The Project-To-Live: Why People Do What They Do and Feel What They Feel

By Paul George Claudel

"This is a short essay presenting a philosophical model on the meaning and purpose of life. It addresses the very basic but critical question: ""Why do people do what they do and feel what they feel?"" In other words, is it possible to identify a fundamental motivating factor that commands and explains all our deeds, impressions and desires? And if so, how can such an ultimate reference of meaning help us to lead a better life?

Although it recognizes its due to our philosophical tradition, this book is meant to be of easy access, written so that most readers can enjoy it."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 6, 2003
• ISBN: 9781465329905

Paul George Claudel

Paul Claudel spent a large part of his professional life in the corporate world, including almost ten years a s a Vice President Human Resources in a large multinational telecom company. Since he left the corporate world in 1996, P. Claudel has been operating independently as an international consultant. He also teaches in Business Schools and in companies, mainly on the subjects of Human Resources, Organisations, Leadership and also Philosophy as applied to Business. He has published several books on the subject of Leadership and Philosophy, in collaboration with Pierre Casse and on his own.

Book preview

Copyright © 2003 by Paul George Claudel.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

[e-mail]

19600

Contents

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CONCLUSION

APPENDIXES

All men and all women are philosophers. If they are not conscious of having philosophical problems, they have, at any rate, philosophical prejudices. Most of these theories which they take for granted, they have absorbed them from their intellectual environment or their tradition. Since few of these theories are consciously held, they are prejudices in the sense that they are held without critical examination, even though they may be of great importance for the practical actions of people, and for their whole life.

Karl Popper (1902-1994)

INTRODUCTION

The unexamined life is not worth living.

Plato (428-347B.C.)

This book offers a representation of life, and by the same token of the world in its whole, since we will also attempt to validate the notion that as living beings we indeed extend so far as to include the totality of what exists.

In presenting this model of life, we do not pretend to give guidance as to how one should go about with one’s life, but to clarify what it is that makes each one of us do what we do and feel as we feel. We believe, and indeed will try to demonstrate, that this understanding alone can help the reader decide for himself on the appropriate course of his own existence, much better than any arbitrary counseling on our part.

To achieve this purpose we have chosen to present life in the form of a very simple model structured in three modules, each of which constitutes an intrinsic part of our selves. The model is called The Project-to-Live and it covers at once our being and our existence: We are thrown into this world as a project and the implementation of this project is our sole and exclusive raison d’etre.

The first two chapters of this book will introduce our philosophical model of life in general terms and explain how we are structured in a way that determines the various aspects of our way of being.

The next three chapters are devoted to the description of the three modules that compose our Project-to-Live. In these chapters we will review in detail how we are built and organized to function. We will constantly emphasize as we go along how our entire behavior is geared towards the accomplishment of our Project-to-Live, which will thus appear as the constant and only reference of meaning and purpose of our entire presence in this world.

The following chapter will examine the Art of Living, namely a set of universal patterns of our existence, such as the economic constraints that we are inexorably submitted to, or the ethical rules that we adopt to guide our behavior, or again the common but controversial notions of freedom and responsibility. All these patterns are but forms under which our Project-to-Live accomplishes itself and we will attempt to demonstrate that they can be fully understood only in relation to our ultimate purpose in life.

Finally, we have also included three Appendixes in which: (1) we will attempt to demonstrate how our model can serve as a tool to understand even the most paradoxical and ambiguous of our behaviors, namely the taking of our own life; (2) we present a series of personal assessments to help the reader get a better picture of him/herself in relation to the Project-to-Live model; and (3) we offer a summary of the book in the form of an integrated e-Glossary defining the key words that enter in the description of our model.

We believe in philosophy as a tool to understand the meaning and purpose of our selves in this world. We think that philosophy needs to be expressed in a language that is accessible to all, lest it becomes a way to disguise the lack of having anything meaningful to say. Therefore we have tried to make this book as readable as possible.

Of course, the model presented, inasmuch as it claims to be philosophical has not been drawn out of the blue, without any reference or debt to the philosophical tradition as passed on to us by the great thinkers of this world. We have chosen however not to make any explicit reference to these thinkers because our purpose is to remain simple, to try to make a very precise point of our own and not to present a textbook for academic use. We do want to stress however the debt we have towards the infinitely precious heritage that makes us all who we are in our thinking today. The quotations we have inserted at the head of each of our chapters are meant to express this obligation.

CHAPTER 1

The Project-to-Live

"For every man is desirous of what is good for him, and shuns the evil, but chiefly the chiefest of natural evils, which is death; and this he doth by a certain impulsion of nature, no less than that by which a stone moves forward.

" Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)

Life is a project.

