John Carroll: Trending quotes (page 2)

“The Inquisitor is the forgiving father, the scientific materialist, and the social engineer. He is the most compassionate, and honest, of politicians; he takes on great burdens of responsibility in order to protect his subjects from ethical doubt. But he also suppresses any attempt to expand their self-consciousness: he is the ‘great simplifier’, the shepherd to a flock of carefree children.”

John Carroll

Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 153

Children , Forgiveness

“Unlike Hegel’s progress model of history, which moves by stages, each containing its own logic of growth and decline, the economic model develops as the simple function of one money-variable over time, with a long-term trend which increases monotonically.”

John Carroll

Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 168

Money , History , Time

“The priest who has lost the resilience of youth cannot be helped; his polymorphously playful and imaginative energies have been emasculated by a long conditioning to the ways of the old order; he would be liberated into a sea of undifferentiated boredom and anxiety. Only the man whose desires and passions are intact has a future.”

John Carroll

Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 95

Youth , Way , Imagination , Passion

“Nietzsche saw in the Protestant ethic, in both its religious and secular (economic) forms, a final protest before the emergence into dominance of the ordered, bourgeois world of the ‘last man’—he who will pay any price in tedium for comfort and the absence of tension.”

John Carroll

Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 96

World

“Stirner … holds to a joy-principle rather than to a pleasure-principle.”

John Carroll

Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 143

Pleasure , Joy

“The original of morals lies with the thought that ‘the community is more valuable than the individual”

John Carroll

Menschliches 2.1.89
Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 80, note

Communication

“Dostoevsky … impeaches Christ through the mouth of the Grand Inquisitor: ‘it was pitiless of thee to value man so highly’. This Christ has no answer to the world of politics, of rational action, of knowledge. He is utterly Nietzschean in his intention not to pity, but to respect.”

John Carroll

Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 154

World , Knowledge , Christ

“Nietzsche himself was a great moralist; his writings abound with value judgments about individuals, character types, modes of thinking, and national traits. It is as if he develops immoralist psychology in order to tame his own nature, to keep his own greatest vice in check.”

John Carroll

Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 38

Nature , Thinking

“Any attempt to break with the past, or with existing social structures, is a failure if it leads to a bored, listless, and colourless style of life; assertive and enduring innovation, like the mastering of a new environment, requires the confidence and discipline which are founded on exuberant emotions.”

John Carroll

Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), pp. 95-96, note

Life , Confidence , Failure , Past

“Nietzsche … explicates his preferred distinction between good and bad individuals as non-condemnatory of the latter. A ‘bad person’ is merely devoid of what Nietzsche personally considers to be noble or virtuous qualities; he is not morally evil. Nietzsche’s aim is … to defuse morality of reactive emotion. … It would be futile, tactless, and cruel, he suggests, to try to change a bad person, one with whom one does not empathize; his formula advises: ‘Where you cannot love, pass by’. No on should be blamed for what he is; there is no point in lamenting fate.”

John Carroll

Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 91

Love , Fate , Evil , Change

“Dostoevsky believed that the gods of rationalism and materialist utilitarianism had joined in conspiracy against all other ethical systems. … The accumulation of capital, or the acquisition of money, are endeavors par excellence which establish a quantifiable goal: hence they are directly amenable to maximization formulae.”

John Carroll

Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 149

Money , God

“The possibility of a genuine metatheory of morality is not available. Even psychology has its ethical presuppositions. … A metatheory of morality would be legitimate only if the existence of a hierarchy of absolute, and hence unconditioned, truths were established. They would then provide a framework of supra-ethical categories. The primary ambition of Nietzsche’s critique of knowledge is to expose just such an exercise … as sleight of hand, an efficacious deception. This critique sets out to demonstrate that ‘truths’ are fictions masking moral commitments”

John Carroll

Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 102

Truth , Exercises , Knowledge

“This will of Stirner’s, this restless probing of all given knowledge, this endless questioning, and the continuous bending towards new understanding, …”

John Carroll

Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 107

Understanding , Question , Knowledge

“Stirner’s political praxis is quixotic. It accepts the established hierarchies of constraint as given. … Not liable to any radical change, they constitute part of the theatre housing the individual’s action. … The egoist uses the elements of the social structure as props in his self-expressive act.”

John Carroll

Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 85

Change , Parting , Housing

“There is a strong strain of Protestant masochism in this [Nietzsche’s] assault on morality and ideology. … Framing this perspective is the Protest image of the utterly self-reliant, responsible individual.”

John Carroll

Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 39

Strong

“R. W. K. Paterson makes a central point of identifying Stirner with nihilism. His argument depends on a failure to distinguish between social values, which Stirner does reject, and personal values, to which he is more overtly committed than any other philosopher.”

John Carroll

Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 108, note

Failure , Dependency , Personality

“The enemies of Christ … could not bear his independence; his “Give the emperor that which is the emperor’s” showed a contempt for the affairs of state and its politics—for the moral order—that their self-respect would not let them tolerate.”

John Carroll

Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 53

Christ

“Education is the strongest weapon available for restricting the questions people ask, controlling what they think, and ensuring that they get their thoughts ‘from above’.”

John Carroll

Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 34

People , Education , Question , Thinking

“If man is to remain the creator and master of his world then, Stirner maintains, … all that has been accepted, that has taken on the secure guise of the ‘fact’, must be return to a state of flux, or be rejected.”

John Carroll

Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 107

World

“Politics and the affairs of State are dissociated from the orbit of the individual, and in so far as they cannot be repossessed as his living private property they must be rendered impotent.”

John Carroll

Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 54