The case for a tragic optimism
In 1984 Viktor Frankl added a postscript to Man's Search for Meaning, "The Case for a Tragic Optimism". It grew out of a lecture at the Third World Congress of Logotherapy in Regensburg in June 1983, and it is dedicated to the memory of Edith Weisskopf-Joelson, a psychologist who had worked with his ideas early on. The first part of the book is the camps. The second sets out the school. The postscript, written almost forty years after the first part, says what the whole book had been arguing for.
Three things no one is spared
Tragic optimism, in Frankl's short definition, means staying optimistic in spite of what logotherapy calls the tragic triad: pain, guilt and death. None of the three is a misfortune that reaches some people and passes others by. They come with being alive.
Then he asks the question behind the title. How can anyone say yes to life with all of that in view? The phrase is older than the postscript. Frankl points out that the German original of the book carried it in its title, trotzdem Ja zum Leben sagen: saying yes to life in spite of everything.
Optimism that cannot be ordered
His answer begins with what each part of the triad still leaves a person able to do. That list is where most summaries stop, and on its own it reads like a program. The sentence right after it takes the program back.
"It must be kept in mind, however, that optimism is not anything to be commanded or ordered."
— Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning, "Postscript 1984: The Case for a Tragic Optimism" (Beacon Press, 2014), p. 130
Nor, he goes on, can a person force himself to be optimistic against all odds and against all hope. Faith and love are in the same position. None of them comes on request. Frankl notes, as a European, how strange he finds a culture in which people are told again and again to be happy.
So the yes of the old title is not a mood or a forecast. It is said with the triad in plain sight.
Only suffering that cannot be avoided
The section on pain is the one most often bent out of shape. Frankl does write that meaning is available in spite of suffering, and even through it. He is just as clear that suffering is not necessary to find meaning. The claim holds only for suffering that cannot be avoided. If it can be avoided, the meaningful thing is to remove its cause. Suffering that did not have to happen is, in his words, masochistic and not heroic.
His example is a man named Long, who had broken his neck. He had not chosen what happened to him. He did choose not to let it break him. Frankl sets out the order right away. Priority stays with changing the situation that causes the suffering. How a person bears it matters most only where nothing can be changed.
That is close to the opposite of how the idea usually travels. Retold, it becomes a way of finding the bright side of pain. In the postscript it applies only where every other road is closed. It is not offered as a way to feel better. The three roads to meaning it rests on are set out in logotherapy and the will to meaning.
Guilt and death
Frankl does not argue guilt away. Nor does he console anyone about death. The third aspect of the triad, he writes, concerns death, but it concerns life as well. Every moment passes and does not return. What was done in it is not undone by its passing. In his image, it has gone into the past and is safe there. For Frankl, transience is a reason to act while the moment is still here.
The question left over
Frankl does not demand even the hope that things will get better. What remains is a yes that does not wait for a good forecast.
If I stop counting on things getting easier, what is left of my yes to life?
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