Purpose is your reason for living. It can be thought of as the ultimate goal toward which you strive. It might be the most fundamental and beautiful concept that defines us as human beings.
In a nutshell, mine's to help mankind get the fvck off the planet.
Allow me to explain.
Philosophically, I'm a teleologist--I believe that there is a higher purpose in life.
While I was raised Catholic, I'm no longer "religious," and I don't like the implications of saying I'm "spiritual." My beliefs regarding what most people would describe as "spirituality" are largely beyond the scope of this discussion.
However, I do believe that we humans have a higher purpose, and if you take God and punishment and reward out of the equation, you must find some secular purpose for which to strive.
For me, that purpose is getting off the planet. Different people tend to define this in different ways, ranging from literally getting in a spaceship and leaving (something I've often wished I could do, believe me) to evolving to a higher plane of "spiritual consciousness." I'm actually cool with aspects of the entire spectrum.
But since I want my philosophy (and my purpose) to at least be accessible to the broadest range of spiritual tastes, let's just assume that we can't rely on anything remotely concerned with spirituality. This means we must focus on an intellectual purpose.
The most obvious--and accessible, and in a sense non-controversial--form of an intellectual approach to getting off the planet boils down to some kind of transportational approach.
When you broaden the concept to the idea of transporting our descendents to some other world, you can argue about the mode of transportation--perhaps a sci-fi-inspired spaceship, perhaps an army of sentient post-human machines ala Frank Tipler's Omega Theory, perhaps some kind of consciousness migration, or perhaps some combination of these.
Whatever the mechanism, if our purpose is to facilitate the exodus of some future human-descended species, I think that gives us sufficient guidance for living our lives as 21st century human beings.
First, it means we must survive long enough to send the future travelers--whatever they might look like, and however they might travel--off. This implies that we must live ethically. My ethics are fundamentally Objectivist, because Objectivism is the most purely rational philosophy I've encountered, and rationality is the human trait that has been primary in getting us to where we are as a species. This has enormous implications in areas like politics, education, foreign policy, business, and of course, interpersonal relationships. Unfortunately I don't have the time to do these implications justice here.
Second, it means we must intellectually evolve. The most obvious (and naive) interpretation of this idea is that we must evolve technologically (the naive view being that we gotta eventually build that spaceship). Science and technology have to date certainly been foundational in our intellectual evolution, and they will likely continue to be. However, without the inspiration all of us take from the arts, I argue that we could never have achieved so much in the sciences. And of course the two are hopelessly intertwined, in everything from the visual work of artists like Escher to the artistic dissemination of scientific knowledge achieved by people like Carl Sagan, James Burke, or Arthur C. Clarke.
We--living in this current epoch of intellectual evolution--cannot know the final form of this goal of getting off the planet; as I said, it may be a spaceship or it may be some kind of intergalactic mind-meld. But whatever the final form, we must intellectually strive for it, and doing so is my purpose.
Copyright © 2004 Vince Cavasin. All rights reserved.