The existentialists Sartre and Beauvoir once touted that existence precedes essence. Such a framing falls victim to the same linear thinking that has us all beholden to causality as the governing principle of existence and occurrence. In point of fact, neither precedes the other, but rather they interpenetrate and codefine as the twins of any duality do.
In a recent treatment of epigenetics and existentialism, the author, Ada Jaarsma, proposes that "Meaning-making, or choosing one's birth, is about navigating the pathway between what's stable and what's affectable. It's only when something given (some aspect of my bodily existence) opens up into something that can be chosen or imagined that existential choice gains meaning." Like Sartre, she is pulling chickens out of eggs and calling them prior.
While I need to choose my own birth, existentially and evolutionarily, my birth is not a solo story. This choice brings me to my own mother's birth, and far beyond, inviting the question of how far, temporally, we extend. What's the crucial turning point, developmentally, in the emergence of us as ‘us'? Is it the emergence of art, or language, or bipedalism – or something we have not yet intuited at all?
What if there is no turning point? It seems that like every other being in and of Nature, we grow of the matrix well-defined and predestined, shaped by everything that precedes us and shaping anything we precede. The conceit of the mind fixates us on finding some key difference, some meaningful distinction between us (me) and your average bear. That may be pure fantasy.
There are only points of departure, Beauvoir wrote. Each individual is a fresh start. And there is a difference between considering who and what we are from the outside (‘a herd of intelligent animals') and considering who I am as a human in continuity with evolution, not replaceable by anyone else.
Once again grasping for importance, Ada and Beauvoir fail to see the infinite extent of epigenetics which can be expanded to describe the choicelessness of our existence through the completeness of our essence. We are not all destined to see our True Nature. Those who are and do see who they are do not doubt their importance, but also do not assign it to a bony water balloon with a name.