> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.mujsyed.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # The purpose you can't give yourself - URL: https://www.mujsyed.com/the-purpose-you-cant-give-yourself/ - Published: 2026-08-08T23:43:13.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-08T23:43:13.000Z - Author: Mujtaba Syed When I am without my faith, there is a purpose-shaped hole where it used to be. Not sadness exactly. More like reaching for a step that isn't there. I have the same wife, the same children, the same work. Nothing has emptied out. What has gone is the sense that any of it was asked of me. I spent a long time trying to work out whether that hole is evidence of anything, or just a habit left over from how I was raised. I think it is neither. I think it is the shape of a real problem, and the problem is not the one people usually reach for. It is not that life without God is empty. I can choose things worth living for. I can love my family, do useful work, pursue knowledge, keep promises, make things better than I found them. None of that requires religion. But that isn't quite what I mean by purpose. I mean something I did not invent, which can make a claim on me whether or not I happen to want it. A reason not merely for what I choose to do, but for why I am here at all. I can want a purpose like that, and I can look for one. What I cannot do is give myself one. The wanting and the giving cannot be done by the same person. Start with a knife. ## Three things we keep confusing Function is what a thing does well, given its form. A knife's edge concentrates force along a line, so it cuts. Use is what I do with it: I can cut with a knife, prop a door with it, or hold down a stack of paper. Purpose, in the sense I am interested in, is what it was intended for. Now imagine someone who has never seen a knife. They find one on the ground. What can they work out? They can work out its functions. They will notice the edge, and that it parts things. They can invent uses, and it will serve as a doorstop, a bad screwdriver, an ornament. Given long enough they will probably conclude that cutting is the thing it does best, because it is a good knife and good knives cut well. They might even infer, correctly, that it was made for cutting. Archaeologists do this sort of thing all the time. We do not always need the maker's testimony. But notice what makes that an inference about purpose rather than about performance. It is not merely that the object cuts. It is that somebody intended it to cut, and the shape of the object is evidence of the intention. The evidence may lie in the object. The purpose does not. Function is a fact about what the knife can do. Use is a fact about what somebody does with it. Intended purpose is ultimately a fact about the mind that made it. That is the distinction I need, and everything after this depends on it holding. ## Sartre's knife The example is not mine. Sartre gets there first, in a lecture he gave in 1945 and published the year after as *Existentialism is a Humanism*, and the object he picks is a paper-knife. His argument runs like this. An artisan who makes a paper-knife has the conception before the object. He knows what it is and what it is for, and only then does he make it. So for manufactured things, essence precedes existence. And when we picture God as creator, Sartre says, we picture something similar. A supreme artisan, with the conception of man existing in the mind of God as it exists in the mind of the paper-knife's maker. Remove God and you remove the conception. What is left is a thing that turns up first and defines itself afterwards. I accept almost all of that. The analogy is exact enough for what Sartre wants from it, and he draws the consequence honestly. What I want to press is the bill. Sartre thinks something substantial survives the removal of the maker. A project. A self-fashioning. We are condemned to be free, he says, but the freedom is real and so is what we build with it. That much seems right too. If there is no maker I can still choose what to do with my life. I can become a doctor, a thief, a parent, a monk. I can commit myself to justice or pleasure or money or God, and make a life more admirable or more contemptible. But there is a difference between choosing what my life will be used for and discovering what my life is for. If the paper-knife analogy holds, taking the artisan away does not leave you with a paper-knife that chooses the purpose for which it was made. It leaves you with a shaped piece of metal that is here. It can still cut. It can still be useful. It can even decide, if we let the metaphor become strange enough, that cutting is what it wants to devote itself to. What it cannot do is make that decision into the reason it exists. ## Where purpose could come from Ask what human beings are for and only a few kinds of answer are available. Religion gives one. Islam gives a particularly direct version: *I did not create the jinn and mankind except to worship Me*, says the Qur'an at 51:56\. Recognise the maker and serve him. Whatever else we say about the truth of that claim, its structure is clear. The purpose is not derived by the creature. It is given by the creator. Biology gives another. Organisms survive, reproduce and pass on genes, and selection explains why traits contributing to those outcomes persisted. A third answer is that nature itself contains ends, so that what a thing is already carries what it is for, without anyone having put it there. A fourth, and the hardest, is that value is simply objective: that there are goods woven into reality