John Carroll: Trending quotes (page 3)

“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 real task is not to rid life of ethics but to rid ethics of its ideological content.”

John Carroll

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

Life

“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

“Nietzsche … argues that all that passes in the life of a society is ephemeral and banausic except for the presence of great personalities, of men like Goethe … who seem to forge their own destinies, who seem to move unhampered by those burdens of existence which keep most men from rising above the vicissitudes of their daily toil.”

John Carroll

Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 93

Life , Men , Personality

“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