Perhaps the biggest of these big philosophical conundrums is a question that is still being asked - and we appear no closer to an answer - today: 'what is the meaning of life?' We all want to know the answer to this question, and it seems to be because of a human desire to find meaning and purpose in our lives. We want to know why we are here, we want to feel there is a reason for our existence. We don't like the suggestion our lives have no innate purpose or meaning at all, and that we are just biological organisms that have - by a complete random incidence of nature - evolved into 'homo sapiens'. We are simply evolution made conscious of itself, and we don't just have a need for food, survival and reproduction, but also a need for answers, explanation and a sense of purpose.
One man who was very interested in all this debate about meaning and purpose was Aristotle, one of Plato's students at the Academy. Aristotle was so interested in these discussions about meaning and purpose that he had his own word for purpose - 'telos'. Everything, he believed, had a 'telos' to be fulfilled. He famously thought everything had 'four causes' - a material, formal, efficient and final cause. Let's quickly break them down...
Material cause - what the thing (e.g. a chair) was actually made of...the materials involved
Formal cause - what the thing represented, how we could know what kind of thing it is (e.g. how do we know a chair is a chair, what key characteristics does it have)
Efficient cause - How did that thing come into existence, what / who created it (e.g. a craftsman in the case of a chair)
Final cause - What purpose the thing will serve, what the point of it is. For example, a chair has the final cause of providing a seat.
Aristotle believed his four cause approach could be applied to everything, including the universe itself and to individual human beings. In the case of the universe, he believed a 'Prime Mover' existed which served as the final cause of all the universe - it was what the universe was 'moving towards', like a magnet attracts metal.
In the case of human beings, Aristotle had some VERY interesting ideas which I think would be very much worth exploring today. Aristotle believed that our final cause as human beings is to fulfil our potential - in other words, it is to flourish. That means achieving what is highest in your nature and capabilities, it means - in modern self-help terms - becoming the best version of yourself.
Aristotle had a word for this: eudaimonia. This refers to the state of genuine happiness you feel when you fulfil your potential - when you are flourishing in life. This is a very different kind of happiness to hedonism, where sensory pleasures such as sex or food provide temporary pleasure to us. Instead, eudaimonia is a deep happiness that comes from fulfilling your final cause, of fulfilling your potential.
2,500 years later, the business psychologist Maslow would describe this as 'self-actualisation', and place this at the top of his famous 'hierarchy of needs'. We need to feel like we are fulfilling our potential, that we are flourishing and making our very best contribution, in order to feel motivated, to feel our lives have meaning, and to consequently produce our best levels of work. Fulfilling our employees physical needs isn't enough - they need to feel genuinely fulfilled in what they are doing if they are to 'self-actualise' and do their very best work.
So whether you're walking about the streets of Ancient Athens, looking a debate with one of Plato's students, or whether you're in the business boardroom looking at how to get the best out of your employees, one thing is for sure - if you can find ways to help them flourish and fulfil their potential, you can help everyone in the world to thrive. And people who flourish and thrive not only feel their best, but they do their best as well. And isn't that what we want in this world?
For more on the Ethics Explained series on Aristotle, Eudaimonia & Business Ethics click below:
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