Recently, I was helping a dear friend with an essay, and the topic of the essay was one that presented her with serious difficulties. The topic of the essay was writing about the purpose of science, and asking whether it was to serve the interests of humanity or something else. This response of stupefaction about trying to write about “the” purpose of science was entirely appropriate. Like any human endeavor, science has many purposes. Even science itself is a deep abstraction of a whole host of activities that people take up for a variety of reasons and purposes relating to the whole host of human experience and observation of the entire material universe. My own answer to the question, such as it was, is that the main purpose of science is to better understand the universe that we are a part of, and from that greater understanding of reality we can find information that can be of practical benefit and use to humanity, giving the example of medicinal plants being a useful result of pure scientific investigation into botany. What I would like to comment upon today is the inapplicability of trying to think of “the” purpose of anything, and how looking for only one reason blinds us to the complexity of human motivations for doing anything and everything.

It is necessary to admit at this point that a great deal of my interest in discussing the complexity of motivation comes from my own understanding of my own complex motivations for doing anything. While some people might find me to be a rather lazy person because of my tendency to spend hours working, writing, and thinking inside my small bedroom that I affectionately refer to as my cave, I consider myself rather to be an energy-efficient person who requires reasons (generally in the plural) to expend my energy to go anywhere. I do not think this experience is unusual. The more reasons we can summon up to do something, the more likely it is that we will do it, and things that we are inclined to do or desire to do will already have built-in reasons that we may not even need to consciously consider, while things that we do not want to do, for whatever reason, will have reasons against doing them that we will also likely be unconscious of that will need to be overcome by reasons in favor of acting against our own wishes or desires. Some reasons for doing things will be internal reasons that strike close to the heart of who we are as people and which we may not be inclined to tell others, while other reasons will be the cover reasons that we present people and which may be necessary for us to do them at all. Indeed, we will likely need both real motivation as well as a suitable cover story to do many things and go many places, especially if it may be necessary to inform people about our going who may require some justification or defense for our behavior to begin with.

Often, the sort of things that we do are overdetermined, in that there are such overwhelming reasons for us to do what we do that untangling one reason as being the main reason is difficult to impossible. Frequently private motivations that may be so private that we may not openly acknowledge or admit them and those motivates that we are willing to publish can combine in such a way that behaving in certain ways or going to certain places to do certain things is inevitable. There is simply so much pushing for it that it cannot be helped. Where does this bias towards wanting to find one reason come from, though, if most of us could examine ourselves and our own conduct and see several reasons for why we have the habits and patterns of behavior that we do, ranging from being people of habit to a certain enjoyment in the cozy and familiar to positive experiences that we have from spending time with people we already like and enjoy and eating foods and engaging in activities that we know that we like without any risk or uncertainty in the matter, along with any other number of reasons that could easily be enumerated as the case may require.

In my own life, at least, thinking of one purpose often comes to the academic study I have undertaken in writing, where the writing of thesis or purpose statements for one’s speeches and essays was drilled into my head and those of fellow learners. Even here, though, while there may be a specific purpose or thesis to a given essay, there are likely to be other reasons and purposes why this essay or this sort of subject matter is of interest. The subjects that interest me are influenced by my own situation, my own preoccupations, my own life experiences, as well as my interactions with others. Other people will be influenced by their own education and experiences and preoccupations and personal interests which will be different from my own. I am generally confident, no matter where I happen to be speaking or writing, that no one will think of exactly the sort of material or approach that I do in a given situation, because I am sufficiently distinct from those around me that no one is going to go about the task the way I would, a confidence informed by the outcome of many such experiences. Even when we go about explaining the purpose of a given speech or essay, we may be unaware of or unwilling to disclose the reason we choose to talk or write about that given subject at that specific time. Sometimes it may be because of some irritation, or because of an intense and long-held curiosity about a subject, or perhaps there may be someone’s conduct which bothers us and which we wish to address in an indirect fashion. These purposes inform what we say, what we choose to focus on in a given topic and what we omit, as well as the tone and approach that we use to the subject matter.

In all of these cases and many other ones, a great deal of motivation exists for our conduct that we may not be able to verbalize, even if we were so inclined. Many times we judge, rightly, that our goals would be hindered by being too up front about our own personal motivations for writing or speaking about a given subject. To the extent that others were are that their behavior provoked us to speak or write about a problem, to marshal arguments from scripture and history as well as the intellectual artillery of our reasoning processes to fire at them with all of the passionate indignation of our hearts, they might be highly resistant to whatever we had to say. People are more likely to hear us out if they do not think we have some personal hostility or animus against them, but if they think that we are biased against them, they may not wish to take anything we have to say favorably, thinking it all tainted by our unacceptable perspective. Many of us are not inclined to look too closely or dig too deeply into the reasons for our thoughts, words, and actions, and being too curious about the motivations of others is nearly uniformly viewed as a hostile and unpleasant act. Suffice it to say, though, that we would not do what we do, or say what we say, or approach life the way that we do without having multiple reasons to do so. The more reasons that we have, and the more obvious that they are, the less likely that we will consider them as anything other than entirely justified as seeking to express and live in the absolute truth, regardless of how partial or limited or complex such truth may be when examined critically. How could we behave otherwise, though? We must act as if our motivations are pure and our reasons just and proper, or else we would not be inclined to act at all.