The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a br… - Viktor Frankl

The salvation of man is through love and in love

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.

But does the danger really lie in the lack of universality? Doesn't it rather lurk in the pretense of totality? What is dangerous is the attempt of a man who is an expert, say, in the field of biology, to understand and explain human beings exclusively in terms of biology. The same is true of psychology and sociology as well. At the moment at which totality is claimed, biology becomes biologism, psychology becomes psychologism, and sociology becomes sociologism. In other words, at that moment science is turned into ideology. What we have to deplore, I would say, is not that scientists are specializing, but that the specialists are generalizing. We are familiar with that type called terrible simplificateurs. Now we become acquainted with a type I would like to call terrible generalisateurs. I mean those who cannot resist the temptation to make overgeneralized statements on the grounds of limited findings.

The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity — even under the most diffcult circumstances — to add a deeper meaning to his life. It may remain brave, dignified and unselfish. Or in the bitter fight for self-preservation he may forget his human dignity and become no more than an animal. Here lies the chance for a man either to make use of or to forgo the opportunities of attaining the moral values that a diffcult situation may afford him. And this decides whether he is worthy of his sufferings or not.

A human being is not one thing among others; things determine each other, but man is ultimately self-determining. What he becomes — within the limits of endowment and environment — he has made out of himself. In the concentration camps, for example, in this living laboratory and on this testing ground, we watched and witnessed some of our comrades behave like swine while others behaved like saints. Man has both potentialities within himself; which one is actualized depends on decisions but not on conditions.