Sartre’s slogan—“your existence precedes your essence”—may serve to introduce what is most distinctive of existentialism, namely, the idea that no general, non-formal account of what it means to be human can be given, since that meaning is decided in and through existing itself.
For many thinkers there is no such thing as human nature” in an Aristotelian sense. A person does not have an inbuilt set of values that they are inherently structured to pursue.
Such an entity’s existing cannot, therefore, be thought as the instantiation of an essence, and consequently what it means to be such an entity cannot be determined by appeal to pre-given frameworks or systems—whether scientific, historical, or philosophical.
Rather, the values that shape a person’s behavior result from the choices they have made. In contrast to other entities, whose essential properties are fixed by the kind of entities they are, what is essential to a human being—what makes her who she is—is not fixed by her type but by what she makes of herself, who she becomes
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