QuestionsDoes life have a meaning?"It is yours to make sense of"
Does life have a meaning?A meaning to create

"It is yours to make sense of"

There is no sense in life a priori (Sartre)

Jean-Paul Sartre 1905 · 1980Existence precedes essence: we are condemned to be free.
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What it claims

Life has no sense a priori, but it is up to each person to give it one: value is nothing else than the sense one chooses.

Why

Without God, no good is written in advance; humans have only themselves to invent values and give them meaning.

In short

""It is yours to make sense of"" is an argument by Jean-Paul Sartre (Existentialism Is a Humanism (lecture of 1945), §11, §25-26) on the question "Does life have a meaning?" (answer: a meaning to create). Its claim: Life has no sense a priori, but it is up to each person to give it one: value is nothing else than the sense one chooses. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P4). AskPhilosophy presents 4 objections, 1 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

Existentialism Is a Humanism (lecture of 1945), §11, §25-26
Valid with an implicit premise

If God does not exist, who says what matters? Sartre first answers that no one says it in advance: it is nowhere written that the good exists, because no infinite and perfect consciousness thinks it. The secular moral teachers of 1880 wanted to remove God but keep values "in an intelligible heaven": Sartre finds that incoherent. Yet he does not conclude that life is absurd. He says that "there is no sense in life a priori", but that it is up to each person to give it one. Note: atheism is here a premise, not a conclusion.

P1God does not exist, and the consequences must be drawn right to the end.
P2Without God there is no good "a priori": it is nowhere written that the good exists, that one must be honest or must not lie, since there is no infinite and perfect consciousness to think it. So no meaning of life is given to us in advance.
P3Yet someone must invent values: man has no legislator but himself.
P4 · implicit premiseValues invented by human beings are real values, and the sense they choose is a real sense of life, not a pretence.
Therefore life has no sense a priori, but it is up to each person to give it one: value is nothing else than the sense one chooses.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P4, the computer finds a world with no God where someone invents values, but those values remain arbitrary and life, at bottom, has no sense: nobody has created anything more than a habit, and the world stays silent.
Valid with P4. From P1 and P2 it follows that meaning is not given; P3 says someone must invent values; P4 says that what is invented really counts, and it is what lets us conclude that meaning is created rather than absent. This is where one parts ways with the absurd: one can accept P1 to P3 and reject P4, saying that an invented meaning is a consolation. Note also the second half of P2: "so no meaning is given" assumes that a given meaning would need a consciousness to think it.
Analogy. Sartre compares the choice of values with the creation of a work of art: a painter before a blank canvas has no rule telling him which picture to paint, and yet we do not call his picture gratuitous. We judge it once it is made. It is only a comparison, Sartre insists: he is not speaking of an aesthetic morality.

Objections

4

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

An objection Sartre states himself: "your values are not serious" 1945 · attacks premise 4

You take with one hand what you give with the other. If people choose their own values, those values are not serious: one could just as well have chosen others.

Sartre replies
Sartre Sartre's reply (1945)
Sartre answers that he is very sorry that it should be so, but that, if he has excluded God the Father, there must be somebody to invent values. We have to take things as they are.
The debate goes on (our summary) This passage answers "who else?", not "why take seriously what I choose?". Sartre returns to it later in the same lecture: he compares choice with creating a work of art, holds that some choices rest on error (bad faith), and says one cannot not choose. His critics think these answers do not establish that a chosen sense is a real sense, and the debate remains open.
A
Augustine 400 · attacks premise 2

The sense of life is given to us, and it comes from God: "Thou hast formed us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless till they find rest in Thee". The very restlessness we feel shows that we are made for something other than what we create.

no reply
We have not yet found a direct reply by Sartre in the texts.
The debate goes on (our summary) Sartre does not answer Augustine. He only writes, at the end of the lecture, that his existentialism is not an atheism that would exhaust itself in proving that God does not exist: even if God existed, he says, it would make no difference from his point of view, because man must find himself again and nothing can save him from himself, not even a valid proof of the existence of God. That sentence asserts more than it demonstrates. A believer would say that entrusting oneself to God is also a free choice, and not a cheap way of being saved from oneself.
Aristotle 330 BC · attacks premise 2

One can have a good given in advance without a creator God. In Aristotle, man's good lies in his proper function, which is the activity of the soul in accordance with reason. This good is read off from what man is, not from a command.

no reply
We have not yet found a direct reply by Sartre in the texts.
The debate goes on (our summary) Sartre does not speak of Aristotle. In the lecture (§11) he targets the secular moral teachers of 1880, who kept values "in an intelligible heaven" while removing God, and answers that there can be no good a priori without a perfect consciousness to think it. That does not directly answer a good drawn from man's nature. The question remains whether a "function" of man is really given, or whether we already choose what we retain of human nature, as Sartre would say.
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus 1942 · attacks premise 4

Three years before the lecture, Camus goes the other way: life "will be lived all the better if it has no meaning". He calls hope an "evasion", including the hope of living for some great idea that goes beyond life and gives it a meaning. A meaning one gives oneself may play that role: filling the world's silence instead of facing it. Honesty asks us to live without meaning, not to manufacture one.

no reply
We have not yet found a direct reply by Sartre in the texts.
The debate goes on (our summary) Sartre does not name Camus in the lecture and does not answer him here. In his defence: the meaning he speaks of is not a great idea beyond life, since "life is nothing until it is lived". In Camus's defence: he precisely refuses to let the value of life depend on a meaning, and says it is revolt that "gives life its value" (§71). Both reject a meaning given in advance; they part ways on whether what one chooses still deserves the name of meaning.