John Carroll: Morale

John Carroll is Australian professor and author. Explore interesting quotes on morale.
John Carroll: 116   quotes 0   likes

“The attachment to a rationalistic, teleological notion of progress indicates the absence of true progress; he whose life does not unfold satisfyingly under its own momentum is driven to moralize it, to set up goals and rationalize their achievement as progress.”

John Carroll

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

Life

“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

“The virtual suppression of ethical discussion after 1845 produces the semblance of purely descriptive analysis, dressed in the mantle of positivist objectivity, analysis which is, in fact, strung to a framework of crude, because unexplicated, moral assumptions.”

John Carroll

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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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