Sense Of Meaning And Purpose example essay topic

... ty of the soul, rather than as amusement or a permanent state, a possibility which he rejects since, 'if it were it might belong even to a man who slept all through his life, passing a vegetable existence; or to a victim of the greatest misfortunes. ' [Hanfling: P. 206]. What Aristotle meant when he defined happiness in this way has to do with his belief that human beings have a function to fulfil in their lives which has to do with their proper use of the rational principle, a quality unique to mankind and not possessed by either plants or animals. He goes on to argue that when human beings function in such a way as to do excellently whatever tasks fall to them, such as playing the harp, for example, then it may be said that they are demonstrating an activity of soul in accordance with the rational principle and so in accordance also with virtue.

As a result, they may be said to be leading good lives from which happiness will grow. The view that the purpose or meaning of life may or may not have to do with the achievement of happiness and the problem of how such happiness may be defined have been and remain philosophical staples. At one point in his Gorgias, for example, Plato has Socrates and Callicles develop an argument in which the issue is to decide whether or not 'a man who itches and wants to scratch and whose opportunities for scratching are unbounded' can be said to lead a happy life spent continually scratching. In the same passage [Hamilton: pp. 90-96], Socrates relates his analogy to the life of a catamite and confronts Callicles with the need to consider whether or not feeling enjoyment, of whatever kind, may be said to be the same as being happy.

Is there not, he insists, a distinction between pleasures which are good and those which are bad:' Tell me once more; do you declare that pleasure is identical with good, or are there some pleasures which are not good?' In his Utilitarianism, John Stuart Mill returns to this argument. He wishes to define his Principle of Utility, or Greatest Happiness Principle, which he regards as the foundation of morals, and, in the course of this passage [Ch. 2, P. 6 ff], he asserts, that 'actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure. ' He goes on to argue that, in differentiating between the qualities of both 'high' and 'low' pleasures:' if there be one to which all or almost all who have experience of both give a decided preference, irrespective of any feeling of moral obligation to prefer it, that is the more desirable pleasure.

If one of the two is, by those who are competently acquainted with both, placed so far above the other that they prefer it, even though knowing it to be attended with a greater amount of discontent, and would not resign it for any quantity of the other pleasure which their nature is capable of, we are justified in ascribing to the preferred enjoyment a superiority in quality, so far outweighing quantity as to render it, in comparison, of small account. ' Clearly, Mill finds the problem as intractable as did Callicles and, in addition, seems less than aware of the difficulties inherent in depending upon the judgements of individuals 'competently acquainted' with 'low' pleasures and in the elitist assumptions that underpin his argument concerning the relationship between 'better / worse than' and 'different from'. The essential nature of a living creature, then, that which provides the means by which it achieves survival, reproduction and the creation of its own social formation or culture, may be defined in a number of ways. It may be perceived, on the one hand, purely in terms of biological structure and function in relation to physical environment, or, particularly in the case of human beings, it may be regarded as having to do with much more complex metaphysical presuppositions as to our significance in the universe, our feelings as to the existence of God, a god or gods and our sense that some part of our natures transcends death and is immortal. What, precisely, this may mean marks the point at which knowledge must be set aside in favour of what Kierkegaard called 'the leap of faith'. The search for knowledge and the development of the rational faculty also form part of man's perception of his purpose in living, as do the desire to be happy, to experience pleasure and to achieve fulfilment in those ways deemed valuable within particular social groups or cultures.

New-born children are not, of course, born into an uninhabited desert, but into societies and into a world already fully defined by the dominant values of each particular age and by the behaviour of the physical environment against which life has always to be lived. Given this, such questions as 'How should I live my life?', 'What is my station and what are my duties?' [My question deliberately echoes F.H. Bradley's, 'My Station and Its Duties' in his Ethical Studies], 'What purpose is served by living life as others before me have lived it if, finally, I must die?' are likely already to have been answered by the framework of law, morality and convention embodied in the principle institutions of whichever communities individuals happen to be born into and to which they will be expected, very largely, to conform. If, as would seem to be the case, it is a universal truth that all human beings are born into some particular position in the world and that they very quickly learn the limits of the freedoms available to them to question this there clearly exist difficult issues to be addressed concerning the meaningfulness and purposiveness of life. The sense of meaning and purpose is surely never stronger than when an individual chooses freely and autonomously to act in specific ways. When this is not possible or not permitted, life is lived insincerely and under duress, in ways calculated to give rise to the sense that it is without worth or meaning.

To be forced to be what they are not, to live constantly in a condition of bad faith, is, inevitably, to force individuals ever further from the realisation of who they are and what they perceive the purpose or meaning of their lives to be. As Jean-Paul Sartre puts it in Being and Nothingness [Hanfling: P. 226], an individual will be forced to be 'in the neutralized mode, as the actor is Hamlet, by mechanically making the typical gestures of my state and by aiming at myself... through those gestures taken as an 'analogue' '. One of the features characteristic of human nature is the felt need to live life seriously in regard to the choices that are made and the positions that are adopted, even though it may be perfectly apparent that other points of view and other choices might, logically, be equally acceptable. This quality of mind and general predisposition are not evident in other creatures. As Thomas Nagel makes clear in his essay 'The Absurd' [Journal of Philosophy, 68 (20), 1971: Hanfling: P. 48-59], this inability to live with a diminished sense of the seriousness of life may be the fundamental reason for the sense that both Nagel and many others have that life is, in fact, absurd. He argues that the life of a mouse, for example, is not absurd because 'he lacks the... self-consciousness and self-transcendence that would enable him to see that he is only a mouse.

' This is very far removed from the more usual position that the lives of animals serve only as examples of meaningless existence. In the course of his argument, Nagel develops the view that the human quest for meaning and a sense of purpose in life is derived from the fact that we are preoccupied with such issues as the brevity of the human life-span, our minuteness within the universe as a whole, the inevitability of the eventual disappearance of all of mankind, our sense that life is, if possible, something to be escaped. Rather than attempt heroically to deny the truth of these perceptions and fight against the sense of our own absurdity with which they fill us, Nagel asserts, we would do well to accept what cannot be escaped and, in so doing, demonstrate our ability not only to understand our human limitations, but also to appreciate their unimportance in our situation:' If sub specie aeternitatis there is no reason to believe that anything matters, then that doesn't matter either, and we can approach our absurd lives with irony instead of heroism or despair. '

Bibliography

Brian, Denis Einstein: A Life John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1996 Hanfling, Oswald (ed.
Life and Meaning: A Reader Blackwell F, Open University, 1987 Mill, John Stuart Utilitarianism Dent Dutton (Everyman), 1962 Plato Gorgias trans.
Hamilton, W., Penguin, 1960 Russell, Bertrand History of Western Philosophy Allen and Unwin, 1962 Works consulted following initial assessment of essay: Murdoch, Iris The Sovereignty of Good Routledge, 1991 Nagel, Thomas The Possibility of Altruism Princeton Paperback, 1978.