What is purpose?

What Does purpose Mean

From the Latin finalĭtas , the purpose is the end for which something is done . It is the "why" that explains or justifies the reasons for an action . For example: "With this research, my purpose is to discover the behavior of people in stressful situations" , "Everything we do has a purpose, but that purpose does not justify any behavior" , "What is your purpose with all this ? Do you want to hurt me? " .

The notion of purpose can be associated with concepts such as goal or objective . The purpose is what you are aiming for or what you want to achieve. It is an engine that drives animals to carry out various actions or to project in the short or long term.

When a specific action is carried out that has a short-term purpose, it is generally not accompanied by other actions, since the objective is not usually difficult to achieve, or it requires prior preparation of varying duration, but should not be repeated every time it is intended to obtain the same results. A common example is the performance of a piece of music by a trained professional: although it may be a work of great virtuosity, its study occurs in a process prior to performance.
Taking the same situation, if we are located at the moment in which the person decides to start studying said musical piece, the purpose of such challenge can be achieved in the long term, and various complementary actions will be necessary to overcome each phase successfully (one first reading of the work, practices focused on the most complex parts, refining the tuning and learning new techniques that may be useful, among many other possibilities).
Ultimately, all actions have a purpose, even the everyday or the simplest. The purpose of eating is to nourish the body, although pleasure can also be sought by eating foods that we like. Sleep also has a purpose (to regain strength). In any case, it is usually spoken of purpose to mention more complex and conscious actions that deserve an explanation or justification.
However, there are those who passionately seek a purpose for each action they perform, refusing to live spontaneously even those moments generally related to leisure. The concept of perfectionism is closely linked to this obsession to find a reason for each phenomenon, for each fact, with the aim of being able to control them in order to avoid potential errors and unexpected events.
Depending on the degree of perfectionism, the possibility of becoming frustrated with failure can be so great that it leaves no room for relaxation. When any decision must have a compelling purpose, life becomes a minefield, a track full of unpredictable obstacles and a wide range of difficulty, so that blinking without having planned it in advance can be enough reason to unravel everything. our structure.

There are those who affirm that human beings are the only animals capable of reasoning and making complex decisions, alien to our instincts; According to this point of view, the rest of the species go through life doing what their genes dictate, without the possibility of finding new and unique targets for each individual. On the other hand, both scientists and people who live with non-human animals assure that the reality is very different.
The philosophy considers that the purpose is the trend toward an end of a given object . There are tendencies found according to the philosophical school, since some positions maintain that living beings and nature have no purpose.
For determinism , all physical events (including thought) are causally determined by a cause and consequence relationship. This implies that the future is potentially predictable according to the conditions of the present.