Progress means expanding existence, not approaching a fixed ideal

Evidence

To will freedom and to will to disclose being are one and the same choice; hence, freedom takes a positive and constructive step which causes being to pass to existence in a movement which is constantly surpassed. Science, technics, art, and philosophy are indefinite conquests of existence over being; it is by assuming themselves as such that they take on their genuine aspect; it is in the light of this assumption that the word progress finds its veridical meaning. It is not a matter of approaching a fixed limit: absolute Knowledge or the happiness of man or the perfection of beauty; all human effort would then be doomed to failure, for with each step forward the horizon recedes a step; for man it is a matter of pursuing the expansion of his existence and of retrieving this very effort as an absolute. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 84

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: This is the positive free-person’s stance contrasted with the serious man’s fixed goals and the nihilist’s rejection — a key differentiator in the reader’s typology project.
• DEEPTHINKING: The reframing of progress as inherently deferred — the horizon recedes with each step, yet the effort is retrieved as absolute — is a genuinely dense, paradigm-inverting claim.

Related

• Freedom aims to disclose being, not to capture or fix it. (similarity 0.80)