Even self-assertion requires others to confer lasting meaning on it

Evidence

No man can save himself alone. Doubtless, in the very heat of an action the adventurer can know a joy which is sufficient unto itself, but once the undertaking is over and has congealed behind him into a thing, it must, in order to remain alive, be animated anew by a human intention which must transcend it toward the future into recognition or admiration. When he dies, the adventurer will be surrendering his whole life into the hands of men; the only meaning it will have will be the one they confer upon it. … Forgotten and detested, the adventurer loses the taste for his own existence. Perhaps without his knowing it, it seems so precious to him because of others. It willed itself to be an affirmation, an example to all mankind. Once it falls back upon itself, it becomes futile and unjustified. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 63

Categorization

• XREF: Directly bears on the reader’s central question: whether willing my freedom requires willing yours. Hegel’s formula ‘no man can save himself alone’ is the reciprocal-freedom thesis stated as necessity. — connects to: Any self-pronouncement is already false in the moment it is made; The situation is constituted from Others’ meanings rather than from being itself — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of…, 444