[3] The piece was republished under the title Prize Essay on the Basis of Morals (German: Preisschrift über die Grundlage der Moral), along with On the Freedom of the Will, in The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics (German: Die beiden Grundprobleme der Ethik) in September 1840, with an 1841 publication date.
[4][5] After this incident, Schopenhauer took the opportunity to demonstrate that Hegel’s writings are, as he says, “a pseudo-philosophy that cripples all mental powers, suffocates real thinking and substitutes by means of the most outrageous use of language the hollowest, the most devoid of sense, the most thoughtless, and, as the outcome confirms, the most stupefying jumble of words”, a claim which he normally considered too self-evident for support of arguments.
Schopenhauer took as an example (“out of the rich selection of absurdities”) that Hegel believed that mass could become heavier after being magnetized: An example of the existent specification of gravity is furnished by the following phenomenon: when a bar of iron, evenly balanced on its fulcrum, is magnetized, it loses its equilibrium and shows itself to be heavier at one pole than at the other.
The first section is an introduction in which Schopenhauer provides his account of the question posed by the Royal Danish Society and his interpretation of the history of western ethics.
"[9] Schopenhauer's doctrine was that morality is based on "the everyday phenomenon of compassion,...the immediate participation, independent of all ulterior considerations, primarily in the suffering of another, and thus in the prevention or elimination of it.... Only insofar as an action has sprung from compassion does it have moral value; and every action resulting from any other motives has none.
But this presupposes that to a certain extent I have identified myself with the other man, and in consequence the barrier between the ego and the non–ego is for the moment abolished...."[11] Schopenhauer thus considered it to be true that "compassion, as the sole non–egoistic motive, is also the only genuinely moral one.
[13] The morality of an action can be judged in accordance with Kant's distinction of treating a person as an end not as a mere means.