THE PURPOSE OF HUMAN EXISTENCE

by F Richard Singer III         edition date 11/07/07

Perspective: What is the purpose of human existence? The goal of this paper is to show why I once was concerned about this question and why I longer concerned am. In so doing, I use the concept of a query as a type of question. A query is a question that makes a request for information that is clear enough in the context in which it was formulated. This paper is a modified version of Section 2 Chapter 3 of My Net for Understanding. That file contains a detailed development of the query concept. It also applies it to a number of other philosophical questions.

This present paper indicates why this question about the purpose of human existence once seemed like a query, but now seems too vague to be one. It then suggests some queries that could be associated with what this question might ask. However none of these queries have the apparent significance of the original question, and I suspect that there may be no such query. It is these reflections that have eliminated my concern about that question. I do not expect this will be helpful to persons who still feel the need for a firm external grounding for their most basic purposes.

Puzzlements: The fundamental subceptual net that I absorbed as a child was intertwined with religious beliefs and a theistic cosmic version. This allowed me to ask questions like those below and propose answers that seemed clear to me. Since philosophers also seemed able to debate such questions from a net that assumed physicalistic cosmic version, it took me a long time to realize that such questions were not clear to me because of deep problems within my own most basic conceptual net. Until I began to recognize the extent of this vagueness, I continued to act as if I was using such questions as queries, rather than as expressions of my puzzlements. This confusion became a persistent feature in my philosophical quest, both because of the conceptual complexities involved and because I had a deep emotional stake in treating such questions as queries.

Reasons for Vagueness: The vagueness of my questions remained hidden because my concern was remote from ordinary experience. It was easy to reason about such concerns in a highly abstract setting that provided no correcting feedback. It was also easy to formulate queries using the same interrogatives used in asking vague questions. This made it difficult to realize the conceptual difference between my questions and such queries. My emotional stake in these questions aggravated this. The puzzlements represented by these questions were so central that they were implicit, and thus difficult to articulate.

Even as a child I was more concerned with the remote future than most of the people that I encountered. My religious beliefs were very important to me. As major portions of them disintegrated, I needed a shield against fears of vulnerability and emptiness that persisted even when I had rejected their plausibility. I felt that only by finding secure answers to these questions could I quell these fears. Since this was submerged, I did not realize that vague answers to these questions, as well as clear answers to queries that sounded like these questions, was merely giving me a shallow sense of security.

There were also positive emotional factors involved in my questioning. I needed to feel a unity among my purposes. I needed a purpose transcending the narrow confines of my natural self and my immediate needs, a purpose that felt like an ultimate commitment. I needed a more universal or spiritual theme to integrate my purposes. I needed to belong in a significant manner. My fear of emptiness was the feeling that this was impossible. What am I, but an insignificant speck in a vast universe? I could not feel within me a potential to achieve such a belonging. I wanted to escape the subjectivity of my purposes and my knowledge.

As a child I looked to the supernatural, but except in mathematics, most of my education conditioned me to a naturalistic ontology. I could not have the purposes I needed unless I changed the tone of this ontology. My deepest needs were so important that I demanded reliable knowledge, hoping to escape any dependence on my personal knowledge. I needed a guarantee of objectivity. I needed the right methods. I needed secure principles of rationality. I would not trust myself in such an important endeavor. I turned to philosophy in order to remove the personal and pretend an objective detachment. There was a hidden agenda under this. My deepest needs must be met and my fear of insignificance must be muted.

Questions of Purpose: In an indirect way, exploration of philosophical questions helped me to understand the core of my puzzlements. As I developed the courage to confront this directly, my puzzlement abated. I can now better describe my puzzlements, and I no longer have much use for my former questions. I can interpret instances of them as ordinary queries, but these queries are only remotely related to my puzzlements. Nevertheless these earlier instances once expressed my puzzlements, and reflection on them helped me pose useful queries. To better understand puzzlements, I examine question about the purpose of human existence in more detail. I shall refer to this question as Q.

Human Purpose: I learned the shorter catechism at age seven. The question and answer I most vividly recall was a variant of Q. What is the purpose of man? The purpose of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever. This seemed totally implausible. God must have had some more useful purpose in mind, but if God was omnipotent, how could I be needed for anything? While I did not believe the answer given and did not know the correct answer, I knew the kind of information I wanted. During my early teens I reflected on this from a more abstract perspective, formulating answers that seemed more satisfactory, and which for a while I was able to believe. However I was using a conceptual net that presupposed paraceptual beliefs about God. Altho the instances of Q used in childhood were clear enough to be queries, later instances were not. In a net independent of religious beliefs, my concept of the purpose of man became vague, altho it took me some time to realize this. My emotional stake in Q was too high. The discussion below about my current concepts of purpose and function show me why I find talk of the purpose of human existence vague.

