Duration: 6:41

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“Does life require a purpose and a goal?” This question was posed by Uchiha in a partner series between him, me, and Awarbore. Every two weeks one of us will ask a question and answer said question in video format. The other two will be answering the question during the interim before the next question is asked.

Awarbore's Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkfjWnAWF78
Uchiha's Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewPQfklin2g

To answer this question first I would like to look into the nature of “life.” Life is existence. So, since Uchiha exists Uchiha has life, likewise for Awarbore. When I talk about life I am not referring to a particular life such as my own or Awarbore’s. I am speaking of the universal which all lives share in common.
This brings me to the next point on being. When I say life and refer to the universal which all lives share in I speak of the being of life. This means the complete totality of life and all its properties. For instance, squares, when I speak of squares I speak not of the square that I have drawn or the word simply but rather the essence, the being of square. It’s square-ness so to speak.
Next let’s define “purpose” and “goal.” I find the use of both words a tad redundant because the meaning of both words is essentially the same. However, goal has a lesser connotation than purpose. We can set goals, but purpose is more of a divinely determined thing like fate. However, when we speak of a purpose we are referring to the end for which something exists. For instance, hammers exist to hammer nails. We can use it for other purposes and goals but it has one intended purpose.
We have set out the terms, but the question I interpret as “Does life require purpose in order to be life?”
The question may be tricky to answer. This is a question on the being of life. Can life exist without purpose? An idea that came upon me during my investigation of this question: what if purpose does not exist. The word purpose has meaning because we can use it to designate the cause and effect of actions. Those actions exist however, the purpose does not.
To elaborate, we say something has purpose because it seems that hammers hammer nails and orange seeds grow into orange trees. But these causal chains are named purpose or ends because we think that these things necessarily have an end. Otherwise, what reason would there be for these things to exist?
In assuming that these things have a reason to exist then we can arrive at the conclusion life must necessarily have purpose since it and purpose participate in being. However, the other implication that purpose does not exist is a dreadful one. The question “why am I here?” is then met with silence as being has no account for the purpose of you or anything else in its purview. That can be a terrifying idea.
What really drove this home for me was thinking about mathematics. The wondrous thing about math is that it doesn’t require us to be. The being of a square is no less or more by our existence. We are simply discovering these properties rather than making up new forms. But for what reason does math exist? Divorced from physics and humanity I couldn’t find an answer as to why math exists. There really seems no purpose for the being of these abstractions.
Now, if purpose has being and thus all things that exist participate in being then mathematical objects must exist for some reason. They must have a purpose. But there is no end of mathematical objects. The square does not become something else through nature of its square-ness. It remains a square.
One could argue that because being is complete and the being of a square is complete then it always achieves its end so its purpose is always being fulfilled. If we look at it from a reason to be perspective then one could just say that the square’s reason to be is to simply exist. That it exists out of necessity but then that would be tautological and it would simply say of purpose that it is redundant.
Thus, I can say with some force that life has no purpose. It does not require it because it simply does not have it. The purpose that we think of is just a meaning we attach to the causal chains of events. While the word has meaning it has no being. Life has no purpose seems to be a daunting thing it is actually quiet liberating. It allows us to ascribe a purpose to our own lives and set out to achieve those. Though, this would also open the doors for anyone to say their purpose is to kill all humans, or even worse become a furry. We would just have to accept this without any objection.