At the heart of all philosophical inquiry into meaning and purpose lies a central question: does the human individual really possess agency over his or her desires?  It is difficult not to resign ourselves to nihilistic complacency without assurance that we are in fact not deterministic creatures.  Conceptualizing meaning and purpose in life therefore first requires us to understand whether or not individuals genuinely have free will or instead lead a deterministic existence. 

According to Thomas Nagel, an agent is subject to “luck” insofar as personal constitutive properties are beyond his or her control: mental capacities, temperament, and emotional inclinations for example.  Antecedent circumstances determine the type of person an individual is and external factors influence the outcome of that person's actions.  Traits like conceit or feelings of superiority may have been acquired as a result of circumstances beyond an individual's control, such as certain neuro-chemical composition, parental influence, and so forth.  It would then seem that incompatibilists are correct in arguing that teleological explanations conflict with mechanistic explanations.  From this deterministic perspective, one can suggest that conceptions of meaning and purpose are irrelevant and indeed tautological given that human beings lead a deterministic existence, leaving “purpose” as simply being that which we are determined to do.

On the other hand, compatibilists argue that determinism does not negate free will.  While indeed the condition of control cannot be satisfied with regard to character traits, there are ways to attribute personal traits to the agent.  Susan Hurley, for instance, turns to a non-causal hypothetical/counterfactual choice model.  The hypothetical choice condition of responsibility is still an actual-sequence condition because what someone would do is a dispositional property of the way he or she actually is and of an actual event sequence.  Going beyond the possibility of regression, Charles Taylor and Susan Wolf also offer frameworks that reaffirm individual agency.  For example, Taylor suggests that a person's will can be self-assessed and redefined, while Wolf's "sane deep self" model offers a condition where one holds a "sufficient ability cognitively and normatively to recognize and appreciate the world for what it is." 

After considering free will and determinism arguments in the context of meaning and purpose, this paper ultimately offers two conclusions.  First, the compatibilist model that acknowledges free will allows human beings to pursue meaning and purpose without a sense of tautological futility, while purpose in a determined context would simply represent what an individual is determined to do.  Second, and most surprisingly, the mechanistic logic of the incompatibilist model offers a structured model for meaning and purpose in a spiritual way, and as this paper demonstrates, one that harkens back to a pre-Sartre existentialist strand of thought.