One of the greatest obstacles to concepts of purpose in the modern world is the challenge of determinism. It’s increasingly common today to see human beings as basically material things: we’re a large composition of In this view, we aren’t meaningfully responsible for anything in our lives—it’s all just beyond our control.
If we take responsibility seriously as a part of purpose, then it’s clear that this is an obstacle. Suddenly, there’s no way to consider yourself really in control of your actions or responsible for what you do—everything is out of your control. What would purpose even mean in this case?
Having a worldview like this also influences how you view happiness. Many believers of materialism take a view of human happiness that we might call mechanistic. This essentially means that happiness is simply a predetermined reaction your body has to certain events, in the same way that a computer might respond to certain inputs. You feel happy after you eat because your body knows you won’t starve, or you feel happy when you’re around your friends because your body feels that community makes you safer.
Many people who support this view argue that happiness, then, is as simple as a series of chemicals in the brain. Happiness is just a particular feeling you get, no different from hunger or thirst.
This is a very common understanding of humans today. In a materialist understanding, it seems to be the most logical way to see humanity: if humans are the same as anything material, then everything about humans should be explainable by the same laws that cause any natural phenomena.
Naturally, this seems to throw all sorts of problems into questions about purpose, happiness, and ethics. What does it even mean to be a good person if you don’t have any choice about what sort of actions you do? And what does purpose mean if there’s no freedom and nothing meaningful beyond the basic material facts of existence?
So, this leaves us in a very difficult position: From a materialist viewpoint, there’s not a clear way to say what a good person is, what a good life is, or even what the right thing to do is. Everything seems to be subjective. There’s nothing more than personal choice.
How could we begin to describe a “good” person or a “good” life within this framework? Is there any objective way to answer this? One of the most troubling problems of modern psychology, a problem that has puzzled philosophers and psychologists for decades, is the question of how to establish any sort of standards for the human mind or the human person. If we don’t have any objective idea of what a human should be like, then how can we measure what makes a person good or bad?
Many postmodern philosophers took this problem to be absolutely central to understanding the world. There is no rational way to identify “normal” human nature—it’s simply an arbitrary choice made by society as a whole. These philosophers argued that identifying a concept of a “normal” human is not just impossible but further a dangerous path to oppression and inequality.
And within the context of modern science, it’s very hard (and perhaps impossible) to prove these thinkers wrong. It’s not clear that there is any way to identify what “normal” means for a human without falling back on arbitrary choices. Science can say that there are some things that are typically true of humans or that a human will tend to develop in a certain way, but there’s no way to say that humans are made to have two arms or functioning eyes, or that we are made to live in community.
Any objective judgment needs an objective measurement. If this materialist analysis doesn’t allow for either objective assessment or important things like human freedom, then what’s our path? What could lead to real fulfillment?
From this materialist perspective, it seems like human “purpose” is just animal purpose, simple survival and nothing else. We’ve spoken about this before, and it’s clear that for a human, simple survival is not enough for happiness.
Some might argue that maybe we should just ignore this urge for purpose and fulfillment. This materialist understanding seems to show that it’s impossible to have this sort of immaterial understanding of fulfillment. If that’s the case, shouldn’t we just dismiss this as an illusion? Why can’t we just say that purpose and fulfillment are fictions?
To do this would mean making a grave error: We’d be ignoring evidence that doesn’t fit a hypothesis. Although it’s true that purpose and fulfillment might not fit the strict worldview of materialism, we can also see from experience that these are real things that have a tangible impact on our lives. We cannot avoid the fact that these concepts do have an impact on us.
Although we might be tempted to stick with a widely accepted worldview, it’s a mistake to simply ignore evidence that goes against this view. Materialism may seem logical in light of many scientific discoveries, but it’s clear that a purely materialist worldview contradicts these everyday experiences.
If these concepts of pure materialism and the mechanistic view of humans contradict experience, it seems that they need to be corrected in some way. This is not to say that we have to abandon a scientific viewpoint. To the contrary, it’s a better use of science to approach it in this way. Allowing a hypothesis to be proven wrong is absolutely essential to keeping science at its best.
What leads these views to fall short? More than anything, it’s the fact that they only look at the past. They argue that humans simply live in response to what’s come before: we’re simply responding to a long series of events that built up to this moment.
But this isn’t the case. We are naturally oriented towards the future. Our actions aren’t determined by what’s already happened, but rather by where we’re going. In every moment, we’re motivated by the future that we want to achieve. We are purpose-oriented by nature: we are building to something.
For many thinkers, this was a sort of biological fact. Every living thing lives oriented towards the future, not determined by the past. What’s important for determining what we do isn’t what’s already happened to us but what we choose to pursue. This is something that we can decide through reason, not a choice that’s already made for us.
This is the foundation of purposeful living: understanding that we are always acting with a future in mind. True freedom comes when we stop making choices in response to things and start making choices in pursuit of something.