Your point runs even deeper than you suggest (to my reading). We can read “existence precedes essence” as Sartre’s take on Heidegger’s “back to the things themselves”, i.e. to put the ontic before the ontological, or noumena before phenomena. You suggest a teleological approach to essence, that we create values and other forms of understanding to make sense of the senseless because we need sense to make life bearable (that’s our telos or purpose here: coping with the lack of extrinsic meaning), but the point holds even if we consider it non-teleologically: all of our understanding is post hoc, it always comes after the thing itself, and our sense of values is consequently not whatever the thing is that causes us to act such that we can interpret our observations of those actions as if they were essential values, but instead a posterior pattern matching to that which happened that we call “values” (caveat of course being that the very act of understanding is embodied and so feeds back into the real thing itself, only without necessarily fitting our understanding of it).
Your point runs even deeper than you suggest (to my reading). We can read “existence precedes essence” as Sartre’s take on Heidegger’s “back to the things themselves”, i.e. to put the ontic before the ontological, or noumena before phenomena. You suggest a teleological approach to essence, that we create values and other forms of understanding to make sense of the senseless because we need sense to make life bearable (that’s our telos or purpose here: coping with the lack of extrinsic meaning), but the point holds even if we consider it non-teleologically: all of our understanding is post hoc, it always comes after the thing itself, and our sense of values is consequently not whatever the thing is that causes us to act such that we can interpret our observations of those actions as if they were essential values, but instead a posterior pattern matching to that which happened that we call “values” (caveat of course being that the very act of understanding is embodied and so feeds back into the real thing itself, only without necessarily fitting our understanding of it).