Malcolm Bull > Quotes

“Equality has no fiercer critic than Nietzsche, whose ‘fundamental insight with respect to the geneaology of morals’ is that social inequality is the source of our value concepts, and the necessary condition of value itself.”
― Malcolm Bull, Anti-Nietzsche

“For Hume, Pyrrhonism, like other philosophies, is too ready to assume that our actions are, or at least ought to be, guided by reason at all times. That is looking in the wrong place for the sources of our motivation. The world itself never provides adequate motivation for our choices. It is not the weighing of external evidence but internal desire that determines judgement and action: ‘Nothing can oppose or retard the impulse of passion, but a contrary impulse.’ Indeed, as Bernard Williams later argued, perhaps the very idea of a (purely) external reason is incoherent because there is no account of what is involved in accepting an external reason that does not invoke internal motivation.”
― Malcolm Bull, The Concept of the Social: Scepticism Idleness and Utopia

“In their response to nihilism both Nietzsche and Heidegger rely on what is perhaps the central tenet of fascism in all its forms: the idea that particular human ecologies are the ultimate source of meaning.”
― Malcolm Bull, Anti-Nietzsche