The dialectical critique of positivist habits of mind ... is interested only in behaviour which is 'important' to the actor; that is, behaviour which is emotionally charged to the degree that it is either frequently recalled, reflected upon, or day-dreamed about. ... That science which is less discriminating in the behaviour it chooses to investigate gains clarity and distinctiveness at the cost of confining itself to the trivial.

John Carroll

Categorized in : Mind Important Gains

Education is the strongest weapon available for restricting the questions people ask, controlling what they think, and ensuring that they get their thoughts 'from above'.

John Carroll

weapons people thinking

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

language arguing ideas

For Stirner, the social axiom of conservative, liberal, and socialist schools of political thought alike is in itself repressive: it disguises as potentially redemptive an order whose central function is inhibitory of the individual's interests.

John Carroll

political order school

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

John Carroll

animal beautiful men

The ugliness of the ideological lies in its legitimating the pursuit of the trivial.

John Carroll

ideological pursuit lying

The original of morals lies with the thought that 'the community is more valuable than the individual' (Menschliches 2.1.89

John Carroll

moral community lying

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

degrees groups men

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

self giving order

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

acquisition excellence goal

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

garden eden men

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

reflection men philosophy

Man at his best is a system-breaker, an iconoclast seeking not only variety, but destruction.

John Carroll

variety destruction men

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

analysis objectivity facts

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

necks intention children

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

harsh way christ

A teleology directed to material ends has been substituted for the lust for adventure, variety, and play.

John Carroll

lust play adventure

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

goal mean thinking

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

moral independent law

Any attempt to break with the past, or with existing social structures, is a failure if it leads to a bored, listless, and colourless style of life; assertive and enduring innovation, like the mastering of a new environment, requires the confidence and discipline which are founded on exuberant emotions.

John Carroll

bored discipline past

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

ants goal desire