Compassion as Educator and the Education of Compassion in Schopenhauer’s Ethics

This article explores the role of compassion in Schopenhauer’s ethics along two main dimensions: its cognitive function and its capacity for refinement. The first concerns compassion’s educative power as a form of intuitive awareness of the unity of all beings—an experience that discloses the metaphysical structure of the world. The second addresses compassion as a disposition open to cultivation and development through three avenues: grounding it in rational moral principles, engaging in aesthetic experience as a means of decentering the self, and strengthening the imagination as an essential vehicle for expanding the range of our compassionate responses.