The Basis of Morality (Dover Philosophical Classics)
A disciple of Kant and a significant factor in shaping Nietzsche's thinking, Arthur Schopenhauer worked from the foundation that all knowledge derives from our experience of the world but that our experience is necessarily subjective and formed by our own intellect and biases: reality, therefore, is but an extension of our own will.In this essay, translated by ARTHUR BRODRICK BULLOCK (b. 1860) and first published in English at the turn of the 20th century, Schopenhauer articulates a humane system of ethics that springs, surprisingly, from this same subjectivity as he connects compassion to morality: an action is moral, he insists, if it is motivated by sympathy.Part treatise on conventional ethics and part stunning refutation of Kant's rigid Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, this classic--considered by some to be Schopenhauer's masterwork--continues to challenge and intrigue students of philosophy and of 19th-century intellectualism to this day.--This text refers to an alternatePaperbackedition.