The Best We Can Do is Responsibly Answer the Questions that Life Asks of Us

Faced with mass murder, it is hard to escape the conclusion that life has no meaning. For how could it be that life has meaning when lives matter so little? As a German Jew in a concentration camp, Victor Frankl had to confront that question.

In Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl gives two answers to the question. His first answer is a reflexive rejection of the meaninglessness of life. Frankl claims that life is “unconditional[ly] meaningful.” There is something to that, but not enough to hang on to for too long. It is also not his big point.

Instead, Frankl has a more nuanced point: “If there is … meaning in life …, then there must be … meaning in suffering.” (Because suffering is an inescapable part of life.) The meaning of suffering, according to him, lies in how we respond to it. Do we suffer with dignity? Or do we let suffering degrade us? The broader, deeper point that underpins the claim is that we cannot always choose our conditions, but we can choose the “stand [we take] toward the conditions.” And life’s meaning is stored in the stand we take, in how we respond to the questions that “life asks of us.”

Not only that, the extent of human achievement is: responsibly answering the questions that life asks of us. This means two things. First, that questions about human achievement can only be answered within the context of one’s life. And second, in responsibly answering questions that life asks of us, we attain what humans can ever attain. In a limited life, circumscribed by unavoidable suffering, for instance, the peak of human achievement is keeping dignity. If your life offers you more, then, by all means, do more—derive meaning from action, from beauty, and from love. But also take solace in the fact that we can achieve the greatest heights a human can achieve in how we respond to unavoidable suffering.