30 Minute Meditations on Being Human from the Life and Writings of Viktor Frankl, Day 21: The Reason for Praiseworthy and Blameworthy Behavior

Lesson for the Day: A person’s free-will, freedom of choice, makes it possible for both good and evil to exist, for both praise and blame, merit and guilt, to be attached to human acts.

As a survivor of three years in four concentration camps, Dr. Frankl writes,

“I prefer to live in a world in which man has the right to make choices, even if they are the wrong choices, rather than a world in which no choice at all is left to him. In other words, I prefer a world in which, on the one hand, a[n] … Adolf Hitler can occur, and on the other hand, … many saints … can occur also.”

Source: Viktor E. Frankl, Psychotherapy and Existentialism: Selected Papers on Logotherapy (New York, N.Y.: Simon and Schuster, Inc., 1967), pp. 13-14.