Purpose
Purpose is one of the three cardinal values of the Objectivist ethics, alongside reason and self-esteem. It names a person's chosen central goal — the productive aim around which a whole life is organised — and the virtue by which it is gained and kept is productiveness.
“Purpose, as his choice of the happiness which that tool must proceed to achieve.”
~ Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
Why a life needs a central purpose
Values do not come singly. A person pursues many at once — work, relationships, knowledge, recreation — and they compete for the same finite time and attention. Something has to determine which gets what.
Objectivism's answer is that the resolution comes from a central productive purpose:
- It supplies the hierarchy. Without one, choices are made by whichever pressure is loudest at the moment, and a life becomes a sequence of unrelated episodes rather than a course of action. See Hierarchy.
- It makes long-range action possible. Man's mode of survival is conceptual, which means acting now for results that will not arrive for years. A purpose is what makes that intelligible to the person doing it; the alternative Rand called range-of-the-moment living.
- It is what integrates the other values. Rest, friendship and pleasure are not opposed to a purpose. They are what it makes possible and what makes sustaining it possible.
Rand held that the central purpose should be productive work, on the grounds that this is the field in which a person exercises his own capacities on reality rather than depending on anyone else's response. Other values, including love, are then pursued in a life that already has a shape.
Purposefulness as a policy
The value has a corresponding way of acting, which Rand described as purposefulness: knowing at each stage what one is doing and why.
- Goals are chosen, held explicitly, and checked against reality rather than drifted into.
- Actions are judged by whether they advance the goals, which requires being able to say what the goals are.
- The chain from the immediate task to the ultimate value is kept intact, so that daily work does not become ritual detached from its point. See Rationality.
Purposelessness is the corresponding vice, and Objectivism regards it as destructive rather than merely wasteful: a consciousness with nothing to direct it does not idle, it deteriorates.
Common misunderstandings
- That a purpose must be grand. The standard is the full use of a person's own capacity, not the scale of the enterprise or its visibility to anyone else.
- That it must be chosen once and never revised. Purposes are chosen on the evidence available and revised when knowledge, ability or circumstances change. What Objectivism rejects is having none.
- That it means every hour must be productive. A purpose organises a life, and a life includes rest. See Happiness.
- That "purpose" means a purpose assigned from outside. Objectivism denies that the universe or society hands anyone a mission; see Faith and Altruism. The purpose is chosen by the person whose life it is.
See also
- Value · Reason · Self-esteem — the three cardinal values
- Virtues · Productiveness · Rationality · Pride
- Life · Happiness · Ethics · Egoism
- Hierarchy · Volition · Man
Discussion
- Morality, abstract thinking and culture
- Was it really too late for Peter Keating?
- Jack London's Martin Eden
References
- Rand, Ayn. "The Objectivist Ethics", The Virtue of Selfishness. New American Library, 1964.
- Rand, Ayn. "The Age of Envy", Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution.
- Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged — Galt's speech, on reason, purpose and self-esteem.
- Peikoff, Leonard. Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, chapter 9.