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