Purpose in Life

Fran Porretto recently wrote about purpose and purposelessness:

Recent decades have seen a development in fiction, both written and visual, that I'd never have been able to predict from what preceded it: the embrace of purposelessness, with a hearty side dish of incoherence.

Let me clarify that a bit: Major figures in the entertainment world are presenting us with "heroes" and "protagonists" who, consciously or otherwise, disavow all purpose in life. The depictions of their lives emphasize their immersion in disconnected sensations and their constant struggle to evade the logical conclusion of their rejection of purpose: suicide.

It's a thought-provoking essay, and it provoked me to wonder: Can our hunger to have a purpose--to be meaningful--be explained in strictly materialistic terms?

Everyone wants to matter, to have a reason for being, to live a meaningful life, to have a purpose. (Google those terms and you'll see how universal--and how urgent--that need is.)

People who don't have purpose or meaning in their lives become depressed; and, yes, the converse is also true: people who become depressed feel as if they don't have purpose or meaning. In either case, meaninglessness--randomness--is considered to be a bad thing.

Why is that? Why shouldn't we be perfectly happy as long as our basic physical needs are met, as long as we have physical pleasures? Why should humans be different from cats?

Why is E.A. Robinson's Richard Cory an incisive statement about humanity?

Yes, Fran is right. We're getting big doses of nihilism these days. The big thing in postmodern literature is tales cut off mid-story, open-ended, meaningless slices of life (not to be confused with a well-wrought vignette, a slice of life that captures in miniature the overarching meaning or meaningfulness of life.) But good stories aren't in any danger of becoming obsolete. Meaninglessness may win critical acclaim, but it will never find a permanent place in the hearts of story lovers, not like the enduring tales complete with beginning, middle, and satisfying end.

We crave meaning. We love stories, both fictional and non-fictional. We constantly make our own stories, narratives that make sense of our days and of our lives. And if those stories fail to cohere, our souls ache.

But why? Why should atoms bumping around randomly yearn for pattern, for meaning?

The materialists say:

Given our tendency to look for agents and intentions in ordinary life, to figure out who’s doing what and what things are for, it’s natural that we might seek to assign a purpose or intent behind all of creation, and this we do by supposing, literally, that it has been created....

This doesn't explain why we crave meaning; it just admits that we do. On the ground of materialism, we have an inexplicable yearning that cannot ever be satisfied:

Since naturalism rules out the existence of entities, like God, that are causally privileged, it also rules out the possibility that the universe could be the intentional creation of a being or agency that stands outside it in some respect. This means that under naturalism the universe can’t be construed as having an ultimate purpose or goal attached to it – it exists, strangely enough, for no reason....

Without a supernatural creator conveniently by to justify his handiwork, there is literally no reason for the universe to have the characteristics it does, or for anything to exist at all. For better or for worse, naturalism inevitably frustrates our ambition to make ultimate sense of things....

Why do we crave meaning? The best the materialists can manage is to gesture vaguely toward natural selection, the privileging of those ancestors who were better at pattern recognition. From a distant primate a tad better at recognizing the clue of a broken branch in his pursuit of game we have somehow come to a modern man who will blow his brains out for lack of meaning, or who in his search for meaning will create a Hamlet, a Mona Lisa, a Crime and Punishment.

Materialism simply lacks the resources to explain this most glorious of urges; the explanation lies elsewhere.

We crave meaning because we were created to search out and find both meaning and the Maker of meaning.

--JW and AW