which nobody, divine or human, had to invent. Then there is the answer from will. Decide what matters, commit to it, and let that be your purpose. I have already said why the last of these cannot work. What is worth adding is that logic will not choose between the others for me. Deduction moves from premises to conclusions and cannot manufacture the premises it begins from. Hume's old problem about moving from what *is* to what *ought* to be is still relevant, and although there are philosophers who think the gap can be crossed or dissolved, the crossing takes work. A list of descriptive facts does not obviously contain its own instruction manual. Logic can tell me what follows *if* my purpose is to serve God, maximise wellbeing, preserve my genes or care for my children. It cannot, without further normative premises, tell me which of those ends deserves my allegiance. ## Aristotle's answer Aristotle presents a more serious challenge than the claim that humans are good at certain things. In the *Nicomachean Ethics* he asks for the *ergon*, the characteristic work of a human being, and finds it in rational activity. The good life is activity of the soul in accordance with reason and virtue. This is not merely an observation that we happen to reason well. Aristotle's world contains natures, excellences and ends, so that understanding what a thing is is already, in part, understanding what its flourishing consists in. That is a genuine rival conception of purpose, and it needs no maker at all. It is also not quite the one I am looking for. The stranger can examine the knife and discover that cutting is the activity in which its form finds fullest expression. An Aristotelian may say that this is enough, and that there is no need to climb behind the knife into an artisan's mind. Its nature tells you what its excellence consists in. For human beings the equivalent claim is that our nature contains standards internal to it, and that we flourish by becoming what we characteristically are, only well. Perhaps. But then the question has moved. I began with the feeling that something was *asked of me*, and Aristotle may be able to tell me what fulfils my nature without yet showing that my nature issues commands. If rational excellence is my flourishing, why must I flourish? If courage is an excellence, why am I obliged to become courageous? The Aristotelian can answer those questions, but only because the metaphysics is doing real work. Nature is not neutral material in Aristotle's universe. Ends are already inside it. That may be true, and it is not a foolish position. But it is not something we get by inspecting human behaviour. *Fitrah*, the primordial human nature of Qur'an 30:30, belongs to the same family while making the source explicit. Human beings possess a nature because God originated them upon it, so the nature can be read for purpose because there is a writer behind the writing. Aristotle's harder proposal is that no writer is required. ## What evolution can give us Modern biology creates a different kind of teleology. Since Larry Wright, Ruth Millikan and others developed selected-effects accounts of function, philosophers of biology have had a respectable way of saying that a heart is *for* pumping blood without anybody having designed it. Pumping blood is not merely something hearts happen to do. It is part of the explanation of why hearts with that capacity persisted. Their history gives them a proper function. I do not need to deny that. Nor do I need to insist that selected functions apply only to organs and never to whole organisms. Grant as much as possible. Suppose there is a perfectly good biological sense in which survival and reproduction are what organisms are for. The problem comes one step later. Why should I care? Suppose somebody proves beyond dispute that every appetite, affection and cognitive capacity I possess exists because, somewhere in my ancestry, it improved reproductive fitness. What follows for the life I should lead tomorrow? Perhaps nothing. Selection can explain why I love my children, but it does not follow that I ought to love them. It can explain sexual desire without it following that every opportunity to reproduce should be taken. It can explain aggression, jealousy, tribal loyalty and fear alongside tenderness and cooperation, because evolution has no difficulty producing dispositions that pull in opposite directions. Natural selection selects. It does not legislate. So even if biology gives the whole organism a proper function, the question I care about survives untouched: why does the history that produced me have any authority over me? Selection explains why something is here. Purpose, in the stronger sense, tells me what I should do because I am here. Those are not obviously the same thing. ## What "greater than myself" has to mean I have been leaning on a phrase and I should say what it carries. Not bigger. Not more important-feeling. Not simply something that benefits more people. I mean this: a purpose is greater than me if I did not create the reason for it, and if it can bind me whether or not I happen to agree. That definition produces a problem for religion almost immediately, and the problem is the knife. A knife's purpose is not greater than the knife in any noble sense. It is merely external to it, and the knife serves somebody else's ends. It is an instrument. If the analogy holds all the way down, then a created human is an instrument too, and what I have been calling a great purpose is only somebody else's use for me. There is an answer, but it is a condition rather than a proof. The knife serves an end