A Study Of Schopenhauer’s Sympathy Theory

As the representative of voluntarism,Schopenhauer started from the ontology of will,shook the absolute authority of rationalism,and established the moral foundation of sympathy by means of intuitive experience,relying on the inner emotions of human beings.After the 19 th century,under the influence of Schopenhauer,the thought of compassion ethics was further developed,and Schopenhauer became an important representative of compassion ethics.The first part of the thesis combs the sympathy theory of different thinkers and analyzes the theoretical source and philosophical premise of Schopenhauer’s sympathy theory.In the 18 th and 19 th centuries,Western thinkers paid attention to human emotional experience,and became very interested in its relationship with morality.In the study of human emotion,the thinkers represented by Hume,Adam Smith and Rousseau all attached great importance to the role of sympathy.Among them,Hume believed that sympathy was a psychological mechanism,and Smith believed that impartial bystanders could make appropriate and impartial moral evaluation of others with the help of sympathy.Rousseau believed that compassion is compassion in a narrow sense,which is sympathy for the misfortune of others.Similar to Rousseau,Schopenhauer advocated compassion for the suffering of others,trying to help others avoid suffering and achieve happiness.Schopenhauer sought ontological support for his theory from a philosophical height.Schopenhauer took the ontology of will as the essence of the world.He believed that all things in the world were governed by the same will and subject to the arrangement of the will.The special object of human will can use feeling and experience to understand the feelings of others,and form the same emotional understanding.Schopenhauer’s argumentation on the ontology of will and the epistemology of intuition provided philosophical basis for his theory of compassion.The second part of the thesis is based on Schopenhauer’s text,which expounds the basic content of Schopenhauer’s theory of sympathy.Schopenhauer’s concept of compassion aims at the single attribute of human suffering.The object of sympathy is not only limited to human beings,but also includes all living things including human beings and animals.In addition,Schopenhauer emphasized that compassion is not simply a kind of emotional sharing and resonance between people,but a catalyst that can promote human moral behavior.In Schopenhauer’s view,sympathy,as one of the motives of human behavior,is the basis and standard for moral evaluation and judgment of human behavior,and the only source of human moral behavior.Schopenhauer demonstrated the metaphysical basis of sympathy by penetrating into the principle of individualization and the nature of human suffering.The moral motive of compassion can prompt people to produce moral behavior,which can produce the virtue of justice in the first stage and the virtue of kindness in the second stage.The combination ratio of three kinds of human motivation determines the difference of individual moral character.When motivated by compassion,the behaviors and values generated by people tend to be more altruistic moral values,and they are more able to care about the rights and happiness of others and even animals.The third part of the thesis makes an objective comment on Schopenhauer’s theory of compassion,and summarizes the characteristics of Schopenhauer’s theory of compassion through the analysis of Schopenhauer’s theory of compassion.There are contradictions in Schopenhauer’s theory of compassion.How pure altruism really survives in complex social interactions has become an unsolved mystery of Schopenhauer’s theory of compassion.In addition,Schopenhauer denied the value of reason in the occurrence of human moral behavior,showing a certain extreme.But in general,Schopenhauer expanded the sympathy theory of emotionalism ethics,triggered Nietzsche’s rebutted question of sympathy,and also became the object that phenomenological ethics needs to respond to.His sympathy theory has certain reference significance for the construction of contemporary social ethics and morals.It enlightens us that in the construction of social ethics and morals,we should attach importance to the power of moral emotion,curb the phenomenon of moral apathy by stimulating moral emotion,and stimulate people’s moral motivation through reward mechanism.Therefore,the study of Schopenhauer’s theory of compassion has not only important theoretical significance,but also important practical value.