As living beings we have the form of a project. Right from the start, intrinsically, we are dynamic, not static.

As a project we constantly aim at something, want something, strive for something.

This project involves our whole being which is structured and organized to serve and implement it: not only our mind but also all our organic functions, our unconscious as well as our conscious self, are devoted to the satisfaction of this primordial purpose which is, by the same token, our very essence.

The project of life is to go for its own perpetuation.

We call this all-encompassing project our Project-to-Live (PTL).

The specificity of the PTL is that it is aimed at nothing else than its own perpetuation. There is nothing in particular for it to obtain, no result that will relieve it from its purpose, no end that could denote its final completion: It is just aiming to go on and on for as long as possible. (Although, as we shall see, duration alone is not enough to measure the success of our Project-to-Live.)

We shall be careful, as we move on, not to confuse the Project-to-Live as we have just defined it, with the multiple projects of all sorts that we fulfill in the daily course of our existence. Whilst our Project-to-Live has no other finality than its own perpetuation as such, each one of the other numerous projects that we undertake during our life tends towards a specific end, the purpose of which is always to contribute for its part to the realization of our overall Project-to-Live.

In other words, whilst we always strive to lead our daily undertakings to their term, as regards our Project-to-Live, it is in no way its end but its mere continuation as such that we aim for. In fact, the only end that we can conceive for our Project-to-Live is our death which we can never picture as being its accomplishment, but only its unwanted interruption.

To live is to want to live.

To live is to do and to feel. Whatever we do in life, we do exclusively in order to accomplish our PTL. Whatever we feel, is a way for us to measure the degree to which our PTL is effectively being accomplished. Life, as seen from our own perspective, can have no other sense or purpose.

Therefore, to live, for us human beings, is just to go on doing what is needed to stay alive. To live is to maintain ourselves in the way of the Project that we are.

The Project-to-Live is the ultimate reference of meaning.

Our Project-to-Live is the deepest and most stable perception we have of our own identity, of what or who we actually are and want.

As a consequence, we can consider that our PTL is also our ultimate reference of meaning. It is in relation to our PTL that we give sense to everything that we encounter in this world. Our PTL is our universal yardstick. Objects, people, events will have a meaning, and a value, for us only if and when we understand to what extent they have an effect on the accomplishment of our PTL.

To parody an ancient Greek philosopher, we could say: I, as a PTL, am the measure of all things.

The more I become aware of my Project-to-Live as the basic motivator behind my actions and emotions, the better chance I will have to cope with my own life and entertain a meaningful relationship with others.

CHAPTER 2

The Structure of the Project-to-Live

Man is the measure of all things.

Protagoras (485-411 B.C.)

My PTL, which identifies my self as a living human being, is structured as follows.

The Will-to-Live

The purpose of the PTL

The Power-to-Live

The means of the PTL

The Way-to-Live

The accomplishment of the PTL As living beings we are built as a project, which means here that we are articulated according to a three-module structure.

The first module of our PTL is the purpose, the intent of our project, or its raison d’être. This purpose is called the Will-to-Live and we will develop it in our next chapter.

The second module includes the resources that our project will draw upon in order to work towards its goal. These means of accomplishment of our PTL we call the Power-to-Live. They will be amply examined in following chapters.

The third module is the actual accomplishment of our Project-to-Live, or in other words our very existence in all its aspects, i.e., everything that we do and everything that we feel. We call this implementation of our life the Way-to-Live. We shall investigate our way to live further ahead in this book.

My structure determines my behavior as a living being. It is because I take the form of a project that I feel a constant desire to achieve something, that I strive for power in one aspect or the other, and that I act as I do and am prone to emotions. The only way to understand my behavior in all its implications is therefore to keep in mind my intrinsic identity as an articulated project and to relate any manifestation of my life to the corresponding module of my structure.

Since my PTL is articulated as a structure where all three modules are organically bound together, I may regard it as a system, meaning that each part contributes to and relies on the whole. Every element of my being is connected through some kind of cause and effect chain to all its other elements, while they all strive together towards the accomplishment of my PTL.

We human beings may—and do—actually differ, as we shall see further on, in the actual composition of each module of our PTL, but never in the fact that all three of them necessarily partake in the making of all of us.

We all share the same basic structure, which characterizes life as opposed to inert matter. This means that as humans we do not differ intrinsically from other living beings in this world, but only by the complexity of the means (the Power-to-Live) that we make use of to accomplish our existence. It is this similarity in our basic structure, and in particular in the very purpose of our Project (the Will-to-Live), that is at the root of the solidarity and compassion that instinctively makes us feel close to, and often protective of, other living beings, which we will normally alienate or destroy only when we have to in order to accomplish our own