it cannot share. It has no access to its maker's mind and gets nothing from the arrangement. Whatever else the religious claim is, it cannot be merely that. The Islamic formula is to know and to serve, recognition and worship together, and the knowing cannot be decoration added to the serving. It has to be part of the point. A purpose given by a maker elevates me rather than reduces me on two conditions. The maker's end has to be my good as well as his, and I have to be the kind of creature capable of recognising it. Take away either half and I am cutlery. Those are demanding conditions. I cannot establish them from an armchair and I will not pretend otherwise. But they tell me what the religious claim has to be in order to be worth anything, which is more than I knew when I started. ## Being gripped Now the objection I find hardest, and it does not come from the atheist or the believer. It comes from ordinary experience. I did not invent my children's worth. I did not sit down, examine the alternatives and confer value on them. I was seized by it, and the seizing did not feel like a decision. Iris Murdoch spent a career arguing that moral reality works something like this. The Good is not made by our choices. What we do is attend to reality, badly and imperfectly, until we learn to see value more clearly. Charles Taylor's idea of strong evaluation makes a related move: we do not merely have desires, but judge some of them as higher, lower, worthy or shameful, against standards that do not feel optional. On views like these, something can grip me, outrank me and correct me without any divine maker having authored it. The mountain does not need a designer to be worth the climb. The objection comes in two forms and they are not equally strong. The weak form says the feeling of being gripped is itself evidence of something greater. The strong form says the feeling may be tracking something real. Only the second is dangerous to me. The feeling on its own proves very little. Harry Frankfurt argued that we do not necessarily love our children because we first judge them valuable, and that often the order runs the other way: love gives things their importance to us. That should make anyone cautious about reading the intensity of an attachment as evidence of its authority. I am built to be gripped by my own children, and evolution had every reason to produce creatures who cared disproportionately about their offspring. Different things grip me, in any case, and they do not agree. Love, fear, desire, status, comfort, duty and God have all had their turn, and several of them have had it in the same week. When two of them seize me and pull against each other, the strength of the seizure cannot settle which deserves obedience. Something still has to distinguish the desire I ought to follow from the desire I ought to resist. If that standard comes from me, we are back with self-authorship. If it exists independently of me, we are back with a maker, or a nature with ends in it, or objective value. The gripping cannot by itself tell us which. ## Unauthored and binding That leaves the strong form, and it is the best objection in this essay. Perhaps the mistake is assuming that if I did not author a value, somebody else must have. Mathematics gives the structure of the possibility. Nobody made seven prime. It is prime whether I consent or not, it constrains my reasoning absolutely, and it was true before anyone noticed. Unauthored and binding is not a contradiction. So why could value not be like that? The analogy only takes us so far, and it is worth being exact about where it stops. That seven is prime constrains what I may consistently believe about numbers, and tells me nothing about what to do with a Tuesday. Mathematical truths are normative in a limited sense: if I want to reason correctly, there are conclusions I cannot deny. A purpose is different, because it directs action. It tells me not merely what follows from what, but what deserves to be pursued. The analogy therefore borrows the bindingness of mathematical truth for something mathematics does not itself contain. But that does not defeat Murdoch. It only means that if objective value exists, it is a different kind of objective fact from a mathematical one. Her Good is real, unauthored and sovereign, and if she is right, then I can have something greater than myself with no maker anywhere in the picture. I cannot dismiss that by saying purpose requires a maker, because that would be repeating my own definition back at her. So I have to say what the disagreement actually is. The religious account says normative reality is grounded in God. The moral realist says some values are simply part of reality, needing nobody to make them true any more than mathematical truths do. That is a large metaphysical claim. But so is theism, and I cannot reject one for asking me to believe something substantial about the furniture of the universe while allowing the other to furnish that universe with God. The question becomes explanatory. Why are there facts about how conscious creatures ought to live? Why should reality contain goodness as well as matter, energy and mathematics? The theist answers that goodness is not an unexplained addition, because the foundation of reality is itself good, knowing and purposive. One realist answer is that no explanation is needed, and that some normative truths are basic. I do not think the first wins merely by offering an explanation. Explanations have stopping points too, and everyone's stops somewhere. But notice where we have arrived. The cheap escape has gone. If there is no God and yet