https://phil.washington.edu/research/publications/schopenhauer-content-compassion
Instead of simply saying that the compassionate person perceives no distinction between herself and the object of her compassion, we should say that she perceives them to not be distinct spatiotemporal individuals. That is, she perceives them to be distict only in the way that Platonic ideas are distinct. The latter distinctness is not sufficient for individuality in the normal sense, for Schopenhauer, since he calls space and time alone the principle of individuation (OBM 4:267, p. 250). The key difference is that, at the level of ideas, things metaphysically overlap with each other in ways that they do not at the spatiotemporal level. (p.7)
So we have here a holology which also suggests comparison with Plotinus' theory of how ideas are unified in the nous.
Hegel's phenomenology of spirit is the antithesis of both Kantian and Schopenhauerian ethics. It is essentially anti-transcendent, pragmatist, relativist, collectivist, deterministic and culminates in a totalitarian-statist mysticism (a fascism based on an esoteric Christianity which subsumes and buries the the possibility of the resurgence of the enlightenment). This is seen in the treatment of the phase of practical reason and its transition into "spirit". Hegel turns Kant's noumenon into his secular pragmatic collectivist fatalistic thing itself Sache Selbst. From thenceforth it is no longer about the individual but only the drama of the collective. The individuality of the individual is allowed to manifest in its "negativity" only for the sake of, and in function of, the development of the power and self-transparency of the collective. What corresponds to this 'spirit' is the third section of what is inappropriately called 'Begriff' in the Science of Logic, the weakest and most ad hoc part, which appropriates the far deeper insights into the structure of consciousness found in Kant and Fichte.
At the basis of ethics must be a consciousness which does not make a distinction between self and others or between today, yesterday and tomorrow. Ethics concerns the timeless individually directly cognizable universal ought which is completely independent from any hypothetical necessary developmental law or process just as it has nothing to do relativistically with arbitrary convention. At a social-cultural level there can indeed be ethical progress, but this should never be seen as the working of some kind of natural law or the result of necessity. Confusing the ideal of human ethical progress with speculation about evolution in natural science has been a very serious error. Human ethical progress is a normative ideal never a law or natural necessity. A normative ideal that remains invariant throughout recorded historical humanity, even if tragically it seems to be less and less realized in the world today. There are non-human sentient beings which cannot be subject to the normativity of the moral law. But we could explore how there is an implicit, albeit imperfect, morality already at work in nature. What we must reject are arbitrary speculations attempting to link non-human and human beings whereby such a link serves as a foundation or explanation of morality.
The correct theory of ethics is much like Frege's philosophy of logic. Or, to paraphrase Husserl:
Whatever is a moral duty, is absolutely, intrinsically a moral duty: the moral law is one and the same for men or non-men, angels or gods. Moral laws speak of the ought in this ideal unity, set over against the real multiplicity of races, individuals and experiences, and it is of this ideal unity that we all speak when we are not confused by relativism.
The moral law implies that we should strengthen our historical organizations dedicated to the universal unconditional upholding of human rights and international law.
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