Whether this somehow benefits the universe in any way other than it possibly leading to you directly benefiting other proximal beings and/ or your environment, remains obscure to me. — Janus

I think "cosmic philosophies" turn on interdependence and symbiosis. The common example is the violinist in the orchestra who is contributing a small part to a beautiful whole, a whole which depends on each of the small, interdependent parts. For the ancients this was usually captured in the balanced, cyclical motions of the heavens.

I've always been attracted to Keats's -- what? observation? suggestion? -- that the world is "a vale of soul-making". Through suffering we grow a soul, and thus become more fully human, more than we were when we were born. I think that's the idea, and it's interesting to cast that Greek idea in these terms -- it's the growth not of your body but of your soul, that matters. — Srap Tasmaner

:clap:

Whether this somehow benefits the universe in any way other than it possibly leading to you directly benefiting other proximal beings and/ or your environment, remains obscure to me. Would even benefiting the whole Earth make any appreciable difference to the Cosmos as a whole? I can't see any way to coherently understand how it could. Perhaps you can enlighten me? — Janus

Isn’t that the kind of intuition found in many forms? “Acting in accordance with the Tao”? There’s also such a thing as religious anthropology which asks precisely this question - see for instance https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Kadmon . It won’t appeal to everyone but I mention it as representative of this theme.

According to our current understanding the rest of the galaxy is so far away that it would have very little effect on our solar system and our solar system would have a virtually negligible effect on it. Not to mention the rest of the universe.

OK, but you haven't even attempted to answer the questions i posed.

Yes, not a good choice of links. I was thinking of 'man as microcosm' which is a theme in some philosophies. So I'll try again. The point of a 'cosmic philosophy' is not that it 'benefits' the cosmos, but that it makes sense of it, that mind and cosmos have some common ground or basis. It is of course a truism that the dissolution of the medieval synthesis and the scientific revolution completely shattered the traditional Western sense of the cosmos (per Alexander Koyré). And that the image of man in the early 20th century was widely understood as the 'outcome of chance and necessity' (per Jacques Monod), and that we became kind of exiles in an indifferent universe (per existentialism). How to re-imagine any kind of cosmic order, knowing what we now know? Actually the book title that comes to mind is 'At Home in the Universe', Stuart Kauffman, which attempts to do so on a scientific basis. Perhaps Terrence Deacon's book is another.

But there's something even deeper than that, but more simple: the resonance of mind and world as I tried to convey in that overlooked quote from David Bentley Hart - that 'the natural order was seen as a reality already akin to intellect'. Considered alongside the argument in Pinter's book, Mind and the Cosmic Order, there is indeed an order, and mind is foundational to it. But it's never an object of analysis in the scientific sense (per David Chalmers). That's also where phenomenology and the emphasis on the reality of first-person experience is important.

I can make no sense of a grand scheme without positing a grand schemer, a grand designer without a grand designer or a grand purpose without a grand purposer. — Janus

That might be due to your cultural heritage, might it not? Buddhists have no such difficulty. Granted, they would also probably not talk in terms of a 'cosmic purpose', but it is at least implicit in their cosmologies, without a director to supervise the whole show. But in Western culture, we're caught up in this kind of Hegelian dialectic of theism (thesis), atheism (anti-thesis) and an emerging synthesis (whatever that turns out to be).

The questions here are, then, what is purpose (in itself), where does it come from, what is its ground? Or, what exactly gives it all meaning, makes it all worthwhile? — tim wood

Purpose is like the concept of cause and effect. It doesn't exist in the empirical world. It comes from the human mind i.e. imagination, desire, motives or will. It is psychological in nature.

Fair enough? And may we say as well, boot-strapped? By which I mean valued because they are valued, any other value being derivative and incidental. — tim wood

Doesn't "valued because they are valued" imply infinite regress, or maybe a vicious circle, rather than bootstrapping?

