Existentialism

[Belacqua]

the human being needs to realize that we are nothing except what we make of ourselves, so we need to define ourselves in terms of the lack of what we wish to become and thereby disclose Being. And all this deciding and intending is nothing without action.

[emphasis added]

I suspect that in Existentialist books there is a great deal said about facticity, or thrownness, and exactly where we can draw the lines of what is a situation we are thrown into, and what is chosen by us. And then we have to ask to what degree our essence -- or let's say "that which we truly are" -- is a part of this thrownness or something we freely choose. 

So obviously we are born with certain kinds of bodies. We need oxygen, that's not a choice. We see only a limited range of the color spectrum. 
We might say that these givens are inevitable, but "what we really are" is what we make of ourselves within these limits. 

This would be a pretty unpopular thing to say to gay or trans people these days. "Born this way" has been a slogan for gay people for a while now. It's verboten to say that being gay is a choice. Yet I think that a person's sexuality is unquestionably a part of what they truly are. 

From Lou Andreas Salome, friend of Nietzsche, lover of Rilke, student and debate partner of Freud:

The psyche is an archive, culture denotes inhibition, memory is weaker than forgetfulness, perception works to prevent seeing too much and intellection to prevent understanding too much, a manifest virtue is the obverse of a latent vice, and one’s sexuality informs the highest reaches of one’s mind.

[emphasis added]

So it seems to me that one's sexuality is a significant part of one's essence, yet is not chosen.

Obviously we can choose what we do with our sexuality. How we express or repress it. These are defining choices that we make, yet a fully repressed sexuality doesn't change the fact that one is essentially a person of that sexuality. The Fates have decreed that I am neither gay nor trans, but (without going into the sordid details) there's no choice that in my life my sexuality has been an essential element of what I truly am. I also suspect that a life of Existentialist Good Faith, authenticity in regard to oneself, would demand honesty about one's [unchosen] sexuality. Repressing it might be a valid and moral choice, but pretending it's otherwise would not. 

So I suspect that like all slogans, "existence precedes essence" has some fairly important exceptions. 

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Personally, I am more taken with the wisdom of Dante's Christianized Platonism. This deals with our unchosen passions, and the demand that authenticity and a moral life requires being guided by these givens. 

As everyone knows, Dante sees Beatrice when he's quite young and is taken with her goodness. He makes it clear that she is not an official saint, like Catherine of Siena, or a local celebrity, like Simonetta Vespucci. There is no evidence that anyone other than Dante was smitten by her. 

This is a coupe de foudre, an unchosen life-defining attachment. She functions for him just as the cute-boy eromenos functions for the men in Plato’s Symposium. She is the first overwhelming hook toward what will truly give meaning to a life. 

Dante sees more possibilities than Plato, in that the Symposium just assumes that everyone’s first introduction to the passion of Eros will be a boy. For Dante, the hook can be anything containing goodness, and will be different for different people. One person might be taken by music, another by art. Or justice or charity. For people who are truly passionate about these things — whose lives are defined by them — the love is never a choice. Think of the people who study and practice music and continue to make it an essential element of their being. They didn't fall in love with it after years of study, after careful consideration. They fell in love first, it gave them meaning before they understood it, and it was never something they consciously chose as their passion or meaning-giving Beatrice.

Again, they can choose whether they pursue this or not, and literature is full of characters who suffer from choosing not to pursue their calling. When Dante meets Beatrice again in Heaven, she scolds him for losing his focus on her after she died, and allowing himself to go astray. 

I know in my own life, by passions were decided early and not in any consciously chosen way, though the choices I have made in how I pursued them have been defining in other ways. But I feel strongly that much of my essence was unchosen.

Sometimes I meet people who have never experienced such a hook, and who seem fairly directionless in life. I feel they have been unfortunate. 

You probably know that the Greeks saw such passions as being gifts from spirits — daemons or geniuses — who inspire us but are not chosen by us. Though we may no longer believe in the literal existence of such spirits, I still feel that they are emotionally true to how our passions are decided. And it’s still true that one’s guiding daemon may be good bad or indifferent, and one’s life may be a good or bad one depending on this, but the essence of what they make us is not something we choose -- it's fate. 

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Thank you for bringing this up. It's been fascinating to think about.