Existence Before Essence: What the Slogan Actually Means
July 2, 2026 | 1,827 words | 9min read
1. Introduction
“Existence is prior to essence” is a common slogan of existentialists1. What it means differs from philosopher to philosopher, but I want to try to give one interpretation of this frame and to show why getting clear on it resolves a deeper confusion running through much of my own recent writing.
In my last few articles, I identified various problems with contemporary analytic philosophical debate. I think I was correct in identifying these problems, but I now think I was identifying symptoms rather than the root cause or at best, second-order causes. What I want to do here is push deeper.
2. What I Got Right: The Symptoms
In On Language and Definitions, I argued that philosophical debates about “what is” questions go wrong because we try to systematize something that cannot be fully systematized. Meaning, I claimed, arises from a loose set of associations, not from strict rules. We build elaborate theories around single intuitions, ignoring the messiness of how words actually work. I identified the cause as language itself.
In The Eiffel Tower is NOT in Paris!, I argued that even seemingly objective statements like “The Eiffel Tower is in Paris” contain elements of subjectivity, in how they are expressed, how they are interpreted, and even in the underlying spatial concepts that depend on Dasein for their meaning.
In Stop Asking What Things Are, I rejected essentialism entirely. I argued that concepts do not have an inner essence waiting to be discovered, and that papers like On Bullshit or Is Justified True Belief Knowledge? proceed as if there were a single thing called “bullshit” or “knowledge” whose ultimate nature we could uncover. I called myself a non-essentialist.
In An Argument for Veganism and an Argument for Amoralism, I traced the problem with morality to normative force: morality binds us only as strongly as we desire it to. We can opt out. The authority of morality depends on a desire that can be changed.
All of these analyses are, I think, not wrong. But they are incomplete. They identify mechanisms: language, subjectivity, anti-essentialism and desire, without identifying what drives the whole machine.
3. What I Missed: The Root Cause
Here is what I now think is actually going on.
The problem is not that things lack essence or meaning. In fact, we rely on essence and meaning constantly. Without them, value judgments, conversation, and much more would become impossible. The problem is that we have the direction of dependence backwards.
We assume that essence comes before existence. Here is how this assumption plays out: we see particular objects in the world, different trees, for instance, and we develop a word to refer to this collection of particulars: “tree.” Then we start arguing over what constitutes “treeness,” or what makes a tree a tree. We behave as if there is some thing (call it a Platonic idea, though the mechanism is broader than that) and the many particular trees are merely instances of it, or constitute it in some way. We then try, through investigation of these particulars, to discover what this essence really is.
This is the mistake that runs through all of the problems I identified earlier. It is, to borrow a phrase from Max Stirner, a spook, a mental abstraction that has taken on a life of its own and now haunts us.
Consider the seminar on Augustine I am currently participating in. The topic of grace came up, and the group was asked to characterize grace. To answer the question “What is grace?” Various answers were given. Some said the definition involves someone more powerful than you granting something that is not societal expected. Then the argument turned on whether grace necessarily involves some kind of moral wrongdoing on the part of the recipient. One side argued it did; the other argued it did not.
From my perspective, the whole argument was going wrong from the start. It is not that we cannot give an account of the essence of grace, we can, we humans are perfectly capable of creating definitions. The problem is that there is not, and will never be, a definition that is completely objective and universal. Not because our language is imprecise, not because we are bad at thinking, but because the meaning of grace is subject to constant negotiation. It changes over time, across cultural periods, and between communities. The essence of the word is not fixed, it is being created and recreated as we speak.
4. Existence Before Essence: A Creation Story of Meaning
So what should we think instead?
The other way around. The particulars are primary. We, to use a Heideggerian term, are thrown into this world, condemned to being-in-the-world. We see many particular things and we ask ourselves: what do they have in common? What value do they have? What meaning is behind them? And because there was none, we created the meaning to make sense of the world.
If I were to tell a small creation story of meaning, it would go something like this:
First, there was the world. Then came the human, thrown into it. These humans saw many particular things and asked themselves what they had in common, what value they had, what meaning lay behind them. And because there was none, they created meaning to make sense of their world.
