Christopher Panza > Quotes

“How do you find yourself to exist right now?”
― Christopher Panza, Existentialism For Dummies

“This happened not once, but twice — first with Martin Heidegger's magnum opus, Being and Time, and then with his pupil Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness. (We discuss Sartre in the next section.)”
― Christopher Panza, Existentialism For Dummies

“This is one of the reasons atheistic existentialists have been so at odds with the church. The church keeps raising eyes to heaven, and the existentialists keep lowering eyes back down. And they do bring your eyes way down. Their stories are often about ugly realities and scandalous people. They don’t force you to look at these things because they want to wallow in misery or debasement. Rather, they want you to recognize that any meaning, value, truth, or beauty can be found only here, in this imperfect and often ugly world. They want you to look at it honestly,without varnish, without covering up its ills, without romanticizing it, and without the filter of an ultimate moral judgment upon it. They say you must learn to see it this way because your task is to find a way to accept and live in this imperfect place — the earth and the human world you’re part of. You must recognize that this is the only home you have or will ever know.”
― Christopher Panza, Existentialism For Dummies