by Algy Moncrieff

Created on: January 02, 2007   Last Updated: July 09, 2009

The purpose of life. A knotty problem if ever I saw one. Many people would argue that the purpose of life is something along the lines of religion, pleasing God or your respective deity so that you secure your place in the afterlife. Some people would argue that there is not purpose to life at all; the (existential) nihilists. What seems to me most likely to be the case however is that neither of these is true; nihilism may be correct in that there is no set purpose to life, but surely cannot be correct that there is no purpose at all to life. After all, every day we go about our business in a manner that projects a purpose onto life if nothing else.

As Jean Paul Sartre famously said; "existence precedes essence." By this he means that no general explanation can be given of the purpose of human existence. Humans make themselves who they are, in a way that objects such as rocks do not. A rock is a rock, there are many generalisations that can be made about rocks and their properties. But humans, beyond their physical appearance at least, cannot easily be compared or generalised, and it is this that allows us to make our own meaning for life.

It does not seem possible either to claim that religion must provide the purpose of life. I think it is perfectly reasonable that for some people, religious people, religion provides the purpose of life, but this is because they have made it so, not because it was already this way. I cannot see that we have any evidence of an afterlife until we get there, so worrying about it in this current world seems unnecessary to me. But then here is simply another example of how my thoughts and actions and upbringing have given my life its purpose, and as an atheist I am hardly likely to argue that religion has anything to do with it.

It seems to me that this is about as far as we can get with this problem. Without knowledge that is beyond our capabilities, we cannot say we know what the purpose of life is beyond what it is we are trying, personally, to achieve in life. In terms of scientific thought this seems to make sense; one could, I suppose, argue that for many people the purpose of life is to survive, and to reproduce. However, even this surely cannot be generalised, as many people do not feel the need to have to children. Again, their lives' purposes are simply what they have made them to be. Part of this will be the influences that have been acting upon them throughout their life, but this still does not allow us to generalise. Different people will respond differently to different influences; perhaps some hyper-intelligent, omniscient being could generalise something out of this, but if you were omniscient then it wouldn't be much help anyway. And us humans are certainly incapable of such a feat.

Maybe I am wrong though - certainly not all philosophers would agree with me, or even Sartre. But failing this of course the answer to life, the universe and everything is generally accepted as 42.

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