The Ninth Street Center Infrequently Asked Questions

What is the most important thing in life?

Aristotle defined four types of "causality," or ways of explaining why a thing is what it is. Its form and matter are important kinds of explanation, as are its ultimate purpose and (what we now think of as causality) the act that created it. Thus a baseball can be explained by talking about its function in the game of baseball, by explaining what it's made of, by identifying the purpose for which this particular ball was created, and by identifying the factory in which it was made.

What is the most important thing in life? There are probably as many of them as there are ways of defining importance or, for that matter, life. We can traverse this lineage of important things from the humble to the sublime, from the immediate to the immortal. For example, the most important thing in life, in one sense, is sheer survival from moment to moment. Without breathing, all else is unimportant. Similarly with sleeping and eating and avoiding fatal diseases. One rung up the ladder might come adaptive success. The most important thing from this perspective is not to perish for lack of social adaptivity -- as thousands do each day, after all. Another rung and we might arrive at the pursuit of happiness, loosely defined in the Jeffersonian sense as a state of mind in which you always have something more to look forward to in life: the next crop, the next child, the next election, or the next scientific revolution.

But this pursuit, at least as conventionally defined, cannot be the most important thing for many of us for it leaves out the question of historical significance. So another "most important thing" might be to some day be able to say, "I made a contribution to knowledge, or science, or morality, or world peace." To have changed the world for the better is an achievement that few of us are given the talent or will for, yet for those who do make their mark I can hardly imagine a more lasting elation.

Then again, how does one migrate from rung to rung in one's inner life? Through psychological growth, a process that is not easy to define except to say that, when you have experienced a significant moment of growth, you begin to see a whole new world of opportunities open up in front of you. The highest rung in the ladder of important things, at least that I can personally perceive, is just to be open to the possibility of psychological growth for an entire lifetime, to not "shut down" and just try to make what one already is and already knows work in an optimal fashion. Although the capacity for psychological growth is with us from birth, unlike other "virtues" the danger here is losing it through an unconscious veering towards conventionality and herd-like thinking and acting. The most important thing in life, then, is always knowing how incomplete any of us really always is, and always believing that there is more to life if only we believe in ourselves and refuse to compromise our highest ideals.