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What is the Purpose of Life? Essay

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Theories on man’s development from a state of nature into politics and the present have all been an attempt to understand the purpose of life. After all, a look at what man was like before politics should give some sense of what his initial aims were. However, the ends of mankind have never been agreed upon, with ideas ranging from simple survival to complex interrelations of populations on a global scale. Perhaps the best way to define the ends of the individual would be that those ends must be found by the individual, thus making them different for every person. However, for a political individual, there is a larger interplay of forces. In a political society, it is possible for others to abridge your own personal pursuit of your own …show more content…

No, Sirs, I bear witness to the better part of our nature, that noble disquiet which pursues and torments us, that desire to broaden our knowledge and develop our faculties. It is not to happiness alone, it is to self-development that our destiny calls us (Constant, 327). In the modern sense, a term exists to define this self-development: self-actualization. Self-actualization, then, includes happiness, work, accomplishment, profit, and all sorts of ideas that accumulated over the ages as necessary for the human – the ideas of such authors as Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. However, reaching self-actualization requires all of these thinkers, and an engagement with the liberal tradition itself. As with so many things, these thoughts began in the classical era, with thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle. A deep discussion of these authors is far beyond the scope of this discussion, but a brief discussion of these thinkers is useful as a starting point. For example, Aristotle postulated four causes for any given thing: the material cause, the formal cause, the efficient cause, and the final cause. These cover the concept of a thing, the nature of it, and its interaction with the world. The final cause, then, is what is important here, as this is the purpose of the thing. What is the final cause of a human

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