The unselfish man is he whose nature has a more universal
direction, whose interests are more widely diffused.

But as impersonal thoughts are such only in their object, not in
their subject or agents, since, all thoughts are the thoughts of
somebody: so also unselfish interests have to be somebody's
interests. If we were not interested in beauty, if it were of no
concern to our happiness whether things were beautiful or ugly, we
should manifest not the maximum, but the total absence of
aesthetic faculty. The disinterestedness of this pleasure is, therefore,
that of all primitive and intuitive satisfactions, which are in no way
conditioned by a reference to an artificial general concept, like that
of the self, all the potency of which must itself be derived from the
independent energy of its component elements. I care about myself
because "myself" is a name for the things I have at heart. To set up
the verbal figment of personality and make it an object of concern
apart from the interests which were its content and substance, turns
the moralist into a pedant, and ethics into a superstition. The self
which is the object of _amour propre_ is an idol of the tribe, and
needs to be disintegrated into the primitive objective interests that
underlie it before the cultus of it can be justified by reason.

_The differentia of aesthetic pleasure not its universality._

Sec. 9. The supposed disinterestedness of our love of beauty passes
into another characteristic of it often regarded as essential, -- its
universality. The pleasures of the senses have, it is said, no
dogmatism in them; that anything gives me pleasure involves no
assertion about its capacity to give pleasure to another. But when I
judge a thing to be beautiful, my judgment means that the thing is
beautiful in itself, or (what is the same thing more critically
expressed) that it should seem so to everybody. The claim to
universality is, according to this doctrine, the essence of the
aesthetic; what makes the perception of beauty a judgment rather
than a sensation. All aesthetic precepts would be impossible, and
all criticism arbitrary and subjective, unless we admit a paradoxical
universality in our judgment, the philosophical implications of
which we may then go on to develope. But we are fortunately not
required to enter the labyrinth into which this method leads; there
is a much simpler and clearer way of studying such questions,
which is to challenge and a