Q&A: Purpose
Purpose
Question
Hello Rabbi. I’ve been learning for many years, but I’m not sufficiently versed in philosophy, and I’d be glad to hear your opinion on the following issue—perhaps also if you could point me to a fuller discussion of it.
My claim is that the question of the purpose of human life is one of the cornerstones of belief in the soul’s survival after death. In essence, when a person defines that there is a purpose to his actions, he is basically a believer. If we assume that a person does not believe in the soul’s survival, then he must say that his life is only what and how he experiences it subjectively. When he dies, all of that experience dies with him.
The reason is that if I disappear from the world completely, then in fact I have no interest at all in working in this world toward anything. And by anything I mean anything—because there is nothing apart from what and how I see and experience things.
Acting for “humanity,” for the future, and so on, is just taking that belief and creating a smokescreen that blurs the fact that this is necessary. Because that humanity too will disappear the moment I disappear from the world, so why should I work for it?
There must be something outside myself in order to live for a purpose that is not merely the maximization of my personal pleasures. That something is divinity. And the soul will remain afterward in one form or another, and it will have significance even after death.
Answer
I don’t agree. Even if I am completely annihilated, my actions still have meaning because they contribute to the world. You are assuming that motivation for action can only be personal interest. See columns 120 and 122.
At the end of your remarks, you conflated two claims: that without God there is no meaning, and that without the soul’s survival there is no meaning. With the first I fully agree (see column 159 and in Part 3 of the fourth booklet), and with the second I do not.
Discussion on Answer
But that too is a conflation, because there are two different kinds of meaning here: if there is survival of the soul without God, then your actions have no value-based meaning, but perhaps there is an interest in doing them (if it will benefit you in some sense after your death). Only when there is God can actions have value-based meaning.
True. But then I can at least understand what a person is living for—namely, that he currently thinks there is some importance to the fact that he will be regarded as generous in the history books and the like. But if even that is absent, there is nothing at all. And we see that people live and act in the world, which implies that they believe their actions have some value even after death.
I understand from your words that the intention is that those same people also think there is a value-based purpose to their lives. If so, does everyone believe in God, even though they define themselves as atheists?
Correct. I’ve written that more than once. Either they are hidden believers, or they are simply inconsistent.
But it is not true that such actions prove belief in the soul’s survival.
Okay. I did indeed conflate them; what I meant was that one must accept at least one of the two. I agree that if you believe in God, you don’t have to believe in the soul’s survival and you don’t need personal interest as motivation for action. But if you have no such belief, then you must at the very least believe in the soul’s survival.