Frankl Quote on Freedom: The Last of the Human Freedoms

Quote

"Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way." — Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning (1946)

Author

Viktor Frankl (1905–1997) was an Austrian neurologist, psychiatrist, and Holocaust survivor, the founder of logotherapy. The passage is the philosophical heart of his most famous book.

Source

The quotation is from Man's Search for Meaning (1946), the memoir and psychological treatise that Frankl wrote in nine days after his liberation from the concentration camps.

Context

Frankl wrote the passage from the camps, where the external freedoms had been systematically destroyed: the prisoners could not choose their work, their food, their companions, or the day of their death. What remained, Frankl observed, was the inner freedom: the freedom to choose how to bear the circumstances. He saw prisoners exercise this freedom in the camps — choosing to share their last bread, to comfort the dying, to preserve their dignity — and he saw others surrender it, collapsing into apathy and despair. The passage states the doctrine that the camps taught him: the last freedom is the one that no power can take.

Meaning

The quotation states the philosophical foundation of logotherapy. "Everything can be taken from a man but one thing" — the scope of the claim is total: the external goods, the health, the wealth, the freedom of movement, even life itself can be taken. "The last of the human freedoms" — the residual: one freedom remains, and it is the deepest. "To choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances" — the content: the freedom is not the freedom of action but the freedom of attitude — the freedom to determine what the circumstances mean and how they will be borne. "To choose one's own way" — the completion: the attitude is not merely a reaction but a way — a stance that the person chooses and for which the person is responsible. The doctrine is the clinical form of the Stoic and existentialist conviction that the inner life is the one thing no power can take, and it grounds the whole of the Meaning & Suffering collection.

Related Wisdom

The quotation belongs to the logotherapeutic account of freedom and the philosophy of meaning. Its doctrine of the last freedom connects to the Stoic tradition's account of the inner citadel and to the wider wisdom tradition's teaching on the freedom of the attitude. The passage is among the most quoted of the twentieth century.