How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question

by Michael Schur

The individual does not and cannot exist alone.… He owes his existence to other people including those of past generations and his contemporaries. He is simply part of the whole.… Whatever happens to the individual happens to the whole group, and whatever happens to the whole group happens to the individual. The individual can only say, “I am, because we are; and since we are therefore I am.”

I don’t know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I do not know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it.… These two certainties—my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle—I also know that I cannot reconcile them.