In the op you say "Bottom line, purpose is boot-strapped", but how could this be possible? Isn't it true that boot-strapping is a purposeful process? This would imply that purpose is necessarily prior to, as the intentional cause of any boot-strapping activity. Then purpose itself cannot be boot-strapped.

Purpose, in my opinion, is to attain value, whether that be financial, experiential(in such cases as heavens), or other. It gives us drive because it improves our experience. The ground of attaining value is gaining pleasure - and losing pain, whether that be short term or long term. Some may want to serve the world, but this is for some future reward, in that they are being moral. Some may take lots of pain to improve themselves in elegant 'loss-of-pain'.

God is something that directs us to the highest value, or 'heaven'.

Hey…..
Good to see you once again.

And purpose comes with – or is invented by – mind. — tim wood

Agreed. However purpose is understood, it follows from judgement alone, and for whatever a purpose is supposed to be follows from the kind/content of the judgement from which it is given.

Can we do purpose without first doing teleology on the one hand, or aesthetics on the other?

Invented or discovered? Neither: they follow implicitly and necessarily from that which is the condition for them, that being….a-hem…..predisposition in accordance with subjective moral law.

Not much more I can contribute here, however interesting the topic is. I have neither opinion nor knowledge regarding purpose in and of itself, so….

Quite simply, God is the source of purpose.... When we come to apprehend the reality of God then all that purpose makes sense. — Metaphysician Undercover

I understand reality as being the world we all live in, and also a set of constraints which things not of or in reality are not subject to. I don't object to beliefs, except when, as concerning things not of or in reality, the believer tries to place them into reality. And as God is supposed to be unconstrained, he cannot be in reality nor rationally supposed to be there. So the question to you, then, do you think God real, in the sense of being in reality?

And in terms of purpose - of any kind - can you point to or articulate any that do not come into being through a man's or a woman's speech or writing? Or, if God is the source of purpose, which come from Him?

Would you agree with me that teleology is an ancient attempt to make sense and that it is not of any great use today, nor since, say, Christians persuaded the world that God made nature? Or at least since Galileo?
— tim wood

Nope. — Wayfarer

You can look up τελός in a lexicon as easily as I can. And what I find there is unhelpful. 2300+ years ago it appears to have meant the presence of an assigned capacity to achieve an end, and with respect to that end, the end itself - but as a generalization, an abstract concept. Thus the τελός of a kitten to become a cat, a colt a horse, acorns oak trees. And I can see the value of this as an insight into the workings of nature, an assurance that your spring calf will become in time a cow and not a goat. And not so much an assurance, but a naming of what appears to be a universal process, growth, under the universal constraint of becoming what it is supposed to become and not something else.

Since most of us no longer need this explicit assurance, I conclude that telos today means something other than what τελός meant long ago, if it is to have any current utility. Can you say what that meaning is? .

“The meaning of a sensation is something primary and biologically given. There is no need to interpret the feelings of hunger and thirst, for example. The meaning of a sensation is embedded in the sensation itself. It may be said that a sensation is its meaning. Primary feelings are genetically given, and constructed in the course of gestation just as organs are. They are “standard equipment” in every animal body.”

— Mind and the Cosmic Order: How the Mind Creates the Features & Structure of All Things, and Why this Insight Transforms Physics by Charles Pinter — Wayfarer

This doesnt seem right to me. Sensations from the eyes, ears, nose , skin and movement are massively intercorrelated on the basis of overarching normative patterns of interacting with a world. The purpose of perceptual sensation is to guide action , and it gets its meaning from such action. Action, furthermore, is anticipatory, and as such brings into play all of the sense modalities directly or indirectly. A kitten deprived from birth of interaction with its surrounding cannot see , despite having a normal visual system. Visually perceived objects have no meaning because such meaning must come from what we are intending to DO with objects, and our anticipation of the response of those objects to our actions. Even supposedly primal sensations like hunger are interpretive. My mother died from starvation as a result of advanced alzheimer’s. This is not uncommon. A person with dementia loses the ability to interpret the meaning of their hunger ‘sensations’ as these are interconnected with other sources of perception within a functional totality whose purposiveness becomes fragmented with the loss of a sense of time, place and identity.

