Truths of Flourishing
Purpose in Nature
The word Greek philosophers used for ‘purpose’, as in the reasons why things are done, is telos.
1Since Darwin, biologists have railed against any hint of teleology — any sense that life has a sense of purpose within it. Life, they say, is blind and random.
This makes sense. Every living thing stands at the end of a long history of survival, a history where all its ancestors passed on their features to the next generation. This process doesn’t involve any anticipation of the future.
The Game of Life
There is, however, another way to look at purpose in nature. Life can be seen as a planet-scaled game that started four billion years or so ago. A cluster of organic molecules chanced into a pattern of activity in which the molecules, as a group, started producing copies of themselves.
This game of building copies has proved to be self-sustaining. It has continued, changing and developing, in an unbroken flow of activity that still gushes today.
All games have aims built into them. In chess, it is being able to checkmate the other player. In poker, the aim is to win chips, and therefore money, by having the best hand or by convincing other players to fold their hands and concede the pot to you. In Snakes and Ladders, the aim is to be the first to reach the top of the board.
Life’s inherent aim is simply to keep on playing. All that living things do has been shaped by natural selection to pursue this aim. They carry within them an implicit sense of what will increase the likelihood of their survival, their reproduction, and the health of their progeny.
Flourishing
Like all animals, evolution has bestowed us with instincts that help us make choices that will promote our wellbeing. We feel tired when our bodies need sleep and thirsty when our bodies are dehydrated. Pleasure, pain and our natural urges steer us, however imperfectly, towards the passing on of our genes.
Our instincts seek out futures where our basic needs are met and we are healthy. Where we fulfil our animal potential. Where we flourish.
As modern human beings, these instincts have been built upon by layer upon layer of culture to furnish us with rich inner lives. We’re able to see beyond our own wellbeing and direct our choices towards reaching futures where other people are healthy and happy too, towards futures where life as a whole is flourishing, or towards whatever conception of the good makes most sense to us, as individuals with our particular histories and beliefs.
Ideas That Promote Flourishing
Ideas that embody a sense of value, duty or purpose are an integral part of the way that we play the game of life. They are signposts for paths towards flourishing.
Most of what is traditionally regarded as moral behaviour promotes the flourishing of others — being kind, or following the codes that make for the smooth running of society — while immoral behaviour like stealing or bullying disrupts a community’s flourishing.
People become able to make their full contribution to future flourishing, both their own and that of others, when they develop an examined sense of where value lies, an examined set of ambitions, and an examined sense of rightness that can shape how they go about their everyday activities.
- In ancient Greece, the word telos had two related meanings. It meant ‘end’ as in a cut-off point, such as the edge of a table or the close of a working day, and ‘end’ as in ‘that for the sake of which a thing is done’. Aristotle uses this second meaning to denote a fourth method for explaining how things come to be like they are after the material cause (the parts that make up the whole), the formal cause (the pattern of the whole), and the efficient cause (the way physical events bring a thing into being). “A fourth way in which the word [cause] is used is for the end ["telos"]. This is what something is for, as health, for example, may be what walking is for. If asked, ‘Why is he walking?’, we reply, ‘To get healthy’, and in saying this we mean to explain the cause of his walking. And then there is everything which happens during the process of change (initiated by something else) that leads up to the end: for example, the end of health may involve slimming or purging or drugs or surgical implements; they are all for the same end, but they are different in that some are actions and some are implements.” Aristotle, Physics, Revised Oxford Translation, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, Book II, 194b32.