Meaning, Purpose, & Belonging
By: Kjell Fostervold
When my students are introduced to thinking about the meaning of life for the first time, the first word out of their mouths is ‘purpose’. However, philosophers have mostly neglected purpose: almost without exception they have assumed that any role for purpose must be connected with God, the divine, cosmic plans, and so on.
This seems to me an important oversight, given that (1) non-philosophers immediately advert to purpose when discussing meaning & (2) the notion of purpose plays an important role in the empirical psychological literature on meaning. Therefore, it seems to me that we ought to take seriously the role that purpose might play even in secular accounts of meaning in life. But just what role might it play? What is purpose?
For something to have a purpose is, on one way of thinking, for that thing to be for something. Not for something in the sense that people might be ‘for’ the Hoosiers and ‘against’ the Buckeyes, but that the thing has something it is aiming at. Knives are for cutting, cars are for transportation, hammers are for hammering nails. But the human race or sentient life? These things don’t appear to be for anything at all, really—hence the rejection of purpose having a role in secular accounts of meaning.
But not so fast. Aren’t teachers for teaching? Veterinarians for taking medical care of our beloved pets? In some sense, we do have purposes tied to what we do. Teachers are, in some sense, aiming at the goal of educating students well—that’s what they are for. Veterinarians, like all health care professionals, aim at the goal of maintaining & repairing bodies when they become damaged or break down—that’s what they are for. This may not be an intrinsic purpose—it is a result of, to some extent at least, our choices, preferences, decisions—but it is nonetheless a purpose. Such things are often cited as playing an important role in meaningful living. No doubt most people reading this take their work to be an important source of meaning in their lives.
But we might be for many things in this sense. At one point in my life, I was for selling electronics at Walmart, tools at Habor Freight, and unloading trucks of consumer goods at Circuit City. Most of this was only very occasionally meaningful. So from which purposes does meaning arise? I claim that it is those purposes connected to what Korsgaard calls “practical identities” which generate meaning. Practical identities are “description[s] under which you value yourself” or “find your life to be worth living and your actions to be worth undertaking” (Korsgaard, Sources of Normativity, 101). Korsgaard herself offers “a member of a certain profession” (ibid.) as an example. Of course, we can be a veterinarian or a teacher, and struggle to find what we are for to be worthwhile: burnout, moral injury, mismatches between one’s personality or self and the career one chose—such things are fairly commonplace. We think we want to be something, but once confronted with the reality, we recoil in horror. Things often go wrong for us. We might also just have a profession that is not a source of meaning for us, and not find this distressing in the slightest (my job during undergrad at Walmart was quite often distressing, but not for this reason). In many cases, though, such practical identities are of central importance to living a meaningful life.
So, an important aspect of meaning is plausibly connected to purpose, and we can understand the notion of purpose in terms of practical identities & what we do under the guise of those practical identities. These social roles are what we are for, what goals we aim at & also what sorts of values are involved. But talk of social roles only really makes sense in the context of a social world. This brings me to another oft-invoked concept related to meaning, that of belonging. People often want to be part of something ‘bigger than they are’. Sometimes this also involves ‘giving back’ or ‘contributing to society’ or similar things. This all sounds fairly innocuous so far. Let us try to get somewhat more precise. What does it mean to belong? And what connection does belonging have to social roles & purpose?
Let’s think about belonging to a tradition. Take philosophy. At the very beginning of graduate school, I remember Kirk Ludwig welcoming my cohort and I to one of the oldest intellectual traditions (or something like that). What did Kirk mean? He might have meant: ‘welcome to philosophy, you are now part of this great tradition, you belong here’. Sam Scheffler has noted that belonging to a tradition involves various temporal orientations. Looking back, we see ourselves as “inheriting values that have been preserved by others. One is heir to, and custodian of, values that have been handed down by those who went before” (Scheffler, Equality & Tradition, 305). Looking forward, we seek to “hand down these values from generation to generation…to preserve what is valued” (ibid.). Something similar can easily work elsewhere: the religious inherit, preserve, and transmit their distinctive values & practices. Astronomers can see themselves as part a tradition of inquiry stretching back through Galileo and Ptolemy. Likewise for other kinds of organizations, too: the ACLU, for instance.
So it seems to me that when one belongs to a tradition, this is in part a social role. What it means to belong to a tradition is to have a purpose: inheriting, preserving, and transmitting values, practices, and other things held dear to us. But this purpose only makes sense in the context of belonging. So here is a way in which purpose & belonging are shown to be intimately connected: some of our practical identities are identities which place us as members of intellectual or religious traditions, or of other sorts of organizations, as members of a certain country or family. And these identities, these belongings, come with purposes.
Does this work with all kinds of organizations & practical identities? Well, perhaps not. On the other hand, it would seem to me that veterinarians, to the extent that they actually enact their purpose, pursue the aim of helping sick, injured animals, typically belong somewhere—to a particular veterinary practice, to a zoo, to a wildlife rehabilitation center. While the connection between purpose & belonging seems to me strongest in the case of traditions, it seems to me that we can, if we are careful, extend that way of thinking to cover many other sorts of cases. If meaning is about purpose, then it will also have to be about belonging, and vice versa.
The College of Arts