Arthur Schopenhauer on Open individualism

“The moral virtues, hence justice and philanthropy, if pure, spring, as I have shown, from the fact that the will-to-live, seeing through the principium individuationis, recognizes itself again in all its phenomena.”

“For just as in dreams, all the persons that appear to us are but the masked images of ourselves; so in the dream of our waking life, it is our own being which looks on us from out our neighbours' eyes, though this is not equally easy to discern. Nevertheless, tat tvam asi.”

“Our aversion to that colossal thought will grow less if we remember that the subject of the great dream of life is in a certain sense only one thing, the will-to-live, and that all plurality of phenomena is conditioned by time and space. It is the great dream that is dreamed by that one entity, but in such a way that all its persons dream it together.”

“That which knows all things and is known by none is the subject. It is accordingly the supporter of the world, the universal condition of all that appears, of all objects, and it is always presupposed; for whatever exists, exists for the subject. Everyone finds himself as this subject, yet only in so far as he knows, not in so far as he is object of knowledge.”

“Individuation is merely an appearance, born of Space and Time; the latter being nothing else than the forms under which the external world necessarily manifests itself to me, conditioned as they are by my brain's faculty of perception. Hence also the plurality and difference of individuals is but a phaenomenon, that is, exists only as my mental picture. My true inmost being subsists in every living thing, just as really, as directly as in my own consciousness it is evidenced only to myself. This is the higher knowledge: for that which there is in Sanskrit the standing formula, tat tvam asi, that art thou.”

“The view of things [...] that all plurality is only apparent, that in the endless series of individuals, passing simultaneously and successively into and out of life, generation after generation, age after age, there is but one and the same entity really existing, which is present and identical in all alike; — this theory [...] may be carried back to the remotest antiquity. It is the alpha and omega of the oldest book in the world, the sacred Vedas, whose dogmatic part, or rather esoteric teaching, is found in the Upanishads. There, in almost every page this profound doctrine lies enshrined; with tireless repetition, in countless adaptations, by many varied parables and similes it is expounded and inculcated.”

“We saw earlier that hatred and malice are conditioned by egoism and that these are based on cognition caught up in the principium individuationis [the principle of individuation]. We also found that seeing through that principium individuationis is the origin and essence both of justice and, when it goes further, of love and nobility at the very highest levels. By eradicating the distinction between one's own individual and that of others, this is the only thing that makes possible and explains perfect dispositional goodness that goes as far as the most disinterested love and the most generous self-sacrifice for the sake of others. But if this seeing through the principium individuationis, this immediate cognition of the identity of the will in all of its appearances, is present at a high degree of clarity, then it will at once show an even greater influence on the will. If the veil of maya, the principium individuationis, is lifted from a human being's eyes to such an extent that he no longer makes the egoistic distinction between his person and that of others, but rather takes as much interest in the sufferings of other individuals as he does in his own, and is not only exceedingly charitable but is actually prepared to sacrifice his own individual as soon as several others can be saved by doing so, then it clearly follows that such a human being, who recognizes himself, his innermost and true self in all beings, must also regard the endless suffering of all living things as his own, and take upon himself the pain of the whole world. No suffering is foreign to him anymore.”