The Jordan Peterson Thread - V2 -

[Lead]

Classic poisoning the well. What's interesting to me is that journalists think that this will work. Peterson has a cult following and is an extremely prominent figure. It is naive and ignorant to believe this mischaracterization will go unnoticed, so I assume it's written with a particular audience in mind.

It's been happening a lot too. This instance seemed to be handled better than others I've seen. I find it very lazy when people just create a buzzword that's negative and lump everyone they don't like into it, especially journalists. It's a way of attacking a person without actually having to examine their views. How can you consider yourself engaged in journalism when you do something like this?

With that said though, the situation didn't go that bad. He corrected himself. I do wonder if he did have any concern for originally doing the error.

 

[BEER]

It's been happening a lot too. This instance seemed to be handled better than others I've seen. I find it very lazy when people just create a buzzword that's negative and lump everyone they don't like into it, especially journalists. It's a way of attacking a person without actually having to examine their views. How can you consider yourself engaged in journalism when you do something like this?

With that said though, the situation didn't go that bad. He corrected himself. I do wonder if he did have any concern for originally doing the error.

He didn't really correct himself though.

He changed the individual descriptors, but the article still remained in the narrative that the Google situation garnered "far-right" support. "classic British liberal" means nothing to leftists reading the article, especially as "classic[al] liberal" seems to fall squarely on the "right" end of the spectrum. The author continued to obfuscate the political affiliations of Peterson. He was pretty adamant about Peterson describing himself, in such that he took no responsibility for his shit-tier article. He refused the journalistic ethics that would dictate that he responsibly describe any persons within his article.

 

[dontsnitch]

It's been happening a lot too. This instance seemed to be handled better than others I've seen. I find it very lazy when people just create a buzzword that's negative and lump everyone they don't like into it, especially journalists. It's a way of attacking a person without actually having to examine their views. How can you consider yourself engaged in journalism when you do something like this?

With that said though, the situation didn't go that bad. He corrected himself. I do wonder if he did have any concern for originally doing the error.

What choice did he have but to correct himself given who he's dealing with? But notice that Peterson was too smart to simply correct him. I would have fallen for it and simply stated my views when he basically tried to sidestep the egregious nature of his slander and shift the conversation towards making Peterson defend himself. Peterson saw it a mile away and had his way with him. "Oh you're not an extreme right winger, well what are you then?" "Nice try, kid, you're on trial, not me."

This is not only a bad strategy ethically, but as we're learning, if you just call everyone you disagree with an extremist, you've undermined your own credibility when you find an actual extremist. When everyone is Hitler, then who cares if you found Mao.

 

[Lead]

He didn't really correct himself though.

He changed the individual descriptors, but the article still remained in the narrative that the Google situation garnered "far-right" support. "classic British liberal" means nothing to leftists reading the article, especially as "classic[al] liberal" seems to fall squarely on the "right" end of the spectrum. The author continued to obfuscate the political affiliations of Peterson. He was pretty adamant about Peterson describing himself, in such that he took no responsibility for his shit-tier article. He refused the journalistic ethics that would dictate that he responsibly describe any persons within his article.

See above. I could rant about that site for days. It's pure garbage journalism.

 

[Bullitt68]

Clearly, I'm VERY late to the party with this guy - not to mention a War Room noob, though I see some familiar names in here - but I've spent the last two weeks watching every video and lecture on his channel and I've recently started reading Maps of Meaning and holy fucking shit this guy is brilliant. He's Joseph Campbell 2.0 without Campbell's Mr. Rogers demeanor.

I don't have time to go through this whole thread (much less V1) but I wanted to find a productive place to jump in, so here I go:

I still cant understand, is he religious or not??? Seriously asking.

As an atheist, I'd say he's religious in the best possible sense. He's religious the way Joseph Campbell was religious. Personally, I think it'd be more accurate to call the type of relationship to religion people like Campbell had and Peterson has mythological, as they relate to the stories as stories, as concretizations of metaphysical/moral abstractions. At the risk of bringing up Ayn Rand in my very first post in here, her theory of art was that it was the arena in which humans objectify their values and make them available to others for contemplation. That's the way Peterson treats religion.

In this sense, Peterson approaches something like the Bible in the exact same way that he approaches something like Pinocchio: As a story in which enduring truths about the human experience can be discovered and disseminated by virtue of committed exegesis.

