Self and Selfishness

The concepts of Self-Interest, Selfishness, etc. entail a concept of Self.  Nevertheless, a persistent incoherence in Modern Philosophy is a discrepancy between the latter and the former.  For example, Hume, on the one hand, conceives the Self to be a bundle of perceptions, but, on the other, accepts Selfishness as a simple behavioral instinct.  Likewise, Schopenhauer conceives the Self to be a mere Representation, yet accepts the Reality of a Selfish instinct.  Now, Nietzsche is briefly more consistent, recognizing, in The Gay Science #1, that if the concept of the Self is a fiction, then so, too, is any Moral evaluation of it.  However, that brief glimpse seems forgotten later when he converts Selfishness from a Vice to a Virtue, which is tantamount to an inversion of the conventional valuation of the characteristic in his era.  But, because its original Real basis has been obscured, that inversion has been distorted, and what is intended as a correction to a degenerative condition of the species, has been widely accepted as, instead, an advocacy of Individualism, a position which is antithetical to Nietzsche's Dionysianism.  Now, at the root of that confusion is his concept of the Self as a fiction, which has its ground in his uncritical acceptance of the concept of the Species-Member relation as that of Universal-Individual.  Thus, while the lapse of method of his predecessors is in the derivation of the concept of Selfishness from that of Self, Nietzsche's is in the derivation of the concept of Self to begin with.