There are four broad research goals: (i) to evaluate schopenhauer's ethics of compassion: (ii) to assess Nietzsche's idea that Schopenhauers's ethics and, more specifically, examine whether Nietzsche's idea that Shopenhauer"s ethics of compassion in ultimately the expresion of a nihilistic (will-to-nothingness' is valid or not: (iii) to examine schopenhauer's aesthetics of disinterestedness and objectivity; (iv) to understand what nietzsche's critique of schopenhauer's aesthetics of the 'passive' an d'intellectualist' character of the aesthetic spectator precisly involves and what the value is of the alternative views he offers against it.