Affolter's defence of purpose theory

The purpose necessary for meaning in life, according to Affolter, has two salient characteristics. First, it is an end that has what Affolter calls ‘absoluteness’, meaning that it is constitutive of our nature such that failure to comprehend it implies a failure to grasp what we essentially are. Drawing on largely premodern, teleological views of ontology and of explanation, Affolter claims that if realizing a purpose is to make our lives significant, it must be a final cause that is inherent to us. What we are just is (at least in part) to be such that we ought to realize a certain state of affairs. It follows from this kind of ontology that an acceptable understanding of what we are must refer to this prescribed state of affairs. Now, when we are asking whether our lives are meaningful, we are often asking whether it has a point and whether it makes sense. Affolter captures these intuitions well by suggesting that meaning in life comes from realizing a purpose that renders intelligible the essential nature of our existence.

In addition to absoluteness, Affolter suggests that the purpose necessary for meaning in life also has ‘specificity’. By the latter Affolter means that the purpose is unique to a given individual. What makes one's life meaningful cannot come from realizing an end that applies to all human beings, but rather from realizing a purpose that defines one in contrast to everyone else. Perhaps Affolter believes that only a specific purpose would be special enough to accord with the dignity of being an individual.

Supposing that the kind of purpose the realization of which constitutes meaning has both absoluteness and specificity, Affolter maintains that it could come from an atemporal God and offers prima facie considerations for thinking it could come only from such a God. First off, nature apparently cannot ground specific purposes. Although, arguably, there could be natural ends for species that are absolute, such that a caterpillar just is the sort of thing that ought to achieve the end of becoming a butterfly, we are much less familiar with the idea of natural ends for each member of a species. Natural ends seem unable to provide an answer to the question of what makes my particular life meaningful. Secondly, although human beings are able to provide specific purposes, they are unable to ground absolute ones. The ends adopted or prescribed by human beings are too contingent and limited to a particular standpoint to be able to constitute the essence of a human being. For instance, parents might assign a purpose to their child, but that purpose is hardly one that makes the child who she essentially is.

If neither nature nor humans can ground a purpose that is both absolute and specific, then what else could beside God, whose viewpoint is alone independent and unconstrained? And while Affolter grants that an atemporal God might not be able to have such a purpose, he maintains that a God who is beyond time could assign one. Affolter claims that the purpose would not be in God's mind so much as in the created object, thereby avoiding concerns about God's mental acts taking time. Affolter sums up his view this way: ‘The idea is that God designs a person in such a way that the need to fulfil some purpose is built into the person's very nature, such that his life makes no sense apart from that goal.’Footnote ³

Affolter's construal of purpose theory is ingenious and usefully draws on the Aristotelian tradition from which the philosophical version of the view originally sprang. In the following, I reply first by bringing out some counter-intuitive implications of Affolter's conception of the relevant purpose as both absolute and specific. Then I argue that, even granting this conception of purpose, an atemporal God could not ground it and a purely physical, temporal world could.

The purpose that constitutes meaning

Although I am not sympathetic to a teleological approach to ontology, explanation, or even meaning, I will suppose, with Affolter, that fulfilling a purpose is necessary for meaning and that the purpose must be a final cause constitutive of human nature. While I am (for reasons of space) willing to grant Affolter these claims, I want to question whether a meaningful purpose must be specific (a claim he tentatively puts forth to provide some reason to think that only an atemporal God – and not nature – could ground the relevant purpose). Traditional and sensible understandings of purpose theory conflict with the claim that, for a purpose to confer meaning on life, it must be unique to a given individual. First, in terms of tradition, standard conceptions of purpose theory envision God ascribing the same purpose to all human beings. For example, many Christians think of it as loving God and one's neighbour, while most Muslims think of it as upholding the five pillars of faith, prayer, charity, pilgrimage, and fasting.

Second, and more deeply, there is good reason to think that the sort of purpose that confers meaning on a person's life would not be unique to that person. What the monotheistic traditions have in common is the view that at least one of God's central purposes for human beings would be to live a moral life. Intuitively from a religious point of view, a purpose could confer meaning on a life if and only if it were ethically sound. Assuming that Affolter does not wish to embrace relativism about moral norms, and more plausibly holds that they are universal in scope, then he cannot easily hold the notion that a purpose confers meaning only if it varies from person to person. Indeed, it is precisely because morality is an invariant end among human beings that religious thinkers have been inclined to find it – and hence God – relevant to meaning in life.Footnote ⁴

Affolter might respond that morality would be a universal constraint and not a goal. Perhaps God's purpose would be for each person ‘to do his own thing’ without violating the same set of moral norms. However, morality as it bears on meaning is not exhausted by observing deontological restrictions. Surely from the standpoint of purpose theory, the stereotypical Mother Teresa has a meaningful life in virtue of her moral behaviour, where this behaviour is much more than a matter of taking care not to coerce, deceive, exploit, or the like. Helping others whom one has assumed no prior obligation to help is the quintessential way to make anyone's existence significant to some degree. This is true for both the religious and the secular, and it is a view that I do not think the friend of purpose theory can reasonably question.

Another response from Affolter, then, might be to grant that realizing a universal moral end would confer some meaning on life, but to claim that it would not exhaust it. Perhaps there are non-moral ends that an individual must also realize in order fully to find meaning in her life. However, it seems as though a life devoted solely to universal moral norms would be meaningful, again in light of a stereotypical Mother Teresa.

