Values are invented by people since there is no a priori meaning

Evidence

To that I can only say that I am very sorry that it should be so; but if I have excluded God the Father, there must be somebody to invent values. We have to take things as they are. And moreover, to say that we invent values means neither more nor less than this; that there is no sense in life a priori. Life is nothing until it is lived; but it is yours to make sense of, and the value of it is nothing else but the sense that you choose. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, 32

Categorization

• DEFINE: Sartre’s core existentialist claim about invented values and life only having the meaning one chooses.
• XREF: Connects directly to Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity, a natural pairing for this reading purpose. — connects to: Values are inherited from the social world, not invented from nothing — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of…, 213; Values are created absolutely by human attachment, not discovered; Humans lack any predefined nature and create themselves through choices — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 26 (+3 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: The core existentialist inversion—no a priori sense in life, values chosen rather than discovered—remains the load-bearing idea of the whole movement.

Related

• Values are inherited from the social world, not invented from nothing (similarity 0.89)
• A single free person cannot generate genuinely moral values. (similarity 0.82)
• Sartre grounds all value in an unjustified, self-legitimizing freedom (similarity 0.81)
• Nothing justifies the values a free being adopts since freedom grounds all values (similarity 0.80)
• The spirit of seriousness treats values as absolute rather than made by human freedom (similarity 0.80)
• Humans lack any predefined nature and create themselves through choices (similarity 0.80)
• Existence precedes essence and carries a subjective quality in human reality. (similarity 0.80)
• Man is condemned to be free because he creates neither himself nor his values. (similarity 0.80)
• Human beings create their own essence through action rather than inheriting a fixed nature (similarity 0.79)
• Value is intuited only as a beyond of concrete acts (similarity 0.79)
• Existentialist ethics demand acting as if the fate of humanity rests on each choice (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Values are inherited from the social world, not invented from nothing #contradicts (0.95) — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 213
• Moral standards are personally constructed, not passively absorbed #corroborates (0.95)
• Values are created absolutely by human attachment, not discovered #corroborates (0.92)
• The spirit of seriousness treats values as absolute rather than made by human freedom #expands (0.85) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1520
• Humans lack any predefined nature and create themselves through choices #expands (0.82) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 26
• Decentering the subject displaces humanity from the origin of meaning #complicates (0.75)