There’s an existentialist saying “existence precedes essence”. In other words, we aren’t here doing things because we have some values that we need to pursue by existing. We’re here because our parents got horny. We create values for ourselves to give us (the illusion of) purpose and make our existence bearable, but the values are post-hoc inventions. As such, they are not more consistent that we make them, nor more binding than we choose to let them be.
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).
There’s an existentialist saying “existence precedes essence”. In other words, we aren’t here doing things because we have some values that we need to pursue by existing. We’re here because our parents got horny. We create values for ourselves to give us (the illusion of) purpose and make our existence bearable, but the values are post-hoc inventions. As such, they are not more consistent that we make them, nor more binding than we choose to let them be.
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).