Does that mean he's religious? It certainly doesn't fit my definition of a religious person. But then that's because religious people have been acting so fucking stupid for so fucking long that that designation is all but a pejorative at this point.

Probably the biggest obstacle to understanding Peterson's conception of "truth" is the word itself.

I think the bigger problem is the one Peterson has been at pains to elucidate, viz. that the word "truth" these days really means "truth as discovered/verified by scientific technology/investigation."

If you ditch that and replace it with something like "wisdom" (which he does himself in the second part) you'll have a much easier time making sense of the first podcast

And by encouraging a shift in terminology, you seem to be indicating a similar problem with truth and wisdom as I just identified between religion and mythology. So many terms have for so long been so "agenda-fied" that it sometimes makes talking about them equivalent to speaking to someone across languages.

Peterson's wisdom is better understood as a commitment to a worldview

I actually don't think his argument is even that ambitious. I think he's trying to make a more modest claim, which is that every pursuit of a (scientific) truth is made against a background of previously established (moral) truths. For Peterson, morality is the key. The cultivation of values (across worldviews, which is why I'm nitpicking here) takes precedence for him, as he tried to explain in the discussion of the biological warfare thing.

In a way, rather than spatializing this argument as Harris being on one "truth track" and Peterson being on another and never the twain shall meet, it's more like (to bring in some Emerson) Harris is in one very small "truth circle" and Peterson is trying to draw a bigger truth circle around it. But Harris' vision is far too narrow, so it's like talking to a brick wall (ironically, it's like the Magritte painting of the apple in front of the guy's face that Peterson used as an example in his Ted talk).

For all the people who were interested in the first conversation between Peterson and Harris, and Peterson's conception of truth in particular, check out this video if you haven't already, as I think it's the place where he gives the clearest and most sustained rundown of what he was trying to get at:

I have some objections to Peterson's position here

Don't keep us in suspense

Harris comes off as a bit smug in the discussion. Like he's trying to flex his intellect against Peterson's, who keeps it very casual.

QFT. Every time he mentioned how he took classes with Rorty, I cringed. Unfortunately, Harris has that tendency (learned in academia) to name drop and fall back on lineages as if it's relevant to the points on the table.

Peterson feels sympathy towards the SJW and mentally ill left. He knows that they are just ignorant, lost souls but it must pain him even more that these bigots who are attacking him are doing so on the grounds of a college campus - a place meant for higher learning and intellectuals. They have comprimised our education system and Peterson knows it all too well.

As someone finishing up a PhD in the humanities (I'm on a scholarship in the UK) I can say that to call college/university education "compromised" is a colossal understatement

Yes, and contrary to what most think, Nietzsche wasn't trying to smash morality

Nietzsche is one of the most misunderstood philosophers

The nihilist interpretation is by the far the worst and most pervasive one.

It's like people read the line "god is dead" and stopped there, not realizing he'd written "amor fati" right before that.

But this is the problem with Nietzsche: For every claim he makes in one place, you can find him contradicting it in another place. He's one of the most schizophrenic philosophers I've ever read. Do you think it's a coincidence that people like Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida were influenced by him?

I also actually find it more than a little perverse that Peterson - a man who gave a talk called "Strengthen the Individual" and is so preoccupied with the individual subject - is so attached to a man who argued in The Will to Power the following:

"'The subject.' This is the term for our belief in a unity underlying all the different impulses of the highest feeling of reality. We understand this belief as the effect of one cause – we believe so firmly in our belief that for its sake we imagine ‘truth,’ ‘reality,’ ‘substantiality’ in general. ‘The subject’ is the fiction that many similar states in us are the effect of one substratum. But it is we who first created the ‘similarity’ of these states; our adjusting them and making them similar is the fact, not their similarity (which ought rather to be denied).”

I also think something like this from Daybreak is more than a little worrisome in the ease with which it can be understood as a license for moral irresponsibility:

"We are none of us that which we appear to be in accordance with the states for which alone we have consciousness and words, and consequently praise and blame."

I think there's just too much cherry picking that has to be done to make Nietzsche not sound like a whack job, and if, at the end of the day, all you're left with is a heap of contradictions where every potentially good point has its opposite somewhere in the same corpus, then why not just move on to someone else?

