ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the ethical ideal of disinterestedness. Drawing on and developing the work of several other scholars, it argues that the modern ideal (or idol) of disinterestedness which reached its apotheosis in Immanuel Kant and which has remained influential ever since, is fissured by an internal paradox or contradiction. The modern idol of disinterestedness, then, leads to two quite distinct, even antithetical impulses: self-promotion on the one hand and self-annihilation on the other. The chapter explains that each of these impulses, considered independently of each other, is paradoxical and ultimately unsustainable. On the one hand, disinterestedness leads to a form of self-promotion that is so extreme that all that is other becomes secondary to the self that is cultivating its own pure disinterestedness, and thus gives rise to the very obverse of what is ostensibly sought by the disinterested ethic.
