John Carroll: Man

“Nietzsche [claims] that the scientist is at best an instrument, a useful slave: he does not command or decide, he is not a whole man.”

John Carroll

Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 111

“Man is more than an animal only in that he finds expression for the beautiful.”

John Carroll

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

Beauty , Animals

“The garden [of Eden] is the realm of pure beauty from which man is expelled when he becomes interested in ethics, in the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. The return into paradise, the homecoming, depends on him penetrating the veils of morality to glimpse again the lineaments of lost beauty.”

John Carroll

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

Beauty , Knowledge , Tree , Evil

“Whereas Marx’s vision of homo faber becomes inoperative within social chains, Stirner’s man makes his own freedom.”

John Carroll

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

Freedom

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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