is to attempt to “solve” a life problem by committing suicide.

Let us imagine for a moment: A chess player is faced with a chess problem and he cannot find the solution, so—what does he do?—he hurls the pieces off the board. Is that a solution to the chess problem? Certainly not.

But this is exactly how the suicide behaves: he throws his life away and thinks he has thereby found a solution for a seemingly insoluble life problem. He does not know that in doing so he has flouted the rules of life—just as the chess player in our allegory has disregarded the rules of the game of chess, within which a chess problem might be solved by moving a knight, castling, or God knows what, at least by a simple chess move, but certainly not by the behavior described. Now, the suicide also flouts the rules of the game of life; these rules do not require us to win at all costs, but they do demand from us that we never give up the fight.

Perhaps someone will now object, they admit that “the suicide’s behavior goes against all reason; but does not life itself become meaningless in the face of the death that inevitably comes to every human being in the end? Does death not make all our beginnings seem pointless from the start, since nothing endures?” Let us try to find the answer to this objection by asking the question the other way around; let us ask ourselves, “What if we were immortal?” And we can give the answer: if we were immortal, then we could postpone everything, but truly everything. Because it would never matter whether we did a particular thing right now, or tomorrow, or the day after, or in a year, or in ten years, or whenever. No death, no end would be looming over us, there would be no limitation of our possibilities, we would see no reason to do a particular thing right now, or surrender ourselves to an experience just now—there would be time, we would have time, an infinite amount of time.

Conversely, the fact, and only the fact, that we are mortal, that our lives are finite, that our time is restricted and our possibilities are limited, this fact is what makes it meaningful to do something, to exploit a possibility and make it become a reality, to fulfill it, to use our time and occupy it. Death gives us a compulsion to do so. Therefore, death forms the background against which our act of being becomes a responsibility.

If we look at things that way then, essentially, it may prove to be quite irrelevant to us how long a human life lasts. Its long duration does not automatically make it meaningful, and its possible briefness makes it far from meaningless. We also do not judge the life history of a particular person by the number of pages in the book that portrays it but only by the richness of the content it contains.

And there is another question we should address on this occasion: the question of whether the life of a person who has not produced offspring may become meaningless by that very fact alone. We can answer: either a life, an individual life, has meaning, and it must also keep its meaning, if it is not reproduced, if it does not engage in this—we can say, highly illusory—biological “immortalization”; or this individual life, the life of an individual person, does not have a meaning—then it could never acquire meaning merely by seeking to “immortalize” itself by procreation. Because immortalizing something that is inherently “meaningless” is itself meaningless.

From this we can see just one thing: death is a meaningful part of life, just like human suffering. Both do not rob the existence of human beings of meaning but make it meaningful in the first place. Thus, it is precisely the uniqueness of our existence in the world, the irretrievability of our lifetime, the irrevocability of everything with which we fill it—or leave unfulfilled—that gives our existence significance. But it is not only the uniqueness of an individual life as a whole that gives it importance, it is also the uniqueness of every day, every hour, every moment that represents something that loads our existence with the weight of a terrible and yet so beautiful responsibility! Any hour whose demands we do not fulfill, or fulfill halfheartedly, this hour is forfeited, forfeited “for all eternity.” Conversely, what we achieve by seizing the moment is, once and for all, rescued into reality, into a reality in which it is only apparently “canceled out” by becoming the past. In truth, it has actually been preserved, in the sense of being kept safe. Having been is in this sense perhaps even the safest form of being. The “being,” the reality that we have rescued into the past in this way, can no longer be harmed by transitoriness.

Certainly, our life, in terms of the biological, the physical, is transitory in nature. Nothing of it survives—and yet how much remains! What remains of it, what will remain of us, what can outlast us, is what we have achieved during our existence that continues to have an effect, transcending us and extending beyond us. The effectiveness of our life becomes incorporeal and in that way it resembles radium, whose physical form is also, during the course of its “lifetime” (and radioactive materials are known to have a limited lifetime) increasingly converted into radiation energy, never to return to materiality. What we “radiate” into the world, the “waves” that emanate from our being, that is what will remain of us when our being itself has long since passed away.

There is a simple way, one would almost say a trick, to demonstrate the full extent of the responsibility with which our existence is so poignantly loaded, a responsibility that we can only face trembling, but ultimately somehow joyfully. For there is a kind of categorical imperative that is also a formula of “acting as if,” formally similar to Kant’s well-known maxim, which goes like this: “Live as if you were living for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!”

