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.