Genuine heroism costs an absolute renunciation unrecoverable by any future

Evidence

But if the individual is set up as a unique and irreducible value, the word sacrifice regains all its meaning; what a man loses in renouncing his plans, his future, and his life no longer appears as a negligible thing. Even if he decides that in order to justify his life he must consent to limiting its course, even if he accepts dying, there is a wrench at the heart of this acceptance, for freedom demands both that it recover itself as an absolute and that it prolong its movement indefinitely: it is through this indefinite movement that it desires to come back to itself and to confirm itself; now, death puts an end to his drive; the hero can transcend death toward a future fulfillment, but he will not be present in that future; this must be understood if one wishes to restore to heroism its true worth: it is neither natural nor easy; the hero may overcome his regret and carry out his sacrifice; the latter is none the less an absolute renunciation. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 107

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The core tension — freedom both recovers itself absolutely and prolongs its movement indefinitely — is the crux the reader wants to track; dense and rewardingly unpacked across rereads.
• DEFINE: Beauvoir here defines what genuine sacrifice/heroism requires once the individual is a real value, contrasting with the collectivist view.
• XREF: connects to: Genuine inspiration and care cannot be bought without being destroyed — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 69