[QUOTE=Liberal]
Take the example often given of a little old lady standing on a street corner. Existentially, she is nothing more than a collection of electromagnetic waves and subatomic particles suspended in a field of gravity. She pre-exists her essence. That means that you are free to apply whatever moral interpretation to her that you wish. You may mug or rape her just as well as you may help her cross the street, and either one has whatever moral value you want to attach to it, if any.
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Liberal, you and mswas seem to claim that an existentialist must also be a solipsist. olivesmarch4th remarked that this is not clear to her, and it is not clear to me either. The little old lady standing on the street may or may not have pre-existed her essence, but the fact that she is old tells me that she has existed for some time, meaning that she currently has an essence. That being the case, it is not clear to me how or why the old lady’s moral value has anything to do with the existential question.
Put another way: if you’re planning to break into my house to steal the million dollars I have tucked away under my mattress, does it really matter whether I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth or got it along the way?
[QUOTE=Wikipedia, from Liberal]
Existence precedes essence", is a philosophic concept based on the idea of existence without essence. For humanity, it means that humanity may exist, but humanity’s existence does not mean anything at least at the beginning. This concept can be applied at the individual level as well. The value and meaning of this existence—or essence—is created only later. It directly and strongly rejects many traditional beliefs including religious beliefs that humankind is given a knowable purpose by its creator or other deity. The idea of “existence precedes essence” is a key foundational concept of existentialism.
<snip>
For Sartre, who did not believe in God as the creator of humanity, believed that if there is no God to have conceived of our essence or nature, then we must come into existence first, and then create our own essence out of interaction with our surroundings and ourselves. With this comes serious implications of self-responsibility over who we become and who we are. There is no longer, for Sartre, some universal “human nature”.
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I still maintain that the only sensible way to interpret “essence” in this context is something like an Aristotelean final cause, or a purpose. I gave, in my first post, two examples of when this is demonstratably true. If we take “essence” to mean the first definition that Sophistry and Illusion] gave, then I don’t see why we need all of the metaphysical baggage that you want to incorporate, in addition to the other point SaI raises. If we take it to mean the second definition (existence without form or properties), then “existence precedes essence” becomes false, but in a trivial and useless way. Again, we don’t need any additional metaphysics to answer the question.
[QUOTE=Sophistry and Illusion]
Word. This is what I’ve been saying. Which is why I’ve been arguing that no choice of values is really made in a vacuum; you don’t create your own values ex nihilo, as the existentialist seemed to think. But my posts to that effect have been largely ignored, leading me to believe (a) that they sucked balls and nobody has anything to say about them, or (b) that everybody finds the metaphysical discussion more interesting and would rather talk about that.
[/QUOTE]
IMHO, the question of whether our choice of values is completely unconstrained was answered well within the first page. If we want to discuss a similar question, e.g., how constrained is our choice of values, or perhaps about the mechanism by which we come to adopt these values, then I am more than willing to take part.