Woke Jesus: Addendum

The essay “Woke Jesus: a brief philosophical analysis based on Schopenhauer” is an analysis of the idea that Jesus would be “too woke” for certain Christians based on Schopenhauer's moral philosophy. In it, I do not make a political analysis, but an ethical one. So much so, that in the end of the essay I write that if Schopenhauer came back to life today he almost certainly wouldn't ally himself with the left, especially with Marxists — even though he would certainly consider the so-called “Christian conservatives” that think that Jesus is too woke as optimists and traitors to the original message of Christianity. But it is of no use to explain this. Some people are so inebriated with the political “culture war” that it is impossible for them to get away from it. They were conditioned to lash out every time they believe to have detected the scent of what they think is leftism.

There is an obvious disconnect between what these people understand to be Schopenhauer's philosophical pessimism and what it really is. They are closer to a reactionary interpretation of Nietzsche than to an objetive analysis of Schopenhauer. According to them, pessimism means betting on the worse in absolutely everything, and even to revel in the worst things. But Schopenhauer doesn't use the terms pessimism/pessimist and optimism/optimist in this way. A pessimist philosophy or religion, for Schopenhauer, is that which recognizes that we all share the same essence, therefore there isn't any difference between the suffering of another and mine. This, for Schopenhauer, should make us be compassionate towards others and want to help them, it should makes us want to decrease suffering as much as possible. This realization should also make one notice that existence is itself suffering and that it is better to deny one's own will. This denial of the will within oneself implies in even more compassion towards others, with the objetive to alleviate their suffering. However, according to the idiot who knows nothing of philosophy, this is “leftism” and “utopia.”

For Schopenhauer, optimistic philosophies and religions are the opposite of what these people believe they are: optimistic philosophies and religions affirm the will, not of others, but of oneself, since the will individuates itself in empirical existence. The will is selfish and it devours itself in the form of countless individual phenomena. In Schopenhauer's pessimistic philosophy, not caring about the suffering of others, and only seeking one's own personal satisfaction in detriment of others is to affirm one's own will, it is to be an optimist. This posture, again, is more in line with a reactionary interpretation of Nietzschean philosophy, a philosophy that not only refuses to judge existence, but in fact affirms and worships it, reveling in it's most egotistical and grotesque aspects. For Nietzsche, Schopenhauer's moral philosophy is akin to Christian ethics, an ethics of the weak, that keeps the strong from accomplishing what is theirs by nature.

These people don't understand what they are talking about. Some even resent the obvious diagnosis I make in some of my essays, about them only claiming to be pessimists to give an air of intellectuality to their “right-wing” political positions. They say ludicrous things, such as: “pessimism can't be left-wing, because being left-wing means having faith in humanity, in existence, etc.” They learned these empty platitudes watching grifters and gurus, and they refuse to sit down and read for years on end in order to actually learn things. They don't know about Philipp Mainländer, for example. But we needn't go so far, since Mainländer was explicitly political in much of his analysis, even taking sides (the left), something that Schopenhauer never did.

We don't need to bring Mainländer, who was a pessimist and a socialist, to prove that these people haven't the slightest idea of what they're talking about. In several of my writings, I've cited passages from Schopenhauer that summarize his moral philosophy, only to be criticized and called “left-wing” in the same way. In other words, in the head of the imbecile that sees leftism everywhere, even Schopenhauer's moral philosophy is left-wing, utopic, etc, even though Schopenhauer didn't care about political and social issues. The idiot doesn't know that, so all that is left to him is to repeat mechanically, like a robot, the idiotic formula that he memorized watching his favorite grifters.

by Fernando Olszewski