The Essence of Existence

It acknowledges limits, then asks what remains possible within them.

Existence becomes something you shape, not something that merely happens to you—through the kind of person you decide to be next.

Frankl condenses logotherapy into what he calls its categorical imperative: live as if you were living already for the second time, and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now. The maxim is a machine for manufacturing responsibility — it confronts you first with a past in which today's choice was already made badly, and then with the power to revise it. Nothing, he says, stimulates a person's sense of responsibleness more than facing life's finiteness this way.

Responsibility, though, needs an addressee, and Frankl leaves that deliberately open: a person is responsible to their conscience, to society, or to God as they themselves understand it — but responsible they are, and for something specific. This is why logotherapy, he stresses, is the opposite of moralizing: the therapist never dictates values. The logotherapist's role, in his image, is that of the eye specialist rather than the painter — not to show the patient a finished picture of the world, but to widen the visual field until the whole spectrum of potential meaning becomes visible.

From here comes his most American piece of advice, delivered to audiences ever after: freedom is only half the truth, the negative half, in danger of degenerating into arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness. That is why, he recommended — only half in jest — that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.

The chapter also relocates self-fulfillment: the more one forgets oneself — giving oneself to a cause to serve or a person to love — the more human one is. Self-actualization, Frankl argues, cannot be attained by aiming at it; like happiness, it ensues as the side effect of self-transcendence.

One consequence Frankl draws deserves its own sentence: because responsibility is always to something beyond the self, a life aimed at self-actualization directly is as self-defeating as a life aimed at pleasure. The self is like the eye — built to see the world, not itself; it works precisely when it is looking elsewhere.