ETHICS IN PIRANDELLO AND SCHOPENHAUER.

This paper is a study of Pirandello’s and Schopenhauer’s ethics, grounded as it is in their shared belief in the world as representation, duality, and conflict. Through an exploration of Pirandello’s critical essay On Humor (1908) and Schopenhauer’s The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics (1840), it will become clear how at the core of their ethical system lies a shared desire to rescue ethics from abstract and a priori concepts and knowledge. Underscoring the fallibility and arbitrariness of conventional constructs and social structures, Pirandello and Schopenhauer turn to inner consciousness as a more dependable, even if fallible, criterion for value, and then to compassion, understood as the true and sole basis of all moral actions. We shall see how for each thinker ethics entails the interdependence and reciprocity of intuition and abstract thinking. I argue that at the core of their ethical theories lies the crisis of modern consciousness, a conception of reality as an irrational force, and of the world as an idea created by individuals who themselves are in a constant state of flux. Finally, I propose an understanding of umorismo as the Pirandellian equivalent of the Schopenhauerian "representation" or "idea". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]