John Carroll quotes - page 2

The primary ambition of Nietzsche's critique of knowledge is ... to demonstrate that ‘truths' are fictions masking moral commitments. (John Carroll)
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
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
Men become utilitarian out of fear of the alternative-the chaos of tangled or tepid desires, of rootlessness and boredom.
John Carroll
Ownership of thought depends on the thinker not subordinating himself to a ‘ruling thought'. This is particularly difficult, argues Stirner, ... for language itself is a network of ‘fixed ideas'. Truths emerge only when language is reworked and possessed individually.
John Carroll
What stands most explicitly as critique in Nietzsche's late work in not a development from earlier interests but a return to two problems of enduring personal involvement for him, those of Wagner and of Christianity. Der Antichrist, to take one case, is not a response to a resuscitating public interest in Christian religion; it is primarily a renewed attempt to resolve for himself the question of piety.
John Carroll
The original of morals lies with the thought that ‘the community is more valuable than the individual' (Menschliches 2.1.89)
John Carroll
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
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
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
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)
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
Stirner ... holds to a joy-principle rather than to a pleasure-principle.
John Carroll
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
The real task is not to rid life of ethics but to rid ethics of its ideological content. (John Carroll)
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
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
The schizophrenic is seen to be afraid of the nihilistic void that ... will remain when a rigid world-view is discarded.
John Carroll
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