John Carroll Quotes
1944
More John Carroll Quotes
Utilitarianism had found [in Samuel Smiles’ Self-Help] its portrait gallery of heroes, inscribed with a vigorous exhortation to all men to strive in their image; this philistine romanticism established the bourgeois hero-prototype the penniless office-boy who works his way to economic fortune and this wins his way into the mercantile plutocracy.
John Carroll— p. 12 (Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974))
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— p. 33 (Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974))
In so far as the intention of education is to train the child for a vocation it is a millstone around his neck.
John Carroll— p. 34 (Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974))
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— p. 39 (Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974))
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— p. 40 (Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974))
The act of greatest subversion … is the one of indifference. A man, or a group, finds it unbearable that someone can be simply uninterested in his, or its, convictions. … There is a degree of complicity, or mutual respect, between the believer and the man who attacks his beliefs (the revolutionary), for the latter takes them seriously.
John Carroll— p. 53 (Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974))
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— p. 53 (Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974))
Politics and the affairs of State are dissociated from the orbit of the individual, and in so far as they cannot be repossessed as his living private property they must be rendered impotent.
John Carroll— p. 54 (Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974))
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— p. 80 (Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974))
The original of morals lies with the thought that ‘the community is more valuable than the individual’ (Menschliches 2.1.89)
John Carroll— p. 80, note
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— p. 85 (Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974))
Man is more than an animal only in that he finds expression for the beautiful.
John Carroll— p. 92 (Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974))
The ugliness of the ideological lies in its legitimating the pursuit of the trivial.
John Carroll— p. 92 (Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974))
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— p. 96 (Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974))
Nietzsche … combines, in effect, Christ’s harsh sayings: ‘let the dead bury their dead’ and ‘narrow is the way which leadeth unto life’.
John Carroll— p. 98 (Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974))
The primary ambition of Nietzsche’s critique of knowledge is … to demonstrate that ‘truths’ are fictions masking moral commitments.
John Carroll— p. 102 (Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974))
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— p. 105 (Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974))
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— p. 107 (Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974))
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— p. 148 (Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974))
A teleology directed to material ends has been substituted for the lust for adventure, variety, and play.
John Carroll— p. 148 (Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974))
Men become utilitarian out of fear of the alternative the chaos of tangled or tepid desires, of rootlessness and boredom.
John Carroll— p. 148 (Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974))
Dostoevsky believed that the gods of rationalism and materialist utilitarianism had joined in conspiracy against all other ethical systems. … The accumulation of capital, or the acquisition of money, are endeavors par excellence which establish a quantifiable goal: hence they are directly amenable to maximization formulae.
John Carroll— p. 149 (Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974))
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— p. 152 (Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974))
Stirner and Nietzsche [adopt] a mode of thinking which is personal, introspective, and which while often operating on alternative systems of belief and action does so only as a means of better grasping one dominant goal the patterns of individual redemption. Stirner and Nietzsche are not primarily interested in critique as such. … Their work is too egoistically compelled for them ever to employ the external world as more than the repository for a series of projections of their own.
John Carroll— p. 174 (Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974))
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— p. 174 (Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974))
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— John Carroll, Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974)
A teleology directed to material ends has been substituted for the lust for adventure, variety, and play.
John Carroll— John Carroll, Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974)
