John Carroll: Trending quotes (page 3)

“Copernicus and Darwin undermined man’s image of himself as the ‘measure of all things’. Newton provided him with a new hope … that of ‘man as the measurer of all things’. Thus the possibility was revealed to man, who had been disinherited from being at the center of the universe, that he might be able know how to work himself back there. Science, at the same time it destroyed his ontological security, gave him the tools for reapproaching Eden.”

John Carroll

Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 97

Hope , Universe , Science , Time

“The estranged ego projects its own disorder on to society and expects the restructuring and integration of the self writ large, the society, to reflect back on to the source of consciousness. Stirner regards this flight from self as a form of suicide, the dissolution of identity and uniqueness.”

John Carroll

Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 79

Suicide

“Man at his best is a system-breaker, an iconoclast seeking not only variety, but destruction.”

John Carroll

Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 152

“The ‘I think, therefore I am’ of Descartes, the ‘I feel, therefore I am’ of late eighteenth century Romanticism, and the ‘I possess therefore I am’ of bourgeois man are dogmas, partial at that, incorporated to define a being that is incapable of defining itself.”

John Carroll

Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 40

Feeling , Thinking

“Modern anthropology … opposes the utilitarian assumption that the primitive chants as he sows seed because he believes that otherwise it will not grow, the assumption that his economic goal is primary, and his other activities are instrumental to it. The planting and the cultivating are no less important than the finished product. Life is not conceived as a linear progression directed to, and justified by, the achievement of a series of goals; it is a cycle in which ends cannot be isolated, one which cannot be dissected into a series of ends and means.”

John Carroll

Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), pp. 150-151

Life

“There is a strain in Marx of the cleric, of the vulgar moralist. He paints the capitalist and the bourgeois as incarnations of evil; it is they who are responsible for the woes of mankind. The dismissal of the individual’s responsibility for his own misery is the quintessence of clericalism.”

John Carroll

Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 79

Evil , Painting

“A teleology directed to material ends has been substituted for the lust for adventure, variety, and play.”

John Carroll

Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 148

“Stirner and Nietzsche … reveal how prone morality is to being used as a means of rationalization, a cloak for concealing violent and brutish passions, and making their sadistic expression a virtue.”

John Carroll

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

Passion

“The ugliness of the ideological lies in its legitimating the pursuit of the trivial.”

John Carroll

Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 92

“The schizophrenic is seen to be afraid of the nihilistic void that … will remain when a rigid world-view is discarded.”

John Carroll

[describing the implications of Ehrenzweig’s theory] p. 95, note
Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974)

World

“For Dostoevsky, Fourier is one of the industrious ant-hill engineers, busy, protected by the delusion that his goal, the will-ordered society, is the summation of all his desires.”

John Carroll

Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 152

Business

“By punishing the criminal the moral man hopes to dissuade the evil imprisoned in his own breast from escaping. Fear of self is projected in hatred of the immoral other.”

John Carroll

Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 35

Fear , Hope , Evil

“The egoist … destroys the universal importance accorded to moral law by showing that life independent of it is possible. Secondly, and even more intolerably to the pious, he manages to do so with shameless enjoyment.”

John Carroll

Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 33

Life , Law , Universe

“[ Marx] explicates ideology as socially determined, [ Stirner] as psychologically determined: both accuse it of remaining oblivious to its own determinations.”

John Carroll

Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 17

“Unless the fundamental categories of economics such as ‘property’ were to be redefined in a radically personal way the liberal rationalist curse which had established economics as a scientific discipline cut off from human interests would proliferate. Economic models … have failed to incorporate any meaningful index of individual benefit other than the original utilitarian one, … the index of increasing income or an increasing flow of commodities.”

John Carroll

Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 145

Way , Personality

“The primary ambition of Nietzsche’s critique of knowledge is … to demonstrate that ‘truths’ are fictions masking moral commitments.”

John Carroll

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

Truth , Knowledge

“Dostoevsky’s underground man … observes his contemporaries striving to establish false goals where there are no naturally generated ones. … He argues they should be conscious and honest enough to recognize that the goal itself is not an absolute, and probably not even important. A strong attachment to the telos indicates that the spontaneous enjoyment the child once took in road-building has waned.”

John Carroll

Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 148

Nature , Strong , Falseness

“Life is more than thought: what a man feels, and what his senses awaken in him, are more indispensable to his life’s fullness than subsequent reflection on their significance. Both Stirner and Nietzsche have elaborated Faust’s opening speech in which he bemoans his wasted years in academia: this speech is Goethe’s own impeachment of Kant and Hegel. Philosophy proceeds always under the risk of making a fetish of thinking.”

John Carroll

Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 105

Life , Feeling , Thinking , Sense