Love and Compassion

Love as foundation and meaning

• Tolstoy (tolstoy) — union in love with the people and with God is what the way out of the crisis leads to: win life for all, not for yourself. Grounding: edinenie-v-lyubvi, dobyvay-zhizn-ne-dlya-sebya-a-dlya-vsekh.
• Schopenhauer (schopenhauer) — compassion is the basis of morality: the only unegoistic motive. Grounding: sostradanie-osnova-morali.
• Confucius (confucius) — humaneness (ren) and reciprocity (shu): do not do to another what you would not wish for yourself. Grounding: ren, shu, xiao.
• Laozi (laozi) — the first of the three treasures is compassion: it gives victory even in battle. Grounding: sanbao, water.
• Adler (adler) — love and care are expressions of social feeling, the sole criterion of worth. Grounding: chuvstvo-obshchnosti, etika-chuvstva-obshchnosti.

Love as deed, not feeling

• Ignatius Loyola (ignatius) — love shows itself in deeds rather than in words: the contemplation for obtaining love closes the exercises. Grounding: lyubov-v-delakh-ne-slovakh, sozertsanie-lyubvi.
• Montaigne (montaigne) — the minimum of compassion is not to torment: cruelty is the extreme of vices, even "under colour of piety". Grounding: protiv-zhestokosti.

Unmasking and rejection

• La Rochefoucauld (larochefoucauld) — love is a field where amour-propre holds power; pity and gratitude are calculation: we give in order to receive. Grounding: lyubov-i-samolyubie, zhalost-i-blagodarnost, interes.
• Nietzsche (nietzsche) — pity is hatred of suffering, that is, of the condition of elevation; the morality of pity is herd morality. Grounding: sostradanie-zhalost, stradanie-vozvyshaet.

Axis of dispute: Nietzsche against Schopenhauer and Tolstoy — compassion as harm
against compassion as foundation; La Rochefoucauld against all who love —
amour-propre behind the mask; Ignatius against the sentimentalists — love is
measured by deeds.