The Necessary Nature of a Highest End

Human beings are purpose-driven creatures. I could of course make a derivative appeal to the popularity of books like The Purpose-Driven Life or Man’s Search for Meaning to substantiate this point, but I don’t think it needs much justification. Everything we do is toward some end, whether consciously or unconsciously. This is self-evident. There is nothing – and I do mean nothing – that we do without reason, or actually do “just because.” We may do something “for its own sake,” so to speak, like taking a walk through the beauty of nature, but even this is done toward an end – toward the experience of Beauty.

In fact, this does not apply only to human beings. Created things as such display this characteristic, albeit in a unconscious, or at least less conscious, way. However, human beings, being indeed conscious, have a special characteristic that separates them from all other created things. We have free will and are thus able to choose the ends toward which our actions point, and furthermore, among the ends we choose, we are able to “rank them,” so to speak, prioritizing which should take priority over another in a given situation.

What does this mean? This means that, because we choose (1) the ends toward which our actions point and (2) the way in which we prioritize those ends, all human beings have a chosen, highest end. Now, this choosing may not always be especially conscious; for instance, we may just orient toward the highest end that we were raised to have, whether by our parents or by our general cultural milieu, and those who have gone before us may have done the same thing. “Spiritual awakenings,” then, are often exactly this – the realization that we have not chosen our highest end consciously enough and that we now need a better one.

Some common ends that we humans direct ourselves toward include wealth, notoriety, power, and romantic fulfillment.

However, suppose that we make something like wealth our highest end. The problem with wealth, despite its immense utility, is that it is finite. No matter how much you have, there will always be more to earn, and at no point does your net worth cross a “final threshold” that guarantees to leave you fulfilled ultimately and in perpetuum. Furthermore, being finite, more wealth for me means less wealth for you. Wealth-as-highest-end does not scale; I would have to sacrifice my highest end to support yours, at which point I would be choosing the sacrifice of my wealth as a higher end, not the wealth in and of itself. (Perhaps we’re on to something there.)

Suppose that we make something like romantic fulfillment our highest end. The problem with romantic fulfillment, though, is that romance requires a partner, and no human being is guaranteed to be perfect – in fact, any human being is guaranteed to be imperfect, a flawed person who will fail you. The same goes for notoriety, power, and even wealth for that matter: they simply cannot be guaranteed to be maintained.

If we are to have any hope at all, then, of a highest end that can actually bear the weight of its role, then these two observations lead us to conclude that it must possess two characteristics: it must be (1) infinite and (2) perfect.

What, then, might this Highest End be?