One of my favorite discussions of purpose is from Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals. Here he argues that the history of a thing, an organism , a cultural tradition only appears to be explicable in the basin of a pre-given purpose, when in fact such teleological notions are post hoc:

But ‘purpose in law' is the last thing we should apply to the history of the emergence of law: on the contrary, there is no more important proposition for every sort of history than that which we arrive at only with great effort but which we really should reach, – namely that the origin of the emergence of a thing and its ultimate usefulness, its practical application and incorporation into a system of ends, are toto coelo separate; that anything in existence, having somehow come about, is continually interpreted anew, requisitioned anew, transformed and redirected to a new purpose by a power superior to it; that everything that occurs in the organic world consists of overpowering, dominating, and in their turn, overpowering and dominating consist of re-interpretation, adjustment, in the process of which their former ‘meaning' [Sinn] and ‘purpose' must necessarily be obscured or completely obliterated.

No matter how perfectly you have understood the usefulness of any physiological organ (or legal institution, social custom, political usage, art form or religious rite), you have not yet thereby grasped how it emerged: uncomfortable and unpleasant as this may sound to more elderly ears,– for people down the ages have believed that the obvious purpose of a thing, its utility, form and shape, are its reason for existence, the eye is made to see, the hand to grasp. So people think punishment has evolved for the purpose of punishing. But every purpose and use is just a sign that the will to power has achieved mastery over something less powerful, and has impressed upon it its own idea [Sinn] of a use function; and the whole history of a ‘thing', an organ, a tradition can to this extent be a continuous chain of signs, continually revealing new interpretations and adaptations, the causes of which need not be connected even amongst themselves, but rather sometimes just follow and replace one another at random.

The ‘development' of a thing, a tradition, an organ is therefore certainly not its progressus towards a goal, still less is it a logical progressus, taking the shortest route with least expenditure of energy and cost, – instead it is a succession of more or less profound, more or less mutually independent processes of subjugation exacted on the thing, added to this the resistances encountered every time, the attempted transformations for the purpose of defense and reaction, and the results, too, of successful countermeasures. The form is fluid, the ‘meaning' [Sinn] even more so . . . It is no different inside any individual organism: every time the whole grows appreciably, the ‘meaning' [Sinn] of the individual organs shifts…

One of those Greeks advised us: "Know thyself.".... And that's why it makes more sense to say this sort of purpose is discovered rather than invented. — Srap Tasmaner

I think Socrates had more in mind, not so much to know himself so as to become who and what he is, but rather instead who and what he ought to be. And this the same as the navigator's admonition to know where you are, so that you can properly get about going where you're going.

I'll say one more little thing: I've always been attracted to Keats's.... the world is "a vale of soul-making". Through suffering we grow a soul, and thus become more fully human, more than we were when we were born. I think that's the idea, and it's interesting to cast that Greek idea in these terms -- it's the growth not of your body but of your soul, that matters. — Srap Tasmaner

A tasty notion! Mix a pound of Greek Paganism, philosophy, and science with a pound of Christian redemption through suffering, mix well, bake, and voila, a sweet and seductive confection - sorry, I'm just having some fun. But yours an admixture of things maybe better and more properly understood unmixed.

The Greek ψυχή*, psyche, is itself not so simple, and it becomes the Christian soul only after an extended time in the forge and on the anvil of Christian appropriation. In particular, I think the Greek sought and found improvement through both mental and physical development, absent suffering, while for the Christian, seeking out suffering,
"Truly it were an excusable covetousness if we did; for affliction is a treasure, and scarce any man hath enough of it. No man hath affliction enough, that is not matured and ripened by it, and made fit for God by that affliction." Donne, Med. 17. And this merely one of a series of echoes through Job, through Paul, et al, etc.