My concept of purpose is implicitly a personal one, involving some person or group of persons and their current purposes. When I reflect on my actions, I notice a multitude of purposes. These can often be made coherent by relating them to purposes that are more fundamental. This gives some fairly clear and useful paraceptual queries related to Q. Which of my purposes are most important to me? What are some ways that I can use to resolve conflict between important ones? Can I find a single cluster of purposes that I treat as most important? In what ways are they important? Do all other persons have fundamental purposes similar to those that I find most important? This last query might even be taken as a way to clarify Q, but neither it nor any of the other queries I imagine about purposes meet the need underlying the instances of Q that used to plague me. I wanted a secure external grounding, rather than a better understanding of my purposes. When this need faded, I realized that these instances had been vague, and that they no longer seemed important. Perhaps some broader concept of purpose might give me useful instances of Q, but further reasoning suggests that this is not the case. None of the queries listed above are philosophical. There is one philosophical query that I would raise about purpose. How does my concept of purpose fit into my net for philosophy?

General Purposes: I often think of my purposes from both from my perspective and a perspective other than my own. I may think of my purpose as a teacher from the perspective of society as a whole, and contrast this with my own purposes as a teacher. While this is a fairly remote perspective, it is clear enough for me to see that my purposes may differ in radical ways from purposes that others may have for me. The perspective from which purpose is being considered is often not explicitly given. I also use this type of perspective to think about the purposes of other persons or any agent capable of intentional action.

Purpose and Function: In addition to thinking about some person P as having some purposes as an actor, we have a notion of the purpose of X, where X is an object, a process, etc. My concept of a purpose of X is relational, involving some person or set of persons S and a purpose that S currently has for X. Many products are designed with implicit assumptions about potential use. Saying that the purpose of a hammer is driving nails might sound as an attribute of hammers, but it implicitly assumes the perspective of most potential users.

I once had a hammer whose main purpose was to crack black walnuts. To focus on an attribute of the hammer, it might be clearer to say that a hammer is suitable for driving nails, an attribute also shared by the hammer I use with walnuts. When talking about the purpose of any deliberately designed X, it is often useful to think about the designer’s purpose for X and each of its component parts. We can ignore the existence of the designer and ask about the function these components serve from our perspective on how X functions.

The word ‘function’ rather than ‘purpose’ avoids certain connotations when thinking from a systems perspective, especially in the case of systems that may not have a designer. Instead of asking the purpose of a heart, I would ask what function does the heart serves. Likewise I could ask what functions persons have in the various systems. Such a question may sound similar to Q, but if this was the kind of information wanted I would use such language rather Q.

Why did instances of Q linger as unrecognized puzzlements, even after I lost the background necessary to make sense out of the kind of answer I wanted? As indicated earlier, the key was a deep desire for personal significance coupled with a sense of insignificance. For a long time I wanted a guarantee of personal immortality, but the answer I received as a child allowed me only a passive kind of immortality. Perhaps this was not the information being sent, but it failed to suggest the creative and dynamic role I wanted. The religious information I received as a child was remote from personal experience and emotionally burdensome, so it disintegrated. This heightened a dichotomy in my experience. My ontic perspective became more naturalistic, but I still experienced deep spiritual needs. My instances of questions like Q had ceased to be queries and had become expressions of vague puzzlement about a dichotomy in my experience.

Altho my spiritual knowledge is weak, I still choose to orient my purposes around spiritual goals. I still need to create, to transcend the narrow confines of my persona. I once wanted to use philosophy as a means of showing that such needs could be met. I was confronted by others who seemed to be using philosophy in order to prove that such needs were rooted in an immature inability to accept reality. I do not know the extent to which others have a spiritual need to reach out to infinity, but this is my own deepest need. I have never had an effective strategy for meeting this need or much confidence that I could evolve such a strategy. For me it was such knowledge about my self that changed my attitude toward philosophy.

As a child, I asked questions like Q because I needed to feel that I had some significant role to play. I hoped the answer would give me information that would meet this need. However even if humans were created with some definite purpose in mind, information about such a purpose would not be as crucial to this need I as once imagined. Assuming a naturalistic perspective, instances of Q seem vague. Perhaps I could ask instead what function do humans play in some ecological sense, or I could ask about purposes that seem to be common to most or all humans. There are a variety of fairly clear queries that can be formulated using instances of Q. Answers to many of these would provide information that I would find interesting and somewhat useful. However I have yet to imagine a query whose answer would help me meet my original need in a significant manner.

Similar remarks apply to other philosophical questions that once seemed so important. Speculation on questions that I feel float on a sea of vagueness may be an occasionally interesting pastime, but it no longer seems to relate to my original needs for philosophy. The task I now have for philosophy is not even intended to meet these needs. It is intended instead to help provide a fundamental subceptual net that helps me think about such needs. I find the task of creatively building integrated and significant purposes too important to be dominated by conceptual inquiry. This is a task of living effectively, and it must be supported by continually cultivating all my powers and characteristics. For this task, developing a coherent personal fundamental subceptual net is useful, but only as part of a much broader strategy.