I talk a good deal on this blog about purpose, and how important it is - yet purpose is an abstraction, hence not really real, but just a symbol for reality.
(The reality is the personal desires of living Beings.)
For most theologically-minded people, the abstract nature of purpose is important; because theologians want purpose to be detachable from individual persons - such that it can be implanted or put-into a Being - for example by God.
The currently-dominant half-baked philosophies of "AI" are also dependent on this abstraction; since they assert that purpose is something that can be built-into computer, robots and the like - inserted by external entities such as computer programmers and engineers, and their paymasters.
But - if I am rigorous, and manage to escape the bad habits of my socialized 21st century metaphysics - then I acknowledge that purpose is ultimately the desires, the "wantings", of Beings.
In a nutshell - purpose is an attribute of particular (living, conscious, eternal, spiritual) Beings.
A major difficulty of classical traditional theologians in the 21st century (and indeed for several centuries already, albeit increasing) is that inherited Christian theology implicitly incorporates the Ancient Greek (Platonic, Aristotelian - and also scholastic Aquinas-derived) sense of purpose as an attribute of a Being.
(e.g. When Aristotle, apparently, explains the motion of things in terms of where entities want to be.)
The ancients knew, from their personal daily experience - but unconsciously and implicitly, that they inhabited a living universe. This formed an unspoken background structure, a matrix, for all their philosophizing.
Those in the past were developing their abstract logical arguments on the unconscious, implicit - yet vital - assumption of a living universe of Beings with desires.
But modern theologians - who expound (as they suppose) ancient or medieval theology and philosophy have (almost invariably) lost this implicit assumption - at least since their adolescence - and have not restored it by conscious choice...
The consequence is that the bottom line assumption of modern classical-theologians is of the divinely-entailed validity of an abstracted version of Greek-Medieval logic; operating in an originally-dead universe.
(And this originally-dead-universe mind-set has been inherited by nearly-all post-reformation theology; and the atheist traditions of philosophy including science, and also and more obviously the "rationality" that underpins and regulates the modern System of governance, corporations, media etc.)
In sum: modern (post-medieval) theology is rooted in pure abstraction - which is why it is experienced as dry, quibbling; irrelevant to me-here-now - why it Does Not Convince.
In order to follow the reasoning of such philosophers - we are compelled to think from a stance in which abstract logic is the primary reality - operating in an otherwise life-less reality.
So that human beings, you and me, are being regarded very much as-if we were (bottom line, ultimately) nothing-but the product of logic!
We are excluded from the assumptions; and, consequently, the conclusions.
Into this assumed-dead universe, God then "puts" souls - souls that he has made from nothing.
God puts into these inserted-souls other attributes - such as purpose, and freedom.
And this kind of abstract stuff is what we are invited to imagine, invited to believe!... Nay instructed that we Must believe; about our-selves, everybody else, the world and universe!
To put it starkly - classic traditional theology of the 21st century pictures a kind of zombie universe; dead but animated by some kind of insertion of properties.
However, this isn't what people believed 2000 or even 1000 years ago - because it leaves-out their spontaneous animism - their implicit and unconscious knowing that ultimately reality consisted of living Beings, and the properties and attributes of these Beings emerged from this living nature.
No matter what the ancients said and wrote: this animism lay behind it; which was why the abstract logical scholastic philosophy was not - to them, then - dry and quibbling and irrelevant in the way it is to us, now.
The history of human consciousness, and therefore of philosophy and theology; is one of emergence from spontaneous innate animism - to the present state when animism is no longer spontaneous, but is denied and ridiculed...
Consequently our ultimate metaphysical philosophy is either/ both incoherent and/or consists of irrelevant autonomous syllogisms.
But we need consciously and by choice, to recover the implicit and (mostly) unconscious animism of the past - if we are really to understand-by-experience the nature of reality.
Therefore we must beware of the delusions of abstractions understood in a way that did not apply to Aristotle and Aquinas - whose minds included the built-in assumption of living Beings as a "given"...
And this built-in assumption underlay everything they thought and wrote.
*
Note: The above insight is heavily indebted to the work of Owen Barfield (eg. Saving the Appearances) and Rudolf Steiner (eg. The Riddles of Philosophy).
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