Essence, in other words, comes after existence. We create the ideas: the Platonic ideas, the universals, the essences of things. They do not pre-exist us.
5. Working Through the Examples
5.1 Morality
In my amoralism article, I argued that morality’s normative force depends on our desire to be moral, and that this desire can be changed. I said that if the desire disappears, we effectively opt out of the system of morality.
But that analysis, while not incorrect, identified the symptom rather than the underlying cause. What is actually happening when moral talk seems confused or goes nowhere is not that we can opt out of morality. It is that morality is a human invention: a way we, as humans, decided to make sense of actions around us.
We saw humans acting in ways we did not understand, being cruel, for instance, in the natural world. The human mind started wondering: what is the meaning behind this action? Why is this happening? In order to understand, we created a system of rules and forced people to comply with it. Through this, the actions of others now made sense again: there are actions that are moral and actions that are immoral. Why is this person being cruel? Because he is doing something immoral, and thus he is evil.
The system of morality was created to provide meaning, to understand the actions of others, but also to push human action inside the system.
This connects directly to what I have been reading in Active Inference: The Free Energy Principle in Mind, Brain, and Behavior2:
Active Inference is a normative framework to characterize Bayes-optimal behavior and cognition in living organisms. Its normative character is evinced in the idea that all facets of behavior and cognition in living organisms follow a unique imperative: minimizing the surprise of their sensory observations.
And:
Instead, a fundamental insight of Active Inference is that both perception and action serve the very same objective. As a first approximation, this common objective of perception and action can be formulated as a minimization of the discrepancy between the model and the world.
We see humans acting in ways we do not understand, being cruel, or what we now call immoral. We want to minimize the surprise in our world model, the discrepancy between what we expect and what we observe. We do this in the two ways Active Inference describes: we change our mind (perception) and we change the world (action). The invention of the story of good and evil is a change of mind, we now understand the cruel action, it fits in our model. And the enforcement of moral rules on others is a change of the world, we push people toward compliance.
5.2 The Eiffel Tower and Language
In my article on the Eiffel Tower, I argued that the sentence is not purely objective because language and spatial concepts are grounded in Dasein. And in Stop Asking What Things Are, I argued that essentialism is the problem. But these too are symptoms.
The deeper issue is that we assume there is a fixed referent, “Paris,” “the Eiffel Tower,” “morality”, some stable essence of the thing that the word points to. We then treat philosophical disagreement as a disagreement about this pre-existing essence. But there is no pre-existing essence. There is only the ongoing process of creating and negotiating meaning.
5.3 Negotiation of Meaning
As argued in the paper Disagreement and the Semantics of Normative and Evaluative Terms, a constant process of negotiation occurs whenever we use evaluative language. But this is not limited to values, it applies to all essences. Every time we use a term like “tree,” “grace,” “morality,” or “Paris,” we participate in the creation and modification of its essence.
Consider: someone points to a shrub and calls it a tree. Someone else says: “No, that is not a tree, you are wrong.” What is happening here is not that there is some essence of “treeness” and one person is right while the other is wrong. Rather, they are negotiating what the term means. They are in the process of creating meaning.
And this process has no endpoint. Essences are not fixed, they are constantly being renegotiated through use, through disagreement, through cultural change.
6. Conclusion
So where does this leave us?
The slogan “existence is prior to essence” is not just a metaphysical claim. It is a methodological one. It tells us that when we encounter philosophical confusion, whether about morality, language, knowledge, or grace, we should not ask “What is the true essence of X?” We should instead ask: “How did the concept of X arise? What work is it doing? How is it being negotiated?”
The problems I identified in my earlier articles, the imprecision of language, the subjectivity of seemingly objective statements, the contingency of moral authority, are real. But they are downstream of a more fundamental error: the assumption that essence precedes existence, that there is something there to be discovered rather than something being created.
Once we flip the direction, the picture changes. The word comes after the thing. The essence comes after the particular. Meaning comes after the human. And if we keep this in mind, we might stop arguing about what things really are, and start paying attention to the much more interesting question: how do we participate in shaping the world we inhabit?
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