Mitleid

How is it possible that suffering that is neither my own nor of my concern should immediately affect me as though it were my own, and with such force that it moves me to action?... This is something really mysterious, something for which Reason can provide no explanation

Campbell foregrounds Schopenhauer's foundational question about Mitleid as the irreducible mystery at the heart of moral action, establishing compassion as a phenomenon that exceeds rational justification.

Campbell, Joseph, Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor, 2001thesis

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the weal and woe of another should directly move my will; that is to say, become my motivation, as though the end served were my own: indeed, and even occasionally to such a degree that my own well being and suffering — which are normally my only two springs of conduct — should remain more or less ignored

Campbell cites Schopenhauer's Mitleid passage at length as the 'grounding theme' underlying Wagner's Tristan, Parsifal, and the Ring, positioning compassion as the metaphysical key to mythological transformation.

Campbell, Joseph, Creative Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume IV, 1968thesis

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Schopenhauer was apparently the first philosopher to realize that Immanuel Kant in The Critique of Pure Reason (1781), not only had demolished the philosophical mansions both of Cartesian rationalism and of Baconian empiricism, but also had established the prerequisites for a correlation of oriental and occidental metaphysical terms

Campbell situates Schopenhauer's philosophy — including his ethics of Mitleid — within a broader project of correlating Eastern and Western metaphysics via Kant's critical framework.

Campbell, Joseph, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and as Religion, 1986supporting

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What a wonderful theme! And what a wonderful world of myth one finds in celebration of this universal mystery! The Greeks, it will be recalled, regarded Eros, the god of love, as the eldest of the gods

Campbell's wider meditation on love as a universal mythological force provides the cultural-historical context within which Mitleid operates as one expression of love's transformative power.

Campbell, Joseph, Myths to Live By, 1972aside

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