Essence is one’s accumulated past, made by living rather than predetermined.

Evidence

Sartre put this principle into a three-word slogan, which for him defined existentialism: ‘Existence precedes essence’. What this formula gains in brevity it loses in comprehensibility. But roughly it means that, having found myself thrown into the world, I go on to create my own definition (or nature, or essence), in a way that never happens with other objects or life forms. You might think you have defined me by some label, but you are wrong, for I am always a work in progress. I create myself constantly through action, and this is so fundamental to my human condition that, for Sartre, it is the human condition, from the moment of first consciousness to the moment when death wipes it out. I am my own freedom: no more, no less. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 27 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

This means also that the type of being of consciousness is the opposite of that which the ontological proof reveals to us. Since consciousness is not possible before being, but since its being is the source and condition of all possibility, its existence implies its essence. Husserl expresses this aptly in speaking of the “necessity of fact.” In order for there to be an essence of pleasure, there must be first the fact of a consciousness (of) this pleasure. It is futile to try to invoke pretended laws of consciousness of which the articulated whole would constitute the essence. A law is a transcendent object of knowledge; there can be consciousness of a law, not a law of consciousness. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 137 (#expands, via linked claim)

Past. What the For-itself has been. The Past thus becomes Being-in-itself and is the For-itself’s essence and substance as well as part of its facticity. This is the only sense in which the For-itself has either essence or substance since in its living present it “is what it is not and is not what it is.” — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1505 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: One’s past is grounded in the world by becoming In-itself, losing transcendence.; Manness is not an essence but something each for-itself freely sustains — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1224; Existence precedes essence and carries a subjective quality in human reality. (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• Human beings create their own essence through action rather than inheriting a fixed nature #corroborates (0.88) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 27
• For consciousness, existence precedes and grounds any essence #expands (0.85) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 137
• The past is the only essence a for-itself ever possesses #expands (0.82) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1505
• Existentialists share the belief that existence precedes essence #corroborates (0.80) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, 7
• Woman’s mystery reflects that essence does not precede existence #corroborates (0.72) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 662