*From a hefty lexicon of the New Testament: "...but apart from other data, the fact that ψυχή is also a dog's name suggests the the primary component is not metaphysical."

These are responsibilities I assume freely, of choice — Vera Mont

I should not have responded. If all the meanings of 'purpose' are eliminated from discussion, there's nothing left to discuss but God. — Vera Mont

I think with these you have landed both feet in the center ring. If it's God, then I hold that to be a matter of faith, which I hold to be personal, from the self and not from God but from an idea. That leaves the question as to why assume responsibilities. Not asking, but glad to read if you respond.

That makes the issue of "being alive" a little tricky, because it's easy to say that this is the primary and overarching goal of a living organism, but it's also set apart, as that which enables any other goal. Is there something else set apart from such goals, perhaps also set apart from maintaining yourself as a living organism? I think there sort of is.

@unenlightened gives you the first bit: this kind of purposiveness is something that inheres in living, in acting, in being, not something outside it. Getting your ducks in a row is a row-ly way of behaving with ducks — Srap Tasmaner

I’m not sure that ‘being alive’ makes sense as a goal from a biological point of view. I think it’s sort of thinking is a throwback to the early days of Darwinism, when organisms were set off from a world, as if they were dropped into a separate environment and then subject to one-way selective pressure from that environment. But an organism isnt a an already determined thing, like a rock, surviving or not in a world. It is a system of interactions that maintains itself as a normative pattern of exchanges. It is not a living thing that survives, it is these patterns. And it is a misnomer to say that they survive. What they do is continually transform themselves, but in such a way that they maintain a relative self -consistency throughout these changes. I would not separate goal from purpose here. Any adjustment within the organism-environment system that maintains or strengthens the self-consistency of the specific manner of organismic functioning fulfills its goals and purposes, and modifications which fragment such integrity work against its purposes. Since the organism’s current normative patterns shape the possibilities of future changes to the organism, there can be no purpose that comes from on high, or from a causal below, entirely independent of the total style of its functioning.

Note that what I just said concerning the nature of functioning of living systems can be applied in a general sense to human psychological and cultural goals and purposes. Theories, faiths, schemes of understanding , value systems and worldviews function like living systems. The are normatively structured interactions with a human created niche (our linguistically formed technological and social world). The aim of such schemes, practices and worldviews is to maintain their ability to assimilate events without disintegrating into incoherence and unintelligibly .
To the extent that a system of ideas survives, it does so not by simply duplicating itself, but by changing itself constantly in subtle or not so subtle ways so as to keep
up with a constantly changing environment that it is instrumental in shaping.

In understanding the concept of purpose, both at the biological and psychological level, it is crucial to appreciate the reciprocal , reflexive nature of the person-world interaction. Persons aren’t dropped into a world with purposes any more than organisms are dropped into an environment with purposes. Purpose is a dynamically self-adjusting back and forth between self and world , remaking itself constantly both from the side of the organism and its environment. There can be no transcending purpose when the very notion of intention is not only responsive to but mutually shaped by an outside.

Purpose is like the concept of cause and effect. It doesn't exist in the empirical world. It comes from the human mind i.e. imagination, desire, motives or will. It is psychological in nature. — Corvus

I agree, pretty much. By will and motive I infer you include reason, and I'd have preferred you left out "psychological" because I do not know what that means.

FWIW, I didn't mean anything metaphysical by the word "soul". I don't know whether Keats did.

Purpose is a dynamically self-adjusting back and forth between self and world , remaking itself constantly both from the side of the organism and its environment. — Joshs

I think what interests me about the Keats is near here: you're not just born with an eternal soul, and that's what makes you special; it grows within you, or doesn't, through the process of living a life. The organism and the environment have memory, and the organism -- us -- can also reflect on those interactions, and develop some sense of how things are related, and the great variability of those relatings. There's a possibility there of coming to feel at home in the world, which can be very difficult for us. And in feeling at home, achieving freedom, which is also hard for us.