there is still an objective Good that can command me, atheism has not left us with a flat universe in which human beings casually manufacture their own meaning. It has left us with an unauthored moral order that conscious creatures can somehow recognise, and disobey. That may be true. It is not the modest position it is usually taken to be. ## Choosing is not enough either There is one complication left, and it is the one most likely to be raised by someone who has never read a word of philosophy. I said that I cannot choose something and then make it greater than me simply by choosing it. That needs qualification. I can choose to have a child and acquire obligations I cannot cancel when they become inconvenient. I can make a promise today that binds me tomorrow. I can enter a profession voluntarily and become subject to duties I did not individually write. So authorship of a commitment plainly does not leave me sovereign over everything that follows from it. But look more closely at why. If my child genuinely acquires claims against me, that is because my choice did not create my child's value. If my promise binds me, that is because promise-keeping has some normative force beyond the fact that I once moved my lips. If professional obligations really ought to be honoured, then there is already some reason why commitments, trust and agreements matter. My choice can place me inside a structure of reasons. It cannot, merely by being a choice, create the authority of the structure itself. Christine Korsgaard has the most serious version of the reply. Normativity, on her account, is neither found in the world nor picked arbitrarily. It is generated by the structure of agency itself, so that in willing anything at all I am already committed to standards I did not invent and cannot shrug off. Self-legislation is not the same as making things up. I take the point and I am not sure it rescues me. If I am both the legislator and the subject, I can still hear myself speaking behind the law. Commitment is not authorship. But it is not receipt either. ## Three doors and a price on each So the will is out, and three ways remain of having a purpose that is not mine to invent. Each door is open. None of them is free. A maker may have made me for something. Then there is a purpose to be found rather than assigned. The price is that his end must also be my good, and that I must be able to recognise it as such. Nature may contain ends. Then my flourishing is written into what I am. The price is that ends have to be genuinely in the world rather than in our description of it, and that flourishing has to oblige me rather than merely suit me. Or reality may contain goods that nobody authored. Then there is something to answer to without anyone having put it there. The price is a universe furnished with moral facts as basic features, not grounded in anything more fundamental. I am not the first to notice that the bill comes due. Anscombe argued in 1958 that our language of moral obligation was inherited from a law conception of ethics and became unstable once the lawgiver disappeared. MacIntyre later told the wider historical story. An older moral scheme connected human beings as they are, human beings as they could become if they fulfilled their end, and the disciplines carrying them from the first to the second. Remove the end and the instructions do not become false. They lose the thing they were instructions toward. Nietzsche made the point more violently, arguing that European morality wanted to keep conclusions whose foundations it had already destroyed. None of them proves theism. What all three noticed was dependence. Fruit has roots, and the roots are not optional. I don't write this as someone who has settled which root is real. I write it as someone who has stood on both sides of faith and noticed something peculiar: the hole does not close when I choose something to fill it. I can choose a career, a cause, my family again every morning. I can decide what sort of man I want to become, and those choices give my life shape and meaning and direction. But if I am the ultimate source of their authority, I can hear myself speaking behind them. What I miss is not a purpose I can invent. It is the possibility that there is something to discover. Something that can answer me when I ask what I should live for, instead of waiting for me to answer on its behalf. I don't know whether anything is there. I know that I cannot put it there myself. --- ## References - Aristotle, *Nicomachean Ethics*, Book I.7 (the *ergon* argument). - Jean-Paul Sartre, *Existentialism is a Humanism* (lecture 1945, published 1946) — the paper-knife. - David Hume, *A Treatise of Human Nature* (1739–40), Book III.i.1 — the is/ought problem. - Qur'an 51:56 (*adh-Dhariyat*); Qur'an 30:30 (*ar-Rum*), on *fitrah*. - Larry Wright, "Functions," *Philosophical Review* (1973); Ruth Millikan, *Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories* (1984); Karen Neander, "Functions as Selected Effects," *Philosophy of Science* (1991) — selected-effects accounts of function. - Daniel Dennett, *Darwin's Dangerous Idea* (1995) — design without a designer. - Iris Murdoch, *The Sovereignty of Good* (1970). - Charles Taylor, *Sources of the Self* (1989) — strong evaluation. - Harry Frankfurt, *The Reasons of Love* (2004). - Christine Korsgaard, *The Sources of Normativity* (1996) — the appeal to autonomy. - G. E. M. Anscombe, "Modern Moral Philosophy," *Philosophy* 33 (1958). - Alasdair MacIntyre, *After Virtue* (1981), ch. 5. - Friedrich Nietzsche, *Twilight of the Idols* (1889), "Skirmishes of an Untimely Man," §5.