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.

Living In The Present

We all live now, in the present, but we let the past divide us. An inherited economic system, national loyalties and religious traditions divide people against each other. Guilt, regret and resentment divide an individual against himself. Attachment to the past is alienation from the present.

At the moment when we wake each morning, none of us has a nationality or religion. A moment later, we remember that we have been, eg, British and Christian and therefore think that that is what we still are. If memories could be modified during sleep, then we would, after waking up, think that we were instead, eg, Egyptian and Muslim. 

Many people perceive the contradiction between the potential of the present and the legacy of the past but respond in different ways. Political activity addresses social divisions. Spiritual practice addresses psychological divisions. Political activity includes building the revolutionary party. Thus, there is an organization called "the Party" which is not yet a mass revolutionary organization but is trying to become that. Most of the time, the Party is uniquely disliked, even hated, by:

the economic rulers of society;
their managers and administrators;
public opinion - because the ruling ideas are those of the ruling class;
the bureaucratic labour movement which is incorporated into present society and therefore opposes independent working class action;
others on the left who resent any one organization claiming that it is even potentially the one that can lead social transformation;
campaigners on particular issues who resent the Party's generalization from those issues.

Thus, the Party agrees that racism, sexual oppression, war, poverty, pollution and nuclear weapons should be opposed but insists that these are aspects of a single problem that can be solved only by the revolutionary transformation of society.

Since the Party's ideas in fact reflect real conflicts, these ideas can lead social transformation when the majority seeks a genuine alternative but, most of the time, the Party engages with particular struggles and recruits a minority.

The Basic Question

The most basic inner question for every human being is variously formulated in accordance with differing worldviews:

What is our relationship to God?
Can we realise our oneness with all things?
Can we be unalienated and self-realised?
Are we happy with how things are?

These questions refer to states of consciousness. Our consciousness originated as a by-product of natural selection. (Sensitivity, selected, increased until it became sensation which was then selected because pleasure and pain have survival-value.) Thus, consciousness began as, metaphorically, a means to survival but became, literally, an end in itself. Means presuppose ends which presuppose consciousness. Therefore, consciousness cannot be a literal means.

It is not universally recognised that the conditions necessary for self-consciousness include social interaction. Thus, each Jain monk practises asceticism in order to free his discrete, pre-existent, self-sufficient soul from any further incarnations whereas an organisation of revolutionary socialists engages in collective struggles that can potentially free society from class conflict and alienation. Therefore, Jainism and Marxism are antithetical. However, the latter can be synthesised with Buddhist meditation which:

is a middle way between asceticism and hedonism;
is based on the recognition that consciousness is caused by the temporary coming together of disparate elements, not by the eternal existence of individual souls.

Three Old Questions

Questions

(i) What is the best way to organize society in the interests of all its members?

(ii) How can individuals understand and control their mental processes and respond more appropriately to each other?

(iii) How do (i) and (ii) connect?

Comments

(i) Currently, there are some irreconcilable conflicts of interest. How can society be freed from them? Re-organising society has to involve every member of society, not a programme enforced by a minority. Universal suffrage in Parliamentary elections is a first step but only one step. Collective action has to replace the individual illiteracy of writing an "X".

(ii) Unless we are hermits, all of us interact with other individuals. In addition, if we address (i) with political activity, then we need to respond both to comrades and to opponents, so (ii) is relevant to (i). Personal political interactions can be lethal.

(iii) I think that everyone needs to address both (i) and (ii) and how to relate them.

Brian Aldiss and Karl Marx

Rereading a Poul Anderson novel in order to discuss it on the Poul Anderson Appreciation Blog, I found an Introduction by Brian Aldiss, to the Master SF Series edition, that is relevant here. In the novel, the IQ of every animal and human being on Earth suddenly increases.

Aldiss, discussing means of attempted self-enhancement, therapy, Eastern religions, drugs and "the State", describes Marx's prediction that the State would wither away as foolish. (1)

By quoting Marx and Engels in State and Revolution, Lenin shows that bourgeois and bureaucratic states must be overthrown by the qualitatively different workers' state which will then wither away. Familiar states are instruments of coercion by a small social minority over the vast majority. A workers' state, for the first time in history an instrument of coercion by the majority over a recently dispossessed minority, will have no reason to remain in existence when the dispossessed minority has failed to reproduce itself as a class but it would be foolish indeed to predict that "the State" as we know it will ever wither away.

Aldiss, Brian, "Introduction" IN Anderson, Poul, Brain Wave, London, 1976, AT pp. 5-8, p. 5.

Society and Psychology

A comrade addresses our social problems by speaking at a meeting and opposing economic exploitation. A Zen trainee addresses his psychological states by facing a wall and understanding mental processes. These are responses to issues that are interconnected but on different levels, "outer" and "inner." The best people that I know include Party comrades and Zen trainees.

By meditating facing a wall, I realize that I have been almost completely wrong and mistaken:

insufficiently attentive to interpersonal and social interactions;
unempathetic and uncompassionate;
accepting and defending a belief merely because I had been indoctrinated in it;
thinking that merely abstract reasoning would resolve major issues about reality, society and morality;
entirely abstract and theoretical in outlook;
responding and behaving neither honestly nor spontaneously but in accordance with an idea of what was expected;
not addressing practical issues earlier in life because accustomed to someone else, adults, controlling and dictating (as an adult, I now fundamentally disagree with their beliefs and values);
not appreciating the value of study until a very late stage of education;
attending to issues that happened to interest me but not to other issues that were equally important.

I could have wound up as a celibate priest or bachelor and absent-minded academic. Fortunately, wider reading, marriage, family life, unemployment, political activity, other kinds of work, professional retraining and meditative practice, in other words life, intervened.

We can and must disagree about the state of society but each must attend to his mental states. I was brought up to confess sins to a priest or, in the absence of a priest, to God. I now think in terms of actions and consequences, not of sins (Buddhist, not Biblical, teaching), and attend to them myself although without any quick absolution.