Towards a Theory of Eccentricity — Page 7:
31 Now, with this picture of the standard attitude towards life in mind, I am interested in one specific kind of “dysfunction.” What if somebody does not take this step back (although she certainly is able to do so) but remains in her subjective viewpoint with regard to values? What about a person who is simply indifferent to all objective values?
32 Such a person would only get reasons out of the subjective viewpoint and only prudential reasons aiming at her own good. Let’s call this person egocentric. It is very important to understand that this concept of egocentricity significantly differs from the use of “egocentric” in everyday language. The common usage of the word describes a person who always thinks about himself, but not in such a fundamentally different way from other human beings as I am suggesting here. The sort of egocentricity I am interested in completely lacks the interest in objective values, whereas the common egocentric just attaches a disproportionately high value to his prudential reasons.
33 This egocentric person, as I said, judges and decides only out of her very own values and never takes into account values and reasons stemming from the objective viewpoint. To be sure, she does not lack the ability to take a step back, but she simply does not accept those kinds of reasons as her reasons; she is indifferent to them. In the world of the egocentric, she herself is the absolute centre from which everything is measured and valued. The world of the average person, by contrast, involves a variety of sources in addition to the subjective viewpoint: oneself, the interests of others, cultural and moral values. Thus, the whole process of valuing functions in a totally different way. In fact, it is highly probable that other people who form their values out of the interplay between the subjective and objective viewpoint would simply cease to understand the egocentric. There would be no common ground to relate to because the egocentric is not interested in the reasons and values of those other people.
34 To the others, the egocentric would very likely seem strange or weird because they would completely lack the ability to understand this person, since all common bases are neglected by the egocentric. Furthermore, the others would probably wish to distance themselves from the egocentric, given her indifference to what is important to them and her attitude towards life, which is so different to theirs. It is, in fact, so radically different that they will not be able to say anything positive about the egocentric, but just what she is not: she is not in the centre – i.e. where the others are – since she does not relate to the values of the centre (i.e. the objective values in Nagel’s sense) – she is ex-centric.
5. The eccentric person
35 Finally, we have found our concept of eccentricity. We started by distinguishing three features of the use of “eccentric” in everyday language. It is (i) only a negative description which tells us what the depicted person is not, it has a (ii) pejorative sense to it, and (iii) the speaker who describes a person or a behaviour as “eccentric” considers himself to be in the centre from which that person significantly differs. We then found out that eccentricity has something to do with fundamental questions concerning our attitude towards life. After an examination of the thoughts of Helmuth Plessner and Thomas Nagel, we established a picture of human attitudes towards life which tells us that we determine value out of the interplay between two distinct sources, the subjective and the objective viewpoint. I then suggested imagining a person who is totally indifferent to the values stemming from the objective viewpoint, namely all kinds of interpersonally shared values. In the way other people would react to such a person, we found exactly the same behavioural patterns we distinguished with regard to the use of “eccentric” in everyday language.