It can be said that the purpose is the goal of an action.
From the Latin finalĭtas , finality is the end with which something is done . It is about the “why” that explains or justifies the reasons for an action . For example: “With this research, my goal is to discover the behavior of people in stressful situations,” “Everything we do has a purpose, but said 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 aim for or what you want to achieve. It is an engine that drives animals to carry out various actions or to plan in the short or long term.
Short and long term purpose
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 requires prior preparation of varying duration, but should not be repeated every time. time when the same results are intended. A common example is the execution of a piece of music by a trained professional: although it may be a work of great virtuosity, the study of it occurs in a process prior to interpretation.
Taking the same situation, if we place ourselves at the moment in which the person decides to start studying said piece of music, the purpose of said challenge can be achieved in the long term, and various complementary actions will be necessary to overcome each phase successfully (a first reading of the work, practices focused on the most complex parts, perfecting tuning and learning new techniques that may be useful, among many other possibilities).
The purpose is an objective to achieve.
Objective of actions
Ultimately, all actions have a purpose, even the everyday or the simplest ones. The purpose of eating is to nourish the body, although pleasure can also be sought by eating foods that we like. Sleeping also has a purpose (to regain strength). In any case, we usually talk about purpose to refer to more complex and conscious actions that deserve an explanation or justification.
However, there are those who passionately seek a purpose for every action they perform, refusing to live spontaneously even those moments generally related to leisure. The concept of perfectionism is closely linked to this obsession with finding 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 in the face of 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 blinking without having previously planned can be enough reason to crumble the whole thing. our structure.
Purpose according to reason and instinct
There are those who affirm that human beings are the only animals capable of reasoning and making complex decisions, foreign 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 goals for each individual. On the other hand, both scientists and people who live with non-human animals assure that the reality is very different.
Philosophy considers that purpose is the tendency towards an end of a given object . There are conflicting tendencies 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 relationship of cause and consequence. This implies that the future is potentially predictable according to the conditions of the present.