Forget Your Self

Objectivity can mean a selfless openness to the needs of others, one which lies very close to love. It is the opposite not of personal interests and convictions, but of egoism. To try to see the other's situation as it really is is an essential condition of caring for them.

[...] genuinely caring for someone is not what gets in the way of seeing their situation for what it is, but what makes it possible. Contrary to the adage that love is blind, it is because love involves a radical acceptance that it allows us to see other for what they are.

To be concerned for another is to be present to them in the form of an absence, a certain self-forgetful attentiveness. If one is loved or trusted in return, it is largely this which gives one the self-confidence to forget about oneself, a perilous matter otherwise.

We need to think about ourselves partly because of fear, which the assurance which flows from being trusted allows us to overcome.

Disinterestedness

Disinterestedness [...] grew up in the eighteenth century as the opposite not of interests, but of self-interest [...] Disinterestedness means not viewing the world from some sublime Olympian height, but a kind of compassion or fellow-feeling. It means trying to feel your way imaginatively into the experience of another, sharing their delight and sorrow without thinking of oneself.

It is not that we do not have interests: it is just that our interest lies in another rather than in ourselves. This kind of imaginative sympathy [...] is its own reward; it does not seek for profit, but takes pleasure in the well-being of others with a well-nigh sensuous relish.

Disinterestedness [...] is in origin a radical political concept.

[Terry Eagleton]
After Theory, p.131, 133-4

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