The other day @MarkD shared a different video with Iain McGilchrist over here. I finally got to finish watching this evening and
found his thoughts about purpose around 00:30:00 interesting enough to transcribe them.
According to McGilchrist
There are two kinds of purpose. There’s the kind that the left hemisphere understands, which is the purposing of a tool or a machine to fulfill your will. Once it has fulfilled your will, it’s job is done.
There’s another kind of purpose which belongs to all the things that we like and love. It belongs to games; it belongs to our relationships, to our experience of spirality and of art. They’re not purpose-less. From the point of view of the left hemisphere, you might as well not bother with them, because they have no purpose. However, they are supremely purposeful, because they contain within them something which calls to us and makes us move toward them and beyond. This is not in some designed way by an engineering god. That is a terrible idea that the left hemisphere has dreamt up. It deifies itself as the organizer and mechanic of everything. It says, “God is like that.” But what I understand by god is nothing like that. When I talk about purpose and talk about these values as being values in themselves, ends in themselves. I’m suggesting that we need to re-imagine what we mean by those values and by that purpose.
I like how he points out two different concepts of purpose, one extrinsic and one intrinsic. And I think those two different views show themselves in this discussion in various ways, particularly the first concept: that of a tool.
I think underneath many views of meaninglessness is the assumption that the meaning of our lives results from our being made or coming into being in order to fulfill a role, complete a job, carry out some assignment. The assumption is that without a specific reason for our existence, beyond existence itself, existence is meaningless, absurd (out of tune).
If I understand this idea correctly, does it mean, then, that our lives are meaningful only if they function as a tool to fulfill someone else’s purpose? If that is the case, is that what one would want to be the source of the meaning of one’s life? Certainly it might depend a great deal on who we imagine that someone is. But still…is that desirable? I don’t think this idea works even for Christians.
I think this segment from the long quote above is valuable:
When I talk about purpose and talk about these values as being values in themselves, ends in themselves.
It seems like it’s asking too much to see meaning in our lives in this way, accepting subjectivity as part of the package, being less invested in “ultimates.” In focusing so heavily on ultimates (and our inability to participate in or change them), we tend to miss the real value of our own lives and those of others. In missing it, we are poorer. Starving at a feast.
I’ll bring Sisyphus back, the poster-boy of nihilism. Aside from his mythical existence, he can’t fit the bill of the nihilist. Sisyphus’s meaningless existence was created for him with a purpose – punishment. Sisyphus’s existence is a paradox, particularly, if one sees meaning in life tied to an assigned purpose. I don’t think we need it.