Disinterestedness and Objectivity

Christopher Janaway’s Beyond Selflessness: Reading Nietzsche’s ‘Genealogy’1 is a valuable and important contribution to Nietzsche scholarship on several counts. It gives thematic prominence to questions about Nietzsche’s method of writing and its relationship with his general aim of undermining Christian moral values, and to Nietzsche’s view that our commitment to those values is primarily determined by affective not rational considerations. The book is also distinctive in its careful and illuminating discussion of the Genealogy’s strong, but often only implicit, opposition to Schopenhauer—and it is this dimension of the book that I will try to address in this paper. In particular, I would like to examine the book’s general allegiance to Nietzsche’s critique of the Kantian-Schopenhauerian characterization of aesthetic experience in terms of disinterestedness. According to Janaway’s interpretation of Nietzsche, the concept of disinterestedness with its purported claim to objectivity (in the Kantian sense of the universal a priori conditions of subjectivity) is an expression of the ascetic ideal or ‘will to nothingness’. I argue that (1) Nietzsche’s criticisms rest on a misinterpretation of the notion of disinterestedness; and that (2) although Nietzsche supplants the notion of disinterestedness with his own of Rausch, he derives a conception of aesthetic experience from Rausch that is closely related to the Kantian-Schopenhauerian notion of aesthetic experience as defined by disinterestedness.