A person made great only by their role cannot survive its removal

Evidence

Now he did not “want to be big any more” and, determined that he was not “going to be respectable again,” he thus was indeed “cured …of any desire ever to do anything for myself.” He had been the phantom of a force, and he became a phantom among the living when the force, the function, was taken away from him. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 565

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: A person is nothing but the sum of his actions and undertakings — Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, 18