In Jean-Paul Sartre’s well-known lecture ‘Existentialism is a Humanism’ he wrote that no one’s place in the world is foreordained and that you are what you make of yourself. So at first glance it might seem that the existentialist answer to the question ‘can we reinvent ourselves?’ is yes—in fact, we can never stop reinventing ourselves. 

But ‘reinventing ourselves’ implies that we have selves to reinvent, and that we have the power to reinvent them—and not all existentialists agreed about the truth of these claims.  

In Sartre’s early philosophy he denied the existence of a self as a unifying structure of consciousness. He argued that Descartes (and Kant and Husserl after him) failed to make an important distinction between two forms of consciousness: reflective and pre-reflective. Descartes famously wrote ‘I think, therefore I am’. But in The Transcendence of the Ego Sartre objected that ‘the consciousness which says “I think” is precisely not the consciousness which thinks’. The self that says ‘I think’ only comes into existence with reflection. 

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"For Sartre your identity is perpetually in question."

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As you read this article you are aware of the words you see and follow the sequence of them in order to understand what they convey. You may be aware of other things, like the sounds around you or the temperature of the air. But Sartre would say that no ‘I’ inhabits your consciousness until you reflect on your activity and see it as yours—for example by telling someone that you read an article about existentialism today, or that you were distracted by the noise or the heat.

This distinction is important, for Sartre, because the ‘self’ comes into existence with the step to reflection. Whereas Aristotle defined identity as ‘the fact that a thing is itself’, for Sartre your ‘self’ (as an object you can consider with questions like ‘who am I?’) presupposes your consciousness and your identity is perpetually in question. ‘Existence precedes essence’ because we continuously invent ourselves through action.

When asked ‘why do you do what you do?’ many people appeal to motives or reasons or causes as the explanatory antecedents of their actions. Some explanations are situational, and some are personal: for example, ‘she went for a run because she’s training for a race’ or ‘he kept my secret because he is trustworthy’. Human action is often interpreted as a response to circumstantial demands or an expression of personal identity. But Sartre finds both of these ways of thinking dissatisfying and backwards. On his view, it is by acting that we establish an identity and let external demands to shape our action. We call someone trustworthy because they have kept our secrets. And going for a run implies a prior choice to assign value to training for a race.  

SUGGESTED READING Can We Reinvent Ourselves? A Buddhist View By Bronwyn Finnigan Sartre believed that we are radically free to choose the kinds of selves we want to become. At any point the runner can stop training; at any point the confidante can betray his friend’s trust. And when we recognise that our freedom means we can negate the value we have previously assigned things — that we can decide to see running or trustworthiness as worthless — one response to seeing the precarity of our values is to flee our freedom.