Creativity and Self-Love

Abstract

Abstract For many, self-love is the foundation of all loves. This point of view raises the issue of the relation between self-love and altruistic love of other, considered by authors such as Bernard Williams and Nietzsche in his attack on “altruism”. This chapter focuses on what counts as a non-virtuous denial of one’s subjectivity by showing that self-love, properly understood, is a component (but not necessarily a target or aim) of all virtue including the altruistic ones (where clearly self-love is not a target). We need to distinguish an altruism driven by the logic of what has been called an ethics of ‘the extreme demand’ and a proper pursuit of the personal that does not lapse into unethical individualism. Virtuous self-love needs to be distinguished from non-virtuous forms of “self-esteem”.