Invented, Not Inherited, Purpose

Definition

We assume that a purpose only counts as real if it was installed "from on high" — by a creator, by fate, by cosmic design — and that a purpose we assign to ourselves after the fact is somehow counterfeit. Baggini argues this assumption is false: there is no general principle that a purpose is more real because it was specified in advance by a designer rather than discovered or invented later by the thing that has it. Dennett names the assumption directly: "the trickle-down theory of importance — everything important has to get its importance from something else that is even more important."

In the Book

Chapter 1 opens with Sartre's paper-knife: a paper-knife has a determinate essence because someone made it to fulfil a function, whereas a flint has no built-in essence even though humans find uses for it — sharpening it, cutting with it. If naturalism is true and there is no creator, humans are like the flint, not the paper-knife: we have no essence handed down in advance, only purposes we find or invent for ourselves. Baggini then uses the history of the Post-it note to break the intuition that this makes invented purpose inferior: the adhesive was discovered by a 3M scientist in 1968 with no idea what it was for, and only six years later did another employee, annoyed at losing his hymnal place, realize it made a useful bookmark. What matters, Baggini argues, is not what the inventor had in mind but what the thing is actually good for — and the same logic applies to a human life. He goes further: a predetermined purpose can be worse, imagining a Frankenstein-like creature built solely to clean a house — a life with less dignity than one that gets to author its own ends.

Why It Matters

This dissolves a specific, recurring anxiety — that meaning must be "given" by something bigger than us or it isn't meaning at all — by showing the inference doesn't hold: origin-story and value are separate questions, and a purpose's timing of arrival (built-in vs. discovered) says nothing about its worth. The same move applies wherever people treat a late-arriving or self-assigned purpose, rule, or identity as second-class next to one that was there "from the start" — in institutions, careers, or relationships that found their point after the fact rather than being founded on it.