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- Herausgeber: Quickie Classics
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In The Basis of Morality (1840), Schopenhauer mounts a stringent critique of eudaimonism and Kantian duty, arguing that only compassion grounds moral worth. He distinguishes egoism, malice, and compassion, deriving justice and beneficence from the last. Rooting ethics in his metaphysics of the will, he explains altruism as immediate identification with another's inner being. Composed as a prize essay for the Royal Danish Society, it pairs caustic polemic with crystalline argument, severing ethics from theology and post-Kantian system‑building. Schopenhauer (1788–1860) brought to this project the architecture of The World as Will and Representation and a sustained engagement with classical Indian thought. His estrangement from the Hegelian academy sharpened his prose and his suspicion of abstract moral formalism. Sensitivity to animal suffering and to the ubiquity of pain oriented his ethics toward fellow‑feeling rather than rule worship. This book remains indispensable for readers interested in the psychology of altruism, the limits of duty ethics, and the traffic between metaphysics and morality. Philosophers, classicists, and scholars of religion will find a stringent, clarifying challenge, as will reflective general readers. Read it to see compassion, argued with austere precision, elevated to first principle. Quickie Classics summarizes timeless works with precision, preserving the author's voice and keeping the prose clear, fast, and readable—distilled, never diluted. Enriched Edition extras: Introduction · Synopsis · Historical Context · Author Biography · Brief Analysis · 4 Reflection Q&As · Editorial Footnotes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2026
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The Basis of Morality (Summarized Edition)
Table of Contents
Introduction
Is morality grounded in cold reason, divine command, or the felt recognition of another’s suffering? In The Basis of Morality, Arthur Schopenhauer pursues this question with a rigor that unsettles settled assumptions, asking what truly moves us when we call an action good. He writes as a metaphysician with the habits of a moral psychologist, dwelling on motives, character, and the lived realities of harm and help. The book proposes a clear alternative to prevailing systems without abandoning analytic discipline. Its abiding drama is internal: a contest between principles that promise certainty and a motive that insists on being felt.
As a work of moral philosophy from the early nineteenth century, the treatise belongs to a period defined by intense debate over the legacy of Kant. Written as a prize essay and first published in 1841, it later appeared alongside On the Freedom of the Will under the collective title The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics. The argument unfolds without a narrative setting, yet it is firmly situated in the study, lecture hall, and public disputations of its era. Schopenhauer engages his contemporaries as a combative interlocutor, but he also addresses readers beyond the academy, insisting that everyday moral experience is his court of appeal.
The book proceeds by asking what could serve as the ultimate ground of moral obligation and by testing the leading candidates. It examines religion, social utility, prudence, and the authority of pure reason, weighing each against the phenomena of human conduct. The voice is at once analytic and pugnacious, animated by examples and by tightly framed distinctions. Readers encounter careful definitions, frequent returns to first principles, and a sustained dialectic with Kantian ethics. The style alternates between austere argument and pointed aside, making the experience brisk but exacting, designed to shift attention from rules and rewards to the motive at work in genuine beneficence.
At the center stands a thesis about motivation: that only a non-egoistic concern with the well-being of others can ground the moral worth of actions. From this starting point flow analyses of justice and loving-kindness as distinct expressions of the same source, and a sharp repudiation of any morality that relies on fear, reward, or abstract law alone. Schopenhauer’s challenge to rationalist and theological foundations is not a dismissal of reason or tradition, but a claim about their limits in producing genuine virtue. The book’s emphasis on the direct apprehension of another’s suffering anchors its account of duty, character, and responsibility.
The method combines criticism with phenomenology of moral experience, using ordinary cases to show how motives disclose themselves in action. Distinguishing legality from morality, Schopenhauer asks what remains when external sanctions fall away, and he measures doctrines by their capacity to explain uncoerced beneficence. His analysis reaches beyond the human community to challenge indifference toward animals, treating their vulnerability as a test of moral seriousness. Throughout, he returns to character, arguing that stable dispositions illuminate why similar circumstances yield divergent choices. The result is an ethics attentive to what can be willed, not just what can be legislated, and to concrete harm avoided.
Contemporary readers will find in this work a rigorous companion to current debates about empathy, altruism, and the sources of moral motivation. Its focus on the limits of rule worship speaks to ethical life in pluralistic societies, where shared procedures often fail to settle what we owe one another. The stress on compassion illuminates questions in bioethics, social policy, and criminal justice, while its attention to animals anticipates later arguments about nonhuman moral status. Even as it contests prevailing systems, the book invites dialogue rather than conformity, offering a framework that complements empirical research without reducing ethics to psychology or to utilitarian calculus.
In approaching The Basis of Morality, expect a sustained testing of concepts rather than a catalogue of rules, and a spirited conversation with predecessors that clarifies your own convictions. The prose rewards careful attention, but the payoffs are practical: a sharpened sense of what can legitimately claim moral authority and a renewed sensitivity to suffering as a guide to action. Without presuming unanimity, Schopenhauer offers a durable question set for any age: What motivates, what justifies, and what truly helps. That enduring inquiry, rendered here with clarity and force, is why the book continues to matter as both provocation and resource.
Synopsis
The Basis of Morality by Arthur Schopenhauer is an extended essay originally composed for a prize competition; later published, and ultimately included in The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics. It opens with a preface recounting the competition and Schopenhauer's dissatisfaction with the awarding, setting a combative tone, but the substantive aim remains philosophical: to identify the true foundation of moral obligation. He declares that the question must be settled by examining the genuine springs of human conduct rather than by erecting abstract systems. From the outset, the work promises both historical critique and a positive theory, and it proceeds systematically from method to doctrine.
