La fundamentación metafisica de la compasión como fundamento de la moral en Arturo Schopenhauer / (The metaphysical grounding of compassion as the foundation of morality in Arthur Schopenhauer’s thought)

Abstract

The main focus of the present paper is to argue the metaphysical structure of compassion as an immediate, intuitive and originary knowledge of the human conscience, which is the response of Schopenhauer to the problem of the unhappiest conscience of the nineteenth century. In Schopenhauer’s terms this means the emancipation from the dichotomy between the subject of knowledge and the subject of the will. Indeed this metaphysical stance of Schopenhauer is grounded in the principle that human beings are the mysterious unity between these two subjects that, at the same time, are the two ways of access to being as representation or as will. On the one hand, human beings condemned theirselves to live trapped by mere phenomenon, being egoism the imperative of sustaining the dichotomy. This means to be condemned to live as alienated consciences; On the other hand, salvation is found, by compassion, where the recognition of others in the identity of being becomes the imperative, emancipating conscience from its alienation. This is the deep idea of Schopenhauer that metaphysics has to be ethics at the same time. In this way, the central principle of ethics is compassion that discloses the veil of Maya recovering the conscience from its loss in the phenomenal world. The structure of the paper follows three points: 1.The mysterious immediate identity between the subjects of knowledge with the subject of the will. 2. The world and human beings as will objectivizations are pain and suffering. The innate suffering for the pain of other as source of compassion. 3. The way out of the individuation principle, compassion as the immediate and intuitive knowledge before the suffering of the others.