By Meeros Khattaie
I was 18 years old when I found myself in my first relationship, a period of time I spent navigating new interpersonal relationships and emotions I didn’t fully understand. It was a simple relationship, I was young and curious about the idea of partnership. But it was within this experience where I encountered one of the most profound philosophical and psychological questions I’d ever contended with, one that I still grapple with to this day: the existence of true altruism.
Towards the end of the relationship we had an argument about what we it meant to love someone, rather, how you could show said love. I felt that love was best shown through actions such as gift giving. It was during this fight when I, angrily, brought up the fact that he rarely did such things for me. His response? I only did such things because they made me feel good, not because I cared about doing something for him. That the primary reason I did those things was to boost my own self esteem and ego.
It’s been over four years since I had this conversation with him, and although the relationship didn’t last, one question did: can we truly be selfless? Do we do selfless things mainly because they make us feel good about ourselves? Can something truly be rooted in selflessness? Or are the selfless actions rooted in trying to remedy some guilty feeling we have buried deep down?
Thus, my utter confusion about selflessness was born. What in the world did it mean to be selfless, or altruistic? Does the tainted soul do something good for others in order to purify itself?
I will dive into this question from a few different perspectives, the first is that of Thomas Hobbes and “ethical egoists” who argue that all human actions are ultimately motivated by self-interest. I will further explore this idea through the psychological and physiological perspective offered by Bernard de Mandeville and Richard Dawkins. In contrast, a dive into Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir’s existential argument provides a unique perspective on the radical freedom that allows humans to choose how they wish to act without having to align with inherent self-interest. Finally, I will explore Comte’s coinage of the term “altruism” and the Nietzschean critique.
Through these philosophers, psychologists, and modern neuroscience, I hope to find some sort of clear, modern image, of what selflessness means, if it exists, and how to know when we are truly embodying it.
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