This chapter details Schopenhauer’s critique of a key modern ideology that grew increasingly strong during his own lifetime: nationalism. First, it notes how Schopenhauer argued that ethnic sameness cannot ground any moral obligations of individuals. Second, it turns to Schopenhauer’s critical dissolution of teleological national history, according to which nations are collective agents with a singular fate. For him, nations were not unified subjects with one shared destiny. Third, it reviews his caustic comments on the increased importance of the vernacular in scholarly communication and the attempt to establish an exclusively German literary canon. To Schopenhauer, nationhood was not even a useful category of cultural appreciation. Through this reconstruction, Schopenhauer emerges as a fierce antinationalist who questioned the importance of the nation as a supposedly cohesive community of mutual care, a unified historical subject, or even a meaningful cultural phenomenon.

This chapter reconstructs Schopenhauer’s complex discussion of human sociability. Schopenhauer thought that agents in the domains of politics and morality cannot conceive of human togetherness. For him, the areas of politics and morality correspond to the exercise of egoism and the spontaneous feeling of compassion, respectively. But he added that egoism is rooted in a form of practical solipsism, and compassion is rooted in a metaphysical insight into the inessential nature of individuals. It follows that neither egoistic nor compassionate individuals ultimately care about others as others. Yet Schopenhauer supplemented these treatments of others as reducible with his discussion of sociability. His analysis of social interaction exemplified by conversations, games, and other diversions includes accounts of interpersonal harmony and friction among individuals who remain distinct from one another. Even though Schopenhauer rejected sociable interaction as superficial and embraced misanthropy, his reflections on sociability contain a conception of human community.

Ways of Living Religion provides a philosophical analysis of different types of religious experience – ascetic, liturgical, monastic, mystical, devotional, compassionate, fundamentalist – that focuses on the lived experience of religion rather than reducing it to mere statements of belief or doctrine. Using phenomenology, Christina M. Gschwandtner distinguishes between different kinds of religious experiences by examining their central characteristics and defining features, as well as showing their continuity with human experience more broadly. The book is the first philosophical examination of several of these types, thus breaking new ground in philosophical thinking about religion. It is neither a confessional treatment nor a reduction of the lived experience to psychological or sociological phenomena. While Gschwandtner’s treatment focuses on Christian forms of expression of these different types, it opens the path to broader examinations of ways of living religion that might enable scholars to give a more nuanced account of their similarities and differences.

This chapter considers compassionate experience, using as examples the Pietist diaconate movement in Germany in the nineteenth century, the Catholic Worker, and the L’Arche movement. The chapter shows that such compassionate practice is usually motivated by a recognition of precarity and need, a “seeing” of suffering or “hearing” of the cry of the other. Those who engage in compassionate experiences identify with the poor and suffering, often to the point of joining them or sharing in their plight. Their actions are marked by compassion, which is more than a feeling of pity, but involves deep commitment to understanding and ameliorating the plight of others or enabling them to improve it themselves. Such generous acts of hospitality often go far beyond the bounds of what seems reasonable or even humanly possible. Compassionate experience is focused less on the religious self but instead is devoted to the other, whether religious or not.

After earning a commerce degree, Will got a corporate job and wore a suit to work every day, then came home to a rental condo in the city he shared with his girlfriend. After about a year he started to wonder why he wasn’t happy. Maybe if he took more time off or got a dog? But after another year of his job, a bit of travelling with his girlfriend, and a year of going on jogs and throwing sticks for their puppy, he still felt miserable. Will realized he had been doing all the things that mattered to others without knowing what truly mattered to himself. In a flurry of decisions, Will quit his job, broke up with his girlfriend, and moved back in with his parents. That’s when he ran into an old family friend, Leah, and, in a rush of details, told her about his life since graduation.

The Epilogue argues that, during the first decades of the twenty-first century, the Buddha has become part of Western popular culture, on occasion little more than a commodity on the shelf in the modern supermarket of individual spiritualities. Thus, whether the story of the Buddha is history or legend, fact or fiction, he remains an exemplary human figure, whose life provides a ‘romantic’ ideal to be followed. As the Oriental ‘other’, now acceptably disenchanted, the Buddha is a symbolic antidote to the ills of modernity in the West. The disenchanted Buddha is thus able to serve as the foundation of a new Western naturalised Buddhism. Naturalised Buddhism provides technologies of self-formation for everyday life in this world. Here, the Buddha is a this-worldly sage and the philosopher of a new form of human consciousness focused upon the practices of meditation and mindfulness.

Kierkegaard’s aesthete, named only as A, continually laments the lack of meaning in his life. He suffers through passions that flare up and quickly die away, leaving him in a melancholic state. His mode of being is on display in the Diapsalmata, the fragmentary writings at the start of Either/Or. In this chapter, we examine why he avoids becoming consistently engaged in the world and remains trapped within his alienated melancholia. We offer a general account of melancholy, arguing that melancholia is an existential condition that must be understood in terms of the metaphysics of possibility. We also provide a sympathetic interpretation of A’s melancholy, rather than placing blame upon him, because melancholia attunes us to certain aspects of the world and of human existence. The aesthetic life has epistemic, moral, and aesthetic worth on its own terms, so a person may legitimately decide to remain melancholic. This avoids compromising our possibilities, makes us receptive to the suffering of others, and may inspire creative activity such as writing poetical fragments.

Chapter 9 discusses the implications of the fair process effect for how to deal with various issues of discontent in society and how we can open up ourselves to start overcoming these issues, at least to a certain extent. Based on what is learned in this book, the chapter notes that it could help when we learn to think differently and try to stay away from abstractions that may, in effect, make us more discontent about what is happening in society than is sometimes warranted or desirable. We also may need to train ourselves to accept that sometimes unfair things happen to us. This may lead us to accept the unpleasant feelings that come with these experiences. This also increases the chances of us being able to tolerate or even embrace dissenting opinions, which may turn out to provide the main impetus to real change. Increasing the level of genuine empathy for other people’s feelings is also among the core aspects that we may attempt to learn. Sometimes trying different behaviors than we are used to, and then observing the effects of these different behaviors, is among the more important lessons that we humans can learn and adapt ourselves to accordingly.