So, as a last possible response, Affolter might grant that we all share a same, basic end of living morally, but that, to obtain meaning, we must all do it in our own way. This view is reasonable, but it is unclear what reason there is to favour it over the more generic idea that everyone's life would be pro tanto meaningful if she helped others. Sartre might deem his dignity to be compromised by the fact of invariant norms prescribing mutual aid,Footnote ⁵ but few supernaturalists about meaning do.

If Affolter is to defend the claim that only God can ground meaning, then he cannot easily let go of the claim that specificity is a necessary feature of the kind of purpose that would confer meaning on life; for it is plausible to think that nature could ground an absolute purpose in the way that Aristotle and neo-Aristotelians such as Philippa Foot have articulated (see the caterpillar example above). Affolter must work to reconcile the firm intuition that the end of a moral life is a source of meaning for everyone with his claim that the purposes that confer meaning are specific to individuals.

Purpose and a God without extension

In this section I set aside my criticism of Affolter's conception of the purpose relevant to meaning in life, and instead suppose that it is true. I here argue that, even granting this conception, a God who is atemporal, immutable, and simple could not ground it.

Affolter's claim, recall, is that although a God without extension might not be able to have absolute and specific purposes for human beings, He could assign one to each of us. ‘[P]urpose₁ belongs in a strong sense to the object as much or more than to the person who confers it. In other words, what people think that God alone can assign is not something that is a purpose for Him that we adopt.’Footnote ⁶ Now, even if there is a distinction to be drawn between what is in God's mind, on the one hand, and what God has put into His creation, on the other, I submit that God could put into creation only what was first in His mind. If assigning a purpose to human beings requires the prior condition of God having had it in mind, and if, as Affolter is inclined to suppose, it is correct that having a purpose is impossible for a God without extension, then the distinction between having and assigning does not help to resolve the tension between grounding purpose and lacking extension.

Recall key instances of this tension. It is hard to conceive of a being who creates a physical universe in accordance with an end without the creation being an event with a certain temporal duration. It is difficult to imagine an unchangeable God beyond time and without parts who has multiple purposes, one for each individual person (and still other purposes for the animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms). I am not sure whether these are tensions within God's ‘having’ purposes or ‘assigning’ them; but that does not matter, since, however these are plausibly understood, assigning presupposes having.

Purpose and a physical world

I now make a third and final reply to Affolter's defence of the purpose theory. For the sake of argument, I grant his conception of purpose as specific and absolute and his claim that an atemporal, immutable and simple God could assign such a purpose. What I dispute at this point is Affolter's provisional claim that only God could ground this kind of purpose. Such a purpose and its fulfilment seem possible in a world lacking any spiritual beings.

Remember that a specific and absolute purpose, for Affolter, is one that is unique to a given individual and is such that we must understand her by reference to it. A certain person is who she is, i.e. is distinct from other persons, at least partially by virtue of the fact that she ought to realize a certain end that suits her. Affolter's key example is a person with a deep drive to play the piano who has been prevented from doing so and who may even be imagined to have done more valuable things as a result. The example suggests that the purpose relevant to meaning is not merely that of promoting intrinsic value. The purpose must resonate with an individual or make sense of who she is by appealing to what she is meant to be.

Supposing for the sake of argument this sort of purpose alone can confer meaning on an individual's life, I do not think that it must spring from a supernatural agent of any sort. Consider, briefly, the following objective naturalist account of meaning in life: a person's existence is more significant, the more she exhibits pro-attitudes toward intrinsic value beyond her animal self (without violating certain moral constraints).Footnote ⁷ The animal self is constituted by being alive, satisfying desires, perceiving objects, and experiencing pleasures. These conditions may well be good in themselves, but one intuitively acquires no meaning when they are realized within one's life. Instead, what makes life meaningful are final goods beyond one's animal self, e.g. coherent artworks, fundamental knowledge, supererogatory deeds, complex skills, and other persons, when and only when one contours one's attitudes toward them, very roughly, by creating, developing or sustaining them.

One has attitudes such as conation, cognition, intention, volition, motivation, emotion, and affection, and the present theory is the view that the more these are positively oriented toward final goods beyond one's animal self, the more meaningful one's life. So, meaning varies to the degree that one desires these intrinsic values, believes them to be valuable, intends to support them, acts in ways likely to support them, does so for their own sake, takes pride in helping them to flourish, and is pleased when they do. Such a theory is naturalist for saying that meaning is constituted by physical properties alone, and it is objective for including the view that there is a mind-independent fact of the matter about which physical properties are intrinsically valuable.Footnote ⁸

I hope this terse overview is sufficient to indicate the way one might reasonably accommodate Affolter's suggestion about which kind of purpose confers meaning on life but without appeal to God. An individual's purpose would be constituted by those intrinsic values beyond her animal nature with which she can maximally engage, i.e. those that fit particularly well with the pro-attitudes that she can muster in light of her constitution. This theory captures Affolter's frustrated-pianist case well. Although we imagine the individual promoted more intrinsic value than he would have had he been a pianist, only one of his capacities (namely, volition) was positively oriented toward this value. Had he been a pianist, in contrast, then he would have promoted less intrinsic value but would have found more meaning since more of his capacities (e.g. conation, emotion, and affection) would have been contoured toward the chosen value.Footnote ⁹ The reason this individual did not have much meaning in his life is arguably not that he failed to do what God created him to do, but that he failed to engage with final goods beyond his non-rational nature toward which his capacities would have been most attuned. Such a physicalist view enables one to say of this individual that he is who he is (partially) in virtue of the fact that he ought to realize the end of being a pianist.