ORMUZD AND AHRIMAN AS THE PHILOSOPHER’S HELPERS

(This Schopenhauerian entry is also an illustration to the Foreign Religions To The Rescue Of Philosophy entry in the Religion section [posted on January 15^th, 2011, as part of the mega-entry Religion and Culture]. It is one of my salient points that philosophers dabbling in foreign religions are getting themselves an excellent chance to overcome the challenge of the philosophy-religion conflict, stemming from the fact that religion hates the philosopher’s free spirit of inquiry, and philosophy rejects the dogmatic nature of religion by the very nature of its own spirit of doubt.)

Distancing himself from Christianity is what Schopenhauer does with a relish, transferring his inquisitive ethical lens on Oriental religions, be that Buddhism, Hinduism or, in this case, also Persian Zoroastrianism.

The following paragraph from Schopenhauer proves how much easier it is to operate with other peoples’ ethical concepts than with our own, although in this particular case, he has no intention to divorce himself entirely from his ungrateful philosophical burden of dissecting Christianity. But the Persian gods Ormuzd and Ahriman and the Hindu deity Indra are indispensable as facilitators of his philosophical argument.

“In the Christian system, the devil is a personage of greatest importance. God is described as absolutely good, wise and powerful; and, unless he were counterbalanced by the devil, it would be impossible to see where the innumerable and measureless evils, which predominate in the world, come from, if there was no devil to account for them. And since the Rationalists have done away with the devil, the damage inflicted on the other side has gone on growing, and it is becoming more and more palpable; as might have been foreseen, and was foreseen, by the orthodox. The fact is, you cannot take away one pillar from a building without endangering the rest of it. And this confirms the view, established on other grounds, that Jehovah is a transformation of Ormuzd, and Satan, of the Ahriman, who must be taken in connection with him. And Ormuzd himself is a transformation of Indra.” (Schopenhauer on Religion in Parerga und Paralipomena.)

In concluding this entry, an important point needs to be made. The well-recognized preoccupation of many great philosophers, such as Schopenhauer, with foreign religions, has in my view no religious significance whatsoever, in the sense of the philosopher’s religious preference. On the contrary, they see these foreign religions not even as religions demanding as such from their adherents blind faith and reverence, but only as philosophical tools, allowing them to investigate the exciting philosophical aspects of religion without the unwelcome admixture of cultism.