I don't know if "purpose" is a great word for talking about all this, or a phrase like "the meaning of life", but they're all ways of trying to get at the surprising challenge of living a good human life.

well said.

However purpose is understood, it follows from judgement alone, and for whatever a purpose is supposed to be follows from the kind/content of the judgement from which it is given. — Mww

Ok, but this would seem to cover everything from Sydney Carton's last purpose, to scratching an itch. I.e., imho, not at all to be dismissed, but also not over-valued.

Can we do purpose without first doing teleology on the one hand, or aesthetics on the other? — Mww

Will you share a laugh with me if I read this as,
"Can we do purpose without first doing purposiveness on the one hand and purposefulness on the other?"?

Invented or discovered? Neither: they follow implicitly and necessarily from that which is the condition for them, that being….a-hem…..predisposition in accordance with subjective moral law. — Mww

Hmm. There is in this a question of governance. No doubt inevitably I shall never exceed the limits of what I can or should be, but within, do I not have some choice, even free choice, to both discover what may be and to try to invent what is not yet? And if any at all, then all? And if I'm lucky, comporting with the imperatives, themselves creatures of reason?

The organism and the environment have memory, and the organism -- us -- can also reflect on those interactions, and develop some sense of how things are related, and the great variability of those relatings. There's a possibility there of coming to feel at home in the world, which can be very difficult for us. And in feeling at home, achieving freedom, which is also hard for us — Srap Tasmaner

We do indeed have memory, but is that memory a static archive, or does it reassemble the past on the basis of where we are going? Do we understand history from the past forward or from our future to what has been? Heidegger said that feeling at home in the world conceals from us the strangeness and uncanniness of being-in-the-world, and that we only gain freedom when we no longer feel at home in the world. I agree with both you and Heidegger: if our world is so familiar that we treat it as an unchanging given, then we achieve no freedom. But by the same token, if the world is so unintelligible
that we can’t make any sense of it at all, we are imprisonment by chaos.

if our world is so familiar that we treat it as an unchanging given, then we achieve no freedom — Joshs

Absolutely, and one reason I squeezed in the word "variable" up there somewhere.

I think much of the challenge of freedom for us comes from our culture. We all swim in a sea of inherited ideas. It's all too easy to grab an off-the-shelf interpretation of anything, and that's not freedom.

But "going it alone" or "starting from scratch" is just not an option, so your inheritance, and a certain ambivalence about it, is something else you have to be, well, both comfortable and uncomfortable with. I don't imagine feeling at home in the world as static, but taking it all as it comes, including your own occasional feeling of alienation.

Something like that is what I think of as largeness of soul. Keats was a terribly unusual young man, who got here remarkably quickly. (The "negative capability" letter and the "vale of soul-making" letter are both earlyish, if I recall correctly, and probably only a few months apart.) And of course then there's his real hero, Shakespeare, who had an extraordinarily capacious soul.

I understand reality as being the world we all live in, and also a set of constraints which things not of or in reality are not subject to. I don't object to beliefs, except when, as concerning things not of or in reality, the believer tries to place them into reality. — tim wood

I cannot quite apprehend what you mean by "a set of constraints which things not of or in reality are not subject to". I assume you are saying that there are things which are not part of reality, and those things are not subject to this particular set of constraints you are referring to. Are these non-real things subject to any kind of constraints, and what kind of existence do they have if they are non-real?

And as God is supposed to be unconstrained, he cannot be in reality nor rationally supposed to be there. — tim wood

Your conditions for "reality" do not state that there cannot be an unconstrained real thing. You said that things not in reality are not constrained by a specific set of constraints, but you didn't say that things in reality are necessarily constrained. What exactly do you mean by "a set of constraints"? I understand "sets" to be things created by human beings. Are these constraints artificial as well, or is it just the classifying of them into a specific set which is artificial?

