Virtual Ruin

Disinterested Agency in Hazlitt and Keats

I stood and watched [Keats], fading away, fading away, along the pavement, and could hardly tell whether he were an actual man, or a thought that had slipped out of my mind, and clothed itself in human form and habilments, merely to beguile me.

— NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, "P's Correspondence"

You are here
on the underside of the page,
writing in water,
anachronist,
showing your head
with its delicate fuses,
its fatal telemetry,
a moundful of triggers and gunpowder
like a field-mine,
your sixty-one inches
and your gem-cutter's fingers,
anonymous,
taking the weight
of a "roomful of people"
but making no mark,
pressing the page as I write ...

— BEN BELITT, "This Scribe, My Hand"

The general ambition of Hazlitt's Essay on the Principles of Human Action (1805) is to develop an ethical theory of agency that is predicated on the belief that "the human mind is naturally disinterested ... that it is naturally interested in the welfare of others in the same way, and from the same direct motives, by which we are impelled to the pursuit of our own interest." The remark demonstrates the degree to which the key term disinterest, retaining its Kantian flavor and gesturing to diverse aesthetic, social, and political structures of critical detachment and objectivity derived from the Enlightenment, had become successfully incorporated into much late eighteenth-century philosophical thought. Hazlitt's definition and use of the term partly falls within this tradition, but the Essay far from attempts merely to apply the inherited terminology. Indeed, the difference lies in the kinds of pressures exerted by the ethical in Hazlitt's writings — pressures that reveal the radical implication that the disinterested imagination is the mechanism through which identity is perceived as a limitation or a distortion of an otherwise anonymous subjectivity that anticipates it. Paradoxically, for Hazlitt it is as a result of this kind of estrangement at the core of the self that sociality is at all possible, and it will be the work of the Essay to demonstrate why an aversion to the self leads to an extra-individual concern for ethics, politics, and alterity.

Disinterest evokes a profoundly renunciatory force in the face of a colonizing desire to appropriate the other. According to the Oxford English Dictionary,disinterest in part means "contrary to interest or advantage; disadvantage, prejudice, injury," and certainly the rhetorically injurious or wounding effect of disinterest is intrinsic to its meaning as an austere self-fashioning or ascesis of the subject. Disinterest cultivates a condition of resolute unselfishness, but it does so with a violence that eviscerates the subject's foothold. It promotes an ostensibly balanced and panoptic survey of other persons and things at the expense of a break with personal interest or advantage. David Bromwich has remarked that

the disinterested man is still looking at what he judges; the uninterested one has gone to something else. ... A disinterested investigator, a disinterested judge, a disinterested historian, need not be detached. He may be immersed in a question and, having started on one side, conclude his engagement on the opposite one — or even on the same. What is unimaginable is that he should remain strictly neutral (human nature being what it is) except when treating a question in which he is also uninterested.

In Bromwich's description of the "disinterested man," disinterest evokes a formal principle through which consciousness can represent both itself and others by claiming theoretical detachment. It fully implicates itself in the representations it conceives by virtue of the fact that it alienates itself and others through its own mediating structures.

Disinterest, then, does not signal a withdrawal from presence for the sake of transcendent knowledge. For Hazlitt, it is the crucial term for divesting ourselves of the premise that we are fully self-possessed individuals. Disinterest avows personal involvement only insofar as it dynamically negotiates "the personal" against outside evaluation. What Bromwich's reading of Hazlitt neglects, however, is something that operates on another level in the Essay: the possibility that an impersonal attitude toward ethical judgment and action refracts back onto the agent and puts into question the humanistic reliance on individual motivation. With such a break, Hazlitt evokes a telling emptiness in the judging subject — an emptiness, moreover, that propels the Essay's startling claims about the necessity of ethical thought in the wake of the self 's disarticulation. The anonymity of identity thus raises the question of whether ethics might be conceived as dependent on the imaginary. It is in this sense that Hazlitt's moral philosophy is radically disinterested: it moves beyond a superficial, skeptical quandary that recycles the self through critique, and finds the difficulty of ethical action to lie, not in any objective strategy of reasoning, but in the dubious primacy of personhood in the first place.

The Essay uniquely argues that the intersubjectivity of ethical obligations depends upon the impersonality of social relations themselves, and that this impersonality finds justification in an essential disinterest that is common to all of us. Put another way, Hazlitt wants to argue that the very lack of personal knowledge between individuals not only should motivate us to intercede on behalf of one another and share a mutual commitment to each other's welfare, but it should also lead us to profoundly question the belief that the self's relation to itself is one of privileged knowledge. Hazlitt thus counters the mundane Utilitarian belief that the interests of others can be made viable to us only if we construe them as mere extensions of an essential selfishness. In this chapter, I want to explore Hazlitt's belief that a concern for the imaginative capacities of ethical debate turns us to the virtuality of social relations, and it is precisely in the dynamic between self-constitution and differentiation that an ethically charged social inquiry is formed. Indeed, it is by insisting on the tenuousness of our various conceptualizations of "self," "subject," "individuality," and "reality" that Hazlitt comes to claim the most negating effects of the imagination (its tendencies toward evacuating reference and fictionalizing the social) as its most forceful facets.

Deborah Elise White has pointed out that romantic disinterest posits "the eruption or interruption of sheer being among beings even as it exposes the impossibility of arriving at any oneness with 'Being' itself. The disinterested imagination does not transcend — it defines the limits of what radicals...