Schopenhauer, Compassion, and the Radical Political Subject

Abstract

Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy has been systematically excluded from the canon of radical political thought, dismissed as quietist resignation incompatible with emancipatory projects. This article challenges that exclusion by developing the concept of the pluriversal subject, a political subjectivity derived from Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of will, ethics of compassion (Mitleid), and aesthetic cognition. Where Laclau’s empty signifier demands that particular claims be made equivalent—sacrificing irreducible difference at the moment of articulation—and Žižek’s neo-Hegelian framework reinstates a privileged subject-position grounded in class antagonism, the pluriversal subject achieves solidarity through compassionate recognition of shared suffering without homogenizing the plurality of political claims. Drawing on Schopenhauer’s epistemological break from the Kantian-Hegelian tradition, his engagement with non-Western philosophical traditions, the activation of his ideas through the Nietzschean-Deleuzian lineage and Latin American decolonial thought (Mignolo, Quijano), the article demonstrates that his metaphysics furnishes a non-rationalist, non-identitarian ground for radical democratic politics under conditions of pluriversality.