Schopenhauer frames the central question as whether any imperative claiming moral authority can possess binding force if it rests on advantage, fear, or social convention. He insists that a basis of morality must be non-derivative and immediately efficacious in motivating action. To reach it, he proposes to observe moral judgments as they are actually made, then infer the unique kind of motive that elicits such approval. This method distinguishes the ethical from the legal: law coerces from outside, morality moves from within. He argues that the desired ground must explain duty's felt necessity without invoking external rewards or penalties.
The first target is egoism in its many forms, including prudential calculus, honor, and utility-oriented schemes. Schopenhauer grants that self-interest is powerful and ubiquitous, but maintains that it cannot yield genuine moral worth, because it treats others merely as means to one's own ends. He criticizes theories that attempt to derive benevolence from enlightened self-love or social contract, arguing that such derivations smuggle moral concern into premises that are themselves non-moral. For him, any action whose final motive is personal advantage, however refined, belongs to the domain of prudence, not morality, and therefore cannot serve as morality's foundation.
He next considers theological grounds that appeal to divine command, providential order, or hopes and fears about an afterlife. While not adjudicating metaphysical doctrines as such, Schopenhauer contends that basing ethics on reward and punishment makes morality heteronomous, subordinating right action to calculations about consequences for oneself. In his view, moral obligation should neither depend on religious belief nor be weakened by its absence. He therefore seeks a foundation that would hold even if doctrinal controversies remain unresolved, and that would account for the special character of moral judgment without presupposing external authority, revelation, or a cosmic ledger of merits and demerits.
Schopenhauer then develops an extended critique of Immanuel Kant's moral philosophy. He challenges the strategy of grounding ethics in a universal law legislated by pure reason, faulting it for formal emptiness and for deriving content from premises that are not genuinely independent of experience. He doubts that a respect for abstract law, considered solely as law, can motivate action, and argues that the universalization test risks restating what agents already will for other reasons. The upshot is not a dismissal of rigor in ethics, but a claim that reason alone cannot supply the primary incentive that makes an action morally worthy.
Having cleared this ground, Schopenhauer offers his positive thesis: among the basic incentives of human conduct, only compassion qualifies as the true moral motive. He analyzes three fundamental springs—egoism, malice, and compassion—and identifies the last as uniquely capable of moving an agent to regard another's good or ill as directly significant. Compassion, as he presents it, is an immediate participation in another's suffering that overrides narrow self-concern without appeal to calculation. On this basis, an action is moral to the extent that it flows from this non-egoistic motive, rather than from fear, vanity, custom, or the pursuit of personal happiness.
From the compassion-based motive, Schopenhauer derives two principal virtues. Justice is the negative virtue, restraining one's own will from harming others by respecting their claims; beneficence is the positive virtue, aiming at the relief of others' distress. He emphasizes that legal institutions can enforce aspects of justice through external sanctions, but moral worth resides only where restraint or aid springs inwardly from compassionate concern. This perspective widens the moral circle beyond human communities, since the capacity to suffer is not confined to our species. Accordingly, he treats concern for animals as a clear measure of the depth and sincerity of moral feeling.
Although the essay remains an ethical inquiry, Schopenhauer connects its account to his broader metaphysics. He suggests that compassion becomes intelligible when one sees through the illusion that isolates individuals, recognizing a more fundamental unity of being that underlies separate appearances. In that light, moral motivation expresses an immediate awareness that the same inner reality lives in all. He also maintains that differences in character and the strength of motives shape conduct more decisively than abstract rules, which helps explain both the rarity and the recognizability of genuine virtue. Ethics, then, clarifies experience of value rather than legislating it from first principles.
The Basis of Morality thus advances a distinctive program: purge ethics of heteronomous incentives and empty formalism, locate its source in a single non-egoistic motive, and interpret that motive in light of a deeper account of the self and world. The book's lasting significance lies in its rigorous separation of prudence from morality, its sustained critique of rationalist and theological foundations, and its emphatic defense of compassion, including toward nonhuman animals. Without relying on esoteric premises, it poses a durable challenge: if moral action is possible, what moves us must be something that makes another's suffering matter as directly as our own.
Historical Context
Arthur Schopenhauer composed the work commonly titled The Basis of Morality in the late 1830s while living in Frankfurt am Main, a free city of the German Confederation. Born in 1788 in Danzig and educated at Göttingen and Berlin, he had left Berlin in 1831 during the cholera epidemic that also claimed Hegel that year. Removed from university employment, he wrote as an independent scholar. The immediate institutional setting was a Scandinavian prize-essay culture. Schopenhauer submitted his moral treatise to the Royal Danish Society of Sciences in Copenhagen, positioning his argument within a formal learned-society contest rather than within Prussian academia.
The German intellectual climate he confronted was shaped by the aftermath of Kant and the dominance of post-Kantian systems. Universities in Prussia, especially Berlin, elevated Hegelian philosophy through state patronage and academic appointments. Schopenhauer had attempted to lecture in Berlin in 1820, scheduling his course against Hegel; few students attended, and he withdrew from university life. He revered Kant’s critical philosophy yet disputed central elements of Kantian ethics, including the categorical imperative. By the 1830s, he worked deliberately outside institutional orthodoxy, addressing readers beyond faculty circles and challenging what he saw as scholastic jargon and state-supported philosophical authority.
Across Europe, learned societies promoted Enlightenment methods by issuing prize questions on philosophical themes. The Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences in Trondheim awarded Schopenhauer its 1839 prize for his essay On the Freedom of the Will. Encouraged, he submitted a companion treatise on moral foundations to the Royal Danish Society of Sciences in Copenhagen. The Danish jurors declined to award him their prize, judging his submission unsatisfactory to the set question. Schopenhauer then published both pieces together in 1841 under the title Die beiden Grundprobleme der Ethik, linking debates about moral responsibility with arguments about the ground of ethical obligation.
