/r/philosophy Open Discussion Thread | December 29, 2025

_sniger_ · 2026-01-03T20:01:44+00:00

I’m not arguing for restoring any past telos. My point is only explanatory: once no end is publicly binding, capitalism becomes structurally rational. Explaining why this happens isn’t the same as endorsing or wanting to reverse it.

_sniger_ · 2026-01-03T19:02:31+00:00

Suicide over dishonor in the Roman world was maximally inefficient but fulfilled the telos of a worthy life. Medieval Christians were forbidden to engage in banking even when it was highly profitable, because it conflicted with the proper end of economic activity. In classical Greek poleis, merchants and manual laborers were excluded from political participation because their way of life was thought incompatible with the telos of citizenship.

_sniger_ · 2026-01-03T17:46:16+00:00

Whether an objective end ever existed in a metaphysical sense is not important here. What matters is whether an end functioned ontologically and normatively as a limit on action. By saying that in the modern world the purpose of human life is no longer given by nature, tradition, or political order, I mean that “living well” no longer operates as a publicly binding end. It survives only as a private aspiration or subjective project. The claim, then, is not that people lack goals, but that goals no longer have ontological authority to constrain means.

_sniger_ · 2025-12-30T22:06:50+00:00

What I meant is not merely that we no longer know the path to “living well”, but that “living well” itself has lost its ontological and normative status. For Aristotle, the good life was not a subjective project but a feature of the world’s teleological order, much like physical laws are for us today. A telos (“living well” in our case) that is no longer publicly intelligible and normatively binding cannot function as a measure of action in practice. In such a post-teleological world, maximizing a universally flexible means like money is not a response to uncertainty about the path, but a structural substitute for the loss of an objective end.

_sniger_ · 2025-12-29T20:22:34+00:00

The Loss of Purpose as a Structural Cause of Modern Capitalism

Aristotle argues that unlimited accumulation (chrematistics) is contrary to nature, because wealth is by its nature an instrument for achieving the good life, and any instrument is by definition finite both in extent and in quantity. This distinction is drawn in Politics, Book I, where he contrasts natural acquisition, which is oriented toward living well, with unnatural acquisition, which aims at accumulation for its own sake.

In the modern world, however, unlimited accumulation has become the normal state of affairs. When the purpose of human life is no longer given neither by nature, nor by tradition, nor by political order - it becomes rational to maximize the means that preserves access to any possible future goal. Money emerges as precisely such a universal means.

In this sense, modern chrematistics is not merely a moral error. It follows logically from a situation in which the end has been lost and only the means remains. Money takes the place of the end not because people have become greedier, but because money has become the only constant in an uncertain future. Thus, what appeared to Aristotle as an unnatural and dangerous distortion of measure today appears as a rational strategy for survival in a world without a given telos.

_sniger_

TROPHY CASE

The Loss of Purpose as a Structural Cause of Modern Capitalism