An Underlying Problem to Finding our Own Unique Path ……. as Individuals and as a Society.

What Is The Purpose of Life?  Does It Matter Anyway.....?

A regular question to the attendees of my philosophy talks in Athens is ‘what is the purpose of life’. It’s not that I particularly like asking this question, it’s just that the underlying ideas behind it seem to crop up quite regularly when discussing various topics within Greek philosophy.

Quite often people seem to assume that I’m asking about ‘divine purposes’ or any reason or purpose that a God (should one exist) decide to create the universe and everything in it. Well the audience naturally tend to fall into two camps here depending on their own spiritual position.

The more religious among us start to try and come up with an answer for a universal ‘purpose of life’. Then, oddly in some ways, the people who do not believe in any kind of God or divine hand in the universe answer the question negatively, saying there is no purpose to life whatsoever. Of course, it’s quite difficult answering some of these deep questions off-the-cuff at a talk, so I cannot be completely sure that these people really think there is no purpose at all to life if there is no God.

As I quickly remind to the non-religious people - whether we are religious / spiritual and not - at some level we all still need to have ‘some’ purpose in life as we get out of bed in the morning and go about our daily routines. I disagree that no God necessarily means no purpose whatsoever.

……. and then we start to get to the nub of the question; or rather my intended question. For example, if someone asked me whether the pen I am writing with is a good pen or not, I can say yes or no, only because I know what a pen is - and what it is for. The same is true of say a glass to drink water from. Does it achieve its known purpose well or not….  However, if I asked someone whether they were a good person or not, if they do not know what a person actually is – and what our purpose is – then it is pretty difficult to say yes or no with any certainty; and everybody’s opinion about themselves and the way they live would be as good as anyone else’s. There would no recognizable truth to anyone’s answer. (Be careful of one of the traps with this. I asked a young gentleman ‘what’ he was and he replied that he was an engineer – and a good one too. Of course, this would not necessarily make him a good person…… it’s not quite the same thing.)

So when we start to talk about and consider finding the right path, and being ‘good’ people who use our time wisely (or at least fairly wisely), things start to get a little complicated. It is easy enough to know whether we are simply ‘busy’ people – but again, that is not the same thing at all. Afterall, some of the worse tyrants in history were fairly busy people…...

If we do not have ‘some’ idea of what our purpose is as individuals - surely it gets difficult to say with any certainty what the best or better path for us to follow actually is, and indeed, what sorts of things we should be doing and not doing so often along that path, and how we use our time.

Perhaps this is one of the underlying problems with society as a whole in the 21^st century as traditional religious explanations of the world have tended to crumble to the forces of the media, consumerism and scientific dogmatism.

Whether we are religious or not - without some idea of what the main purpose of a human being is and what it is for - surely it will be difficult to say with any certainty at all whether our goals and objectives (indeed purposes) are good and wise ones, or foolish.

 

[Comments welcome below]

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