The concept of ‘Non Purposive Being’ occupies a quietly pivotal position in depth-psychological and phenomenological discourse, marking the zone where entities — and, more radically, Dasein itself — exist prior to or apart from any intentional, goal-directed structure. The corpus registers two distinct though mutually informing lines of inquiry. The first, rooted in Heidegger’s analytic of Dasein, interrogates whether being-in-the-world is fundamentally constituted by purposive referential totalities — the ‘in-order-to’ chains of equipment — or whether there is a more primordial stratum of Being that precedes all such teleological assignment. The second line emerges through Winnicott’s clinical insistence that the self cannot be located in purposive creative products, however artistically accomplished: being, for Winnicott, must precede doing if the self is to be found at all. Lorenz’s reconstruction of Aristotle introduces the necessary contrast: purposive locomotion requires phantasia and the apprehension of a prospective situation; where such apprehension is absent, movement becomes non-purposive in the strict sense. Thompson’s reading of Maturana and Varela adds a systems-biological dimension, noting that autopoietic living organization is, by definition, purposeless in its self-constitution. Edinger’s gloss on Jung anchors the theological register: Nature as God’s creation supplies no grounds for believing it to be purposive. Together, these voices make non-purposive being not a deficiency but a condition of possibility for authentic existence.
the search for the self the person concerned may have produced something valuable in terms of art, but a successful artist may be universally acclaimed and yet have failed to find the self that he or she is looking for.
Winnicott argues that purposive creative production — however accomplished — cannot yield the self, implying that genuine selfhood is grounded in a mode of being that is non-purposive.
, Playing and Reality, 1971thesis
In calling autopoietic systems purposeless, Maturana and Varela meant that the notions of purpose, aim, goal, and function are ‘unnecessary for the definition of the living organization, and… belong to a descriptive domain distinct from and independent of the domain in which the living system’s’
Thompson reports that Maturana and Varela explicitly characterize living self-organization as purposeless, locating purpose in a descriptive domain external to the system’s own constitutive domain.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007thesis
Nature, i.e., God’s creation, does not give us enough reason to believe it to be purposive or re
Edinger, transmitting Jung’s letter, asserts that the natural order — as divine creation — affords no grounds for attributing purposiveness to being, situating non-purposive being at the heart of the God-image problematic.
, Transformation of the God-Image: An Elucidation of Jung’s Answer to Job, 1992thesis
If a desire is to support, and account for, purposive locomotion, forming it involves envisaging a prospective situation. Envisaging a prospect, then, is a cognitive task that a subject must actually perform if it is to engage in purposive locomotion.
Lorenz reconstructs Aristotle’s position that purposive locomotion necessarily requires phantasia and the apprehension of a prospective situation, thereby defining by contrast what non-purposive movement would entail.
, The Brute Within: Appetitive Desire in Plato and Aristotle, 2006supporting
your recoiling from the oven when you inadvertently put your hand on a hot surface may be driven simply by your aversion to an intensely painful experience, without any apprehension of a prospect being involved or required in addition; and it may be appropriate to say that your locomotion has a purpose
Lorenz identifies reflex-like aversion as a borderline case that approximates non-purposive movement, noting it does not constitute a standard model of purposive locomotion and cannot account for the variety of animal motivation.
, The Brute Within: Appetitive Desire in Plato and Aristotle, 2006supporting
we may not be able to solve the problem, we can comp ground from under it. For it is demonstrably untrue that we are being carried alo less stream of ideas when, in the process of interpreting a dream reflection and allow involuntary ideas to emerge.
Freud challenges the notion of purely purposeless ideation in dream-work, arguing that ostensibly non-purposive chains of thought are always underlain by latent purposive ideas operating outside conscious direction.
, The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900supporting
Strictly speaking, therefore, the organization of nature has nothing analogous to any causality known to us.
Thompson, via Kant, establishes that natural self-organization resists reduction to any known form of purposive causality, laying a philosophical foundation for the concept of non-purposive being in living systems.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007supporting
Considering a dream from the standpoint of finality, which I contrast with the causal standpoint of Freud, does not — as I would expressly like to emphasize — involve a denial of the dream’s causes, but rather a different interpretation of the associative material gathered round the dream.
Jung distinguishes finalistic from causal standpoints in dream interpretation, a methodological distinction that presupposes the theoretical possibility of psychic events that are not reducible to purposive teleological structure.
, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, 1960supporting
what he is committed to, so far as non-rational motivation is concerned, is not that phantasia is required for the formation of every desire, but that it is required for the formation of desires that impel animals to engage in locomotion.
Lorenz delimits Aristotle’s claim about phantasia to locomotion-producing desires, leaving conceptual space for non-rational motivational states that do not eventuate in purposive movement.
, The Brute Within: Appetitive Desire in Plato and Aristotle, 2006aside
The real reason for the prevalence of superficial associations is the abandonment of purposive ideas but the pressure of the censorship.
Freud argues that superficially non-purposive associative chains in dreams are not truly purposeless but result from censorship displacing purposive connections onto indirect pathways.
, The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900aside