Does Life Have an Ultimate Purpose?

For what purpose, please tell me Dear,

Have You've placed us on Earth here?

We find ourselves alive in a world where, as far as we can recall, we didn’t choose to be and where we must spend a while—a few decades at the very most—and then depart. What, we might wonder, is the ultimate purpose, if any, of this elaborate exercise: of arriving here, spending some time and then departing? The quest to know if this earthly life does indeed have an ultimate purpose becomes even more poignant when seen alongside three aspects that are characteristic features of life in this world and that make it seem harsh and difficult for many: a) abundant pain and misery, both in one’s personal life and in the world at large; b) widespread evil in the world; and c) the inevitability of death.

If life in this world entails considerable pain and misery for all, or almost all, sentient beings, if evil abounds in the world, and if our stay here must come to an end some day, can it still be said to be purposeful in an ultimate sense, and also good and worth it, all said and done? This is a basic question that many of us must have asked ourselves at some time or the other.

Since it is an issue of the most basic existential import for each individual personally, human beings have likely always, from earliest times onwards and all across the world, speculated about the ultimate purpose, if any, of this earthly life, especially in the context of abundant pain and misery in the world, the widespread prevalence of evil, and the inevitability of death. Their plentiful reflections and speculations around this issue led them to come up with fascinating, and also widely divergent, possible answers, and even entire elaborate belief systems, as they sought, in their own ways, to attempt to solve the puzzle of why they were on Earth, or, in other words, of life’s possible ultimate purpose. Some of them arrived at the firm conclusion that we are here in this world by mere chance or by accident and that life has no ultimate purpose at all, and that it is, in fact, meaningless or even absurd. Others boldly declared that life does indeed have an ultimate purpose, but they differed widely among themselves about what this purpose might supposedly be. These widely divergent speculations or hypotheses about life’s ultimate purpose (or lack of it) that they proffered led, in many cases, even to fierce conflicts among them, which sometimes assumed the form of deadly wars, with rival sets of people insisting that their particular theory about life’s ultimate purpose (or lack of it), and the surrounding worldview or belief system in which it was embedded, represented the sole or ultimate truth and that all other such theories were flawed or false.

Notwithstanding their fundamental differences, both of these two broad positions that humans came up with in this regard—the claim that life has no ultimate purpose, on the one hand, and the claim that life has an ultimate purpose, on the other—share this one thing in common: both are based on the belief the we mortals can indeed know for sure the answer to the question of life’s ultimate purpose (or lack of it). Now, a belief is something that is accepted on faith or trust, as distinct from something that we know for sure. Hence, even if we feel, or hope, that what we believe is true, we can’t ever be sure that it indeed is. By definition, a belief is something we do not know for certain to be true, for if we did, it would no longer be a belief for us, something that we believed. Rather, it would be an item of knowledge for us, something that we knew for certain. Given that the above two mutually-opposed positions—that life has no ultimate purpose, and that life does have an ultimate purpose—are both based on a common belief (i.e., the belief that we can know whether or not life has an ultimate purpose) and not on certain knowledge, and given, further, that we cannot know for sure if this belief is indeed true, perhaps we can safely conclude that it is simply impossible for us mortals, at least as long as we are in our present earthly form, to have sure knowledge (as distinct from belief) about life’s possible ultimate purpose (or lack of it).

This, then, leads to the suggestion that the question of whether or not life does indeed have an ultimate purpose, and, if it does, what this purpose might be, is something that is destined always to remain a mystery for us mortals, at least till when we depart from here, so that no amount of effort we might make to attempt to understand it can ever unravel it to provide us with sure knowledge (as distinct from a belief-based claim or hypothesis) about it. It really seems for us to be one of several ‘unanswerables’, questions whose answers humans can’t ever be fully sure of, at least as long as we are in our present form in this present world.

If this is true, it would appear to serve no useful purpose at all to speculate about whether or not life does have an ultimate purpose and, if it does, what this might be. It would also be completely pointless to squabble with those who do not share our opinion on the matter, for in no way can any position on the issue be conclusively proven to be true (or, for that matter, false). In such a situation, it would seem that the best that we can do is simply to accept that the issue of life’s ultimate purpose (or lack of it) must remain a closed mystery as far as we, in our present earthly form, are concerned, one that as long as we live on Planet Earth we can never fathom. In other words, the most sensible course for us might be simply to live comfortably with this mystery, rather than attempt in vain to solve it, since no matter what, it just cannot be solved by us. Accepting things to be this way, we can then live our lives here in the manner that appears most positively meaningful to us while hoping that if indeed this earthly life has an ultimate purpose, we have led our own life in a manner that has conformed to it as closely as we were able to manage.