Nietzsche, una ermeneutica della compassione contra Schopenhauer

Abstract

In this essay, after summarising Arthur Schopenhauer's position about compassion, we will mainly focus on Nietzsche's reinterpretation of that paradoxical feeling. Schopenhauer, in the context of an analytical examination of egoism, opposes it to a human being who can go beyond egocentrism in the direction of a compassionate coexistence with others, positing compassion as an empirical evidence. Nietzsche, on the contrary, criticises Schopenhauer's compassion as an axiological error, considering Schopenhauer's compassion not as a mere ethical emotion, but as a value system that aims to deny the will to live. With his philosophical proposal, Nietzsche aimed to give a new principle (to be understood not only as a temporal onset) to Western European culture; in order to do this, he could not fail to subject Schopenhauer's compassion to a careful criticism, considering the compassion as a sentiment that was to be condemned as an obstacle to the natural law of human development.