And in terms of purpose - of any kind - can you point to or articulate any that do not come into being through a man's or a woman's speech or writing? — tim wood

Are you serious? Is it not the case that the purpose of an animal's heart is to circulate blood, and the purpose of sense organs is to sense, etc..?

If it's God, then I hold that to be a matter of faith, — tim wood

Which I don't have, and therefore should not discuss how it works on the faithful.

which I hold to be personal, from the self and not from God but from an idea. — tim wood

Usually not an idea that originates with the faithful. While each believer does a little customizing of the canon, the bulk and overwhelming content of it comes from other minds. A very, very few interpreters of the god's requirements tell all the faithful how best to gain the god's favour. They may think they place themselves in the god's hands; in fact, they place themselves in the ruling prelate's hands.
In the secular realm, the same role is played by heads of state and, in turbulent times, the leaders of ideological factions: the loyal subjects, patriots and freedom fighters receive their purpose from their figurehead.
To me, that seems a lot like abrogation of responsibility - but it does provide a clear, straightforward meaning for their life. And death.

That leaves the question as to why assume responsibilities. — tim wood

We are social animals. We crave community, family, closeness, affection, recognition, a sense of belonging and contributing and being valued. To that end, we take a series of small and large decisions that result in what we know as ordinary life. That includes adults taking responsibility for the young, paying their dues, keeping the peace, lending a hand, making the world around them liveable for others as well as themselves. That requires no supernatural intervention.

Are you serious? Is it not the case that the purpose of an animal's heart is to circulate blood, and the purpose of sense organs is to sense, etc..? — Metaphysician Undercover

If you'd read the OP, you could not have failed to observe that this, your sense of purpose here, is not the topic, and so without relevance. And in passing since you claimed earlier that there could be no propose before purpose, I assume you also would hold that there can be no hearts until there was a heart. Which makes hearts hard to account for. But let's try these: is God constrained in any way? Is He real? My point being that in belief in an idea, you can have what you want. But not in any reality.

We are social animals. We crave... being valued. To that end, we take.... responsibility... for others as well as themselves. That requires no supernatural intervention. — Vera Mont

I buy it; I get it. But I doubt you would say that it's just a quid pro quo of doing and in return getting. I "hear" duty, and not as a consequence of accepting responsibility, but as ground for that acceptance. If so, that would be duty for duty's sake, being both a good example of what I call boot-strapping, and also entirely and deeply admirable. Maybe call it self-ownership of both halves.

Purpose is like the concept of cause and effect. It doesn't exist in the empirical world. It comes from the human mind i.e. imagination, desire, motives or will. It is psychological in nature.
— Corvus
I agree, pretty much. — tim wood

Right - like I said, nothing wrong with purpose, so long as it's mine. Anything like 'purpose' in the abstract - too hard.

But I doubt you would say that it's just a quid pro quo of doing and in return getting. — tim wood

In a way, that's what a social contract always is. But it's not that simple or two-dimensional.

I "hear" duty, and not as a consequence of accepting responsibility, but as ground for that acceptance. — tim wood

I don't know what that sentence means. We have duties and obligations, responsibilities and debts - all different, each resulting from a set of circumstances that are partly given (of the environment and a condition of survival) and partly undertaken by the subject for his or her own reasons.

duty for duty's sake — tim wood

No such thing. Duty has no 'sake'; it's always in service to something much larger. There is duty for the sake of patriotism, or an oath, or as a condition of citizenship, or as part of a binding contract.

being both a good example of what I call boot-strapping — tim wood

I really wish you wouldn't. It grates very hard on my grammatical nerves.

…..for whatever a purpose is supposed to be follows from the kind/content of the judgement from which it is given.
— Mww
Ok, but this would seem to cover everything — tim wood

My teleological/aesthetic to your purposivity/purposefulnes…..don’t we want all our bases covered?

