Sublime

Being a person is not a goal that can be achieved but a purpose that must be sustained.

leading my life, I am not striving for an impossible completion of who I am but for the possible and fragile coherence of who I am trying to be: to hold together and be responsive to the commitments that define who I take myself to be. Leading a satisfying life is not to achieve a state of consummation but to be engaged in what I do and put myself

People are not monads. A real, live human self is always already partial to certain, select others. Morality needs to take this essential fact about human selfhood into account rather than pretend to override it.

Day after day we seek an answer to the ageless question Aristotle posed in Ethics: How should a human being lead his life?

With strangers, there is a temporary reordering of a balancing act that each of us is constantly attempting: between our past selves and our future selves, between who we have been and who we are becoming.

a being that represents or repeats its experience of life back to itself, picturing it, telling its story, sym-bolising it, re-presenting it.

At his bravest moments, he embraces meaninglessness as the first principle, and then he understands that his obligation is to see what is in front of him (even though it is also inside him) and to say what he sees.

it always involves a metaphysics of transcendence.