The Purpose Of Life?

What is the purpose of life?

Life was not designed but evolved so it has no purpose.


Is survival not its purpose?

It has no purpose. Some organisms survive longer than others because they are better able to survive in their environment but survival is not their purpose. All organisms die but death is not their purpose.


Why do conscious beings have purposes?

Organisms were naturally selected for sensitivity to environmental alterations.
Therefore, sensitivity quantitatively increased until it was qualitatively transformed into sensation.
Then, sensation was selected because pleasure and pain have survival value.
Therefore, survival and pleasure are purposes of conscious organisms but not of life.

So we have purposes although we do not exist to fulfill any purpose?

Yes.

What purposes should human beings pursue?

"And it harm no one, do what thou wilt."

But what needs to be done? (Lenin: What Is To Be Done?)

Self-conscious purposive individuals exist only in social relationships so the question, "What is to be done about human life?" divides into "What is to be done about consciousness?" and "What is to be done about society?"


Well, what is to be done about them, then?

Many answers are given but I think that the most helpful are Zen for consciousness and Marxism for society. Zen is practice of immediate awareness without a future goal whereas Marxist practice is purposive and aims to make itself redundant.

I am thinking of Rev W, a Zen monk, and Comrade M, a revolutionary socialist who left the organization because of problems last year. These men seem to have nothing in common and even to be opposites in many respects but both addressed the question, "What is to be done?" The logic of changing society is to change mental states and vice versa although those who approach the question from opposite ends rarely meet.

Capitalism

Capitalism:

is competitive accumulation of the surplus value that is produced after labor has reproduced its value;

cannot coexist either with the earlier modes of production that it replaced or with socialism, which would be cooperative production for the satisfaction of needs and the realization of potentials;

needs armed states to enforce property laws and to defend resources, trade routes and markets;

is compatible with either political democracy or military dictatorship;

is market capitalism when companies sell commodities;

is state capitalism when states accumulate surplus value in order to compete militarily against each other;

is a mixed economy when the market is subsidized by state control of essential industries, like public transport moving workers to where they produce or consume;

involves cooperation within organizations and in society as a whole but competition between companies for profits, between workers for employment and between states for their economic and strategic interests;

revolutionizes technology through competitive reinvestment which, however, decreases profit rates, thus causing slumps;

simultaneously creates both wealth and poverty;

causes an ineradicable boom-slump cycle, monopolies, wars, waste, extreme inequality, corruption, pollution, sexual oppression and scapegoating of social minorities;

will exist until it destroys itself or is overthrown.