…..predisposition in accordance with subjective moral law.
— Mww
Hmm. There is in this a question of governance. — tim wood

Yes, undoubtedly. Or, if not governance per se, then at least legislation.

About ol’ Sydney’s last act: where/how does he fit into your notions of purpose with it?

But there's something even deeper than that, but more simple: the resonance of mind and world as I tried to convey in that overlooked quote from David Bentley Hart - that 'the natural order was seen as a reality already akin to intellect'. — Wayfarer

Since the idea of the natural order is an idea of the intellect by definition as are all other ideas, it is hard to see how it would not, as an idea, be akin to the intellect. As a reality for us it remains an idea. What it might be as mind-independent reality is of course unknowable (per Kant).

That might be due to your cultural heritage, might it not? Buddhists have no such difficulty. Granted, they would also probably not talk in terms of a 'cosmic purpose', but it is at least implicit in their cosmologies, without a director to supervise the whole show. But in Western culture, we're caught up in this kind of Hegelian dialectic of theism (thesis), atheism (anti-thesis) and an emerging synthesis (whatever that turns out to be). — Wayfarer

I have never encountered an idea of "cosmic purpose" in my readings of Buddhist texts, I don't think my association of the meaning of 'purpose' with a purposer is any kind of scotoma due to "cultural heritage", I think the idea of cosmic purpose has always been associated with a god or gods who are the intenders and givers of the cosmic purpose. Without that idea of intention, the notion of purpose seems reducible to simply the way things behave, or a kind of immanent cosmic balance as presented in the notions of dharma and Dao.

I have never encountered an idea of "cosmic purpose" in my readings of Buddhist texts — Janus

Nevertheless, 'dharma' is both 'duty' and also 'law'. In other words, it's not simply an individual prerogative or obligation, but is inherent in the natural order (the original root being 'what upholds' or 'holds together').

And besides, isn't science itself predicated on there being a natural order? I know nowadays that the whole concept of natural law is called into question, but in my view that's mainly because it's a metaphysical issue.

As a reality for us it remains an idea. What it might be as mind-independent reality is of course unknowable (per Kant). — Janus

I agree, with the caveat that it is not a personal idea existing in an individual mind.

Without that idea of intention, the notion of purpose seems reducible to simply the way things behave, or a kind of immanent cosmic balance as presented in the notions of dharma and Dao. — Janus

But as I pointed out, some degree of intentionality - not conscious intentionality, of course - is implicit in the activities of all organic life. That is what Aristotle and Greek philosophy classified as 'self-originated movement': organisms have an internal organising principle which acts towards an end, whereas the organising principle of artifacts, for example, is imposed from without by the artificer.

This kind of thinking was abandoned with the advent of Galilean physics, where the whole antiquated superstructure of Aristotelian physics, with it's 'natural places' for stones and the like, was discarded. The 'new science' sought to provide explanations solely in terms of the mechanical relations of measurable particulars, eschewing any idea of purpose. And that works fine as far as physics is concerned, but when it is applied to organic life, it is invariably reductionist, as it omits the purposeful activities that characterise even simple life-forms.

Subsequently, a neologism 'teleonomy' was devised by a biologist in 1958 to allow for the apparent purposeful activites of organisms (similar to Richard Dawkin's 'apparent' design in nature, which is not co-incidental.) But it was introduced to deal with the inescapably goal-directed nature of virtually all biological activity. 'Teleology is like a mistress to a biologist: he cannot live without her but he’s unwilling to be seen with her in public.’ Today (written in the 1930's) the mistress has become a lawfully wedded wife. Biologists no longer feel obligated to apologize for their use of teleological language; they flaunt it. The only concession which they make to its disreputable past is to rename it ‘teleonomy’.

But all of these philosophical considerations seem out-of-scope for this OP, so I'll leave it for now.