Given Peterson's Jungian slant, it's no wonder that he's fascinated by Nietzsche since the man literally embodied the split down the middle of each person of good and evil that he always talks about. But I don't think all of Nietzsche's evil nonsense is worth the trouble.

"To say "I believe in God" is equivalent, in some sense, to say "my thought is ultimately coherent, but predicated on an axiom (as my thought is also incomplete, so I must take something on faith)."

To say "I don't believe in God" is therefore to say "no axiom outside my thought is necessary" or "the necessary axiom outside my thought is not real." The consequence of this statement is that God himself unravels, then the state unravels, then the family unravels, and then the self itself unravels.

To stem this unraveling with false certainty: that is totalitarianism. To speed it along is nihilism. We experimented with totalitarianism in the twentieth century, as an alternative to the ultimate axiom of faith in the unknowable and unspeakable. Totalitarianism failed. Now we will have to experiment to nihilism. This experiment, led by the resentful, will also fail, and it is as doubtful that we can survive it as it was that we could survive totalitarianism."

These statements are perfectly coherent and make complete sense in the context of his position. How do you imagine yourself to be checkmating Peterson and/or people who like him?

Can you name a single post-modernist who believes what is attributed to them by Peterson?

Roland Barthes, Jean-François Lyotard, and Jacques Derrida for starters. You can also get some wider context for this nonsense by checking out Stephen R.C. Hicks, who, in addition to writing a great book literally called Explaining Postmodernism and lecturing on postmodernism, was Peterson's most recent guest on his podcast.

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id...ce=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

 

[Jack V Savage]

Business insider is the epitome of dipshit journalism. I don't even want to give that site credit as journalism. All you get from that site is click bait, overdramatization, and a bunch of smug articles acting like they understand a complicated topic more than anyone else (written by one of their dipshit 20-30 something year old contributors).

They do a lot of good work. Josh Barro, in particular, is excellent. Their editorial standards are pretty high. Smugness is definitely part of the package, and some clickbait, too.

 

[Lead]

They do a lot of good work. Josh Barro, in particular, is excellent. Their editorial standards are pretty high. Smugness is definitely part of the package, and some clickbait, too.

Do those guys get any front page articles? I don't recall specific names when I use to go on there but do remember the constant theme of headlines.

 

[Jack V Savage]

Do those guys get any front page articles? I don't recall specific names when I use to go on there but do remember the constant theme of headlines.

Not sure. I just search for Barro's stuff and often see links to other stuff on the site. Never actually click the front page. Barro used to write for the National Review and the NY Times (the Upshot, specifically), among other places.

Here's a sampling of recent stuff from him:

http://www.businessinsider.com/civi...ica-is-not-heading-for-new-a-civil-war-2017-8

http://www.businessinsider.com/trump-poll-voter-fraud-fake-risk-2017-8

Calling out the exact stuff you seem to be critical of.

 

[Lead]

Not sure. I just search for Barro's stuff and often see links to other stuff on the site. Never actually click the front page. Barro used to write for the National Review and the NY Times (the Upshot, specifically), among other places.

Here's a sampling of recent stuff from him:

http://www.businessinsider.com/civi...ica-is-not-heading-for-new-a-civil-war-2017-8

http://www.businessinsider.com/trump-poll-voter-fraud-fake-risk-2017-8

Calling out the exact stuff you seem to be critical of.

I haven't read their opinion section but can acknowledge sometimes there being a night and day change with the quality in those sections and vice versa. Good read so far

 

[dontsnitch]

Clearly, I'm VERY late to the party with this guy - not to mention a War Room noob, though I see some familiar names in here - but I've spent the last two weeks watching every video and lecture on his channel and I've recently started reading Maps of Meaning and holy fucking shit this guy is brilliant. He's Joseph Campbell 2.0 without Campbell's Mr. Rogers demeanor.

I don't have time to go through this whole thread (much less V1) but I wanted to find a productive place to jump in, so here I go:



As an atheist, I'd say he's religious in the best possible sense. He's religious the way Joseph Campbell was religious. Personally, I think it'd be more accurate to call the type of relationship to religion people like Campbell had and Peterson has mythological, as they relate to the stories as stories, as concretizations of metaphysical/moral abstractions. At the risk of bringing up Ayn Rand in my very first post in here, her theory of art was that it was the arena in which humans objectify their values and make them available to others for contemplation. That's the way Peterson treats religion.

In this sense, Peterson approaches something like the Bible in the exact same way that he approaches something like Pinocchio: As a story in which enduring truths about the human experience can be discovered and disseminated by virtue of committed exegesis.

Does that mean he's religious? It certainly doesn't fit my definition of a religious person. But then that's because religious people have been acting so fucking stupid for so fucking long that that designation is all but a pejorative at this point.



I think the bigger problem is the one Peterson has been at pains to elucidate, viz. that the word "truth" these days really means "truth as discovered/verified by scientific technology/investigation."



And by encouraging a shift in terminology, you seem to be indicating a similar problem with truth and wisdom as I just identified between religion and mythology. So many terms have for so long been so "agenda-fied" that it sometimes makes talking about them equivalent to speaking to someone across languages.



I actually don't think his argument is even that ambitious. I think he's trying to make a more modest claim, which is that every pursuit of a (scientific) truth is made against a background of previously established (moral) truths. For Peterson, morality is the key. The cultivation of values (across worldviews, which is why I'm nitpicking here) takes precedence for him, as he tried to explain in the discussion of the biological warfare thing.

In a way, rather than spatializing this argument as Harris being on one "truth track" and Peterson being on another and never the twain shall meet, it's more like (to bring in some Emerson) Harris is in one very small "truth circle" and Peterson is trying to draw a bigger truth circle around it. But Harris' vision is far too narrow, so it's like talking to a brick wall (ironically, it's like the Magritte painting of the apple in front of the guy's face that Peterson used as an example in his Ted talk).

For all the people who were interested in the first conversation between Peterson and Harris, and Peterson's conception of truth in particular, check out this video if you haven't already, as I think it's the place where he gives the clearest and most sustained rundown of what he was trying to get at:





Don't keep us in suspense



QFT. Every time he mentioned how he took classes with Rorty, I cringed. Unfortunately, Harris has that tendency (learned in academia) to name drop and fall back on lineages as if it's relevant to the points on the table.



As someone finishing up a PhD in the humanities (I'm on a scholarship in the UK) I can say that to call college/university education "compromised" is a colossal understatement





But this is the problem with Nietzsche: For every claim he makes in one place, you can find him contradicting it in another place. He's one of the most schizophrenic philosophers I've ever read. Do you think it's a coincidence that people like Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida were influenced by him?

I also actually find it more than a little perverse that Peterson - a man who gave a talk called "Strengthen the Individual" and is so preoccupied with the individual subject - is so attached to a man who argued in The Will to Power the following:

"'The subject.' This is the term for our belief in a unity underlying all the different impulses of the highest feeling of reality. We understand this belief as the effect of one cause – we believe so firmly in our belief that for its sake we imagine ‘truth,’ ‘reality,’ ‘substantiality’ in general. ‘The subject’ is the fiction that many similar states in us are the effect of one substratum. But it is we who first created the ‘similarity’ of these states; our adjusting them and making them similar is the fact, not their similarity (which ought rather to be denied).”

I also think something like this from Daybreak is more than a little worrisome in the ease with which it can be understood as a license for moral irresponsibility:

"We are none of us that which we appear to be in accordance with the states for which alone we have consciousness and words, and consequently praise and blame."

I think there's just too much cherry picking that has to be done to make Nietzsche not sound like a whack job, and if, at the end of the day, all you're left with is a heap of contradictions where every potentially good point has its opposite somewhere in the same corpus, then why not just move on to someone else?

Given Peterson's Jungian slant, it's no wonder that he's fascinated by Nietzsche since the man literally embodied the split down the middle of each person of good and evil that he always talks about. But I don't think all of Nietzsche's evil nonsense is worth the trouble.



These statements are perfectly coherent and make complete sense in the context of his position. How do you imagine yourself to be checkmating Peterson and/or people who like him?



Roland Barthes, Jean-François Lyotard, and Jacques Derrida for starters. You can also get some wider context for this nonsense by checking out Stephen R.C. Hicks, who, in addition to writing a great book literally called Explaining Postmodernism and lecturing on postmodernism, was Peterson's most recent guest on his podcast.

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id...ce=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

I have never read one word from Derrida, and I've noticed that Peterson has dropped his name in dozens of lectures. What can you recommend that I