STEPHEN MILLER
The Future of Disinterest
and Foucault's Regime of Truth
Disinterest or disinterestedness has fallen upon hard times. For one thing,
"disinterested" is often used to denote "uninterestedness" or "indiffer–
ence." According to the author of
Modern American Usage,
who argues that
there is no good synonym for the word, this is to be regretted, since dis–
interest "is still the name of a great, sterling, and positive virtue - freedom
from self-seeking motives." Secondly, in recent years the very idea of dis–
interestedness has been called into question by a number of post–
Nietzschean writers who are infected with what Ernest Gellner has called
"epistemological hypochondria," since they put quotation marks around
objectivity and rationality as well as truth. These writers, who sometimes
call themselves postmodernists, argue that disinterestedness in the sense of
being unbiased is impossible because everyone is a prisoner of what the
French theorist Michel Foucault called a "regime of truth" - a way of
looking at things that is determined by the prevailing norms of a particu–
lar society.
The word "disinterest" has had a peculiar history. In the sixteenth
century, disinterested did mean uninterested. The more recent meaning
did not become commonplace until the end of the seventeenth century,
when a number of moralists and political theorists pondered the relation–
ship of disinterest to self-interest. The French moralist La Rochefoucauld
argued that disinterested conduct was possible, but that no one could
know whether his own actions were disinterested or not. "Self-interest,"
he says, "speaks all sorts of languages and plays all sorts of roles, even that
of disinterestedness." La Rochefoucauld is implying that we should not
rush to judgment about the motives of others, since we do not even know
what our own motives are.
When La Rochefoucauld speaks about self-interest, he is not neces–
sarily thinking of an interest in financial gain. One could have an interest
in gaining fame - making a name for oneself in the world - rather than in
making money. By the eighteenth century, self-interest (sometimes called
interest or private interest) came to be understood primarily in economic
terms, so that Samuel Johnson defines disinterested as being "superior to
regard of private advantage: not influenced by private profit." Johnson