The essentially finite nature of our existence in time, apparently in the face of death, even though death may be in the distant future, is not the only thing that makes our existence meaningful: the finite nature of our relationship with another person also makes the life of each individual not meaningless but only meaningful. What is meant by this is the fact of our imperfection, our inner limitations, as they can be seen in the different characteristics of human beings. But before we think about the meaningfulness of our imperfection, we must, for the moment, ask whether the despair of human beings over their own imperfection and inadequacy can ever justifiably exist. For we must ask whether people who measure their “being” against a “what ought to be,” who thus measure themselves against an ideal, can ever be completely worthless. Is it not rather the case that precisely the fact that they can despair of themselves somehow vindicates them and ultimately, to a certain degree, deprives their despair of legitimacy? Could such people even sit in judgment of themselves if they were so worthless that they were not even able to see the ideal? Does not the distance from the ideal, as soon as they perceive it, confirm that they have not become completely disloyal to this ideal?

And now to the question of the meaning of our imperfections and of our particular imbalances: Let us not forget that each individual person is imperfect, but each is imperfect in a different way, each “in his own way.” And as imperfect as he is, he is uniquely imperfect. So, expressed in a positive way, he becomes somehow irreplaceable, unable to be represented by anyone else, unexchangeable. To demonstrate this, we have an apt model from the biological world: originally, in the evolution of living beings, cells are known to have been capable of anything. A “primitive” cell can do anything: it can feed, move, reproduce, and somehow “sense” its environment, etc., and the individual cell only becomes specialized following the slow process of evolution of cells into higher forms of organic cell groups so that the individual cell is finally used only for one single function. According to the principle of progressive division of labor within the whole organism, at the expense of the generally applicable nature of its capabilities, the cell has acquired relative functional irreplaceability. So, for example, a cell from the retina of the eye can no longer feed, no longer move around, and no longer reproduce, but the one thing it can do—i.e., see—it can do exceptionally well. It has therefore become irreplaceable in its specific function. It can no longer be replaced by a skin cell, a muscle cell, or a gamete.

As discussed earlier, just as death proved to be necessary for finding meaning in that it justified the uniqueness of our existence and with it our responsibleness, we can now see that the imperfect nature of human beings is meaningful since—now regarded positively—it represents the individuality of our essential inner being. However, this uniqueness as a positive value cannot be based on itself alone. Analogous to the functional value of the single cell for the whole organism, the unique individuality of each human being is given value through its relationship with an overarching whole; namely, a human community. Individuality can only be valuable when it is not individuality for its own sake but individuality for the human community. The simple fact that every human being has completely unique ridge patterns on their fingertips is, at most, relevant only to criminologists for crime research or the investigation of a particular criminal; but this biological “individuality” of every human being does not automatically turn the person into a personality or a living being that in its uniqueness is valuable for society.

If we were to try to summarize in a formula the unique nature of existence and the uniqueness of every human being, and this uniqueness as a uniqueness “for”—in other words a uniqueness that is focused on others, on the community—a formula that can remind us of the terrible and glorious responsibility of human beings for the seriousness of their lives, then we could rely on a dictum that Hillel, a founder of the Talmud, made into his motto almost two thousand years ago. This motto is: “If I do not do it, who else will do it? But if I only do it for me, what am I then? And if I do not do it now, then when will I do it?” “If not I”—therein lies the uniqueness of every single person; “If only for me,” therein lies the worthlessness and meaninglessness of such uniqueness unless it is a “serving” uniqueness; “and if not now,” therein lies the uniqueness of every individual situation!

If we now summarize what we said about the “meaning” of life, we can conclude: life itself means being questioned, means answering; each person must be responsible for their own existence. Life no longer appears to us as a given, but as something given over to us, it is a task in every moment. This therefore means that it can only become more meaningful the more difficult it becomes. The athlete, the climber who actively seeks tasks, even creates the difficulties for himself: how delighted is that climber when he finds in a rock face another difficult, an even more difficult, “variant” of his task! At this point we must note, however, that religious people, in their sense of life, in their “understanding of being,” distinguish themselves in that they go a step further than the person who merely understands their life as a task, in that they also experience the agency that “gives” them the task or that sets them before the task—the divine being! In other words, religious people experience their life as a divine mission.

And to sum up, what could we say about the question of the “value” of life? The view that presented itself to us is perhaps most aptly expressed in the words of Hebbel, who says: “Life is not something, it is the opportunity for something!”⁵