What Does It Mean to Have a Purpose?
What does it mean for a species to have a purpose? Is that different from the purpose of an individual? And is purpose something that already exists, or something we create for ourselves? These were some of the questions explored in a recent Philosophy for Children session at Sunnyside, using the story Ephemere.
The exploration began with the children imagining, drawing and describing undiscovered species. When asked to think about their purpose, the children described it in different ways; “what a species likes to do,” “how a species helps another species,” and “what a species does and what it can do.” After reading Ephemere, they took these ideas further, working in small groups with situations from the natural world and human history. They considered whether these could be seen as evidence that purpose exists or does not exist, and whether they agreed with that reasoning.
As the conversations progressed, an interesting distinction emerged between species purpose and individual purpose. The children had a strong intuition that species have a purpose and connected it largely to the unique activity of a species or what it was “born for.” They did not, however, connect purpose with reducing suffering, and the question of what the purpose of human beings might be remained unanswered. When thinking about individuals, they felt that purpose could be self-created and that caring for oneself could be a common individual purpose. Interestingly, they did not think of non-human species as having an individual purpose.
The discussion left us with some questions that were harder to settle. How do we know what our individual purpose is? If someone believes their purpose is to stay in a room and play video games all day, does that count? Can anything become an individual purpose? Or could purpose also lie in ways of being such as being playful or creative?
There were no neat answers at the end, and perhaps that was the interesting part. The children began with their own understanding of a familiar idea, tested it against different situations, and were left with questions that made the idea of purpose a little less simple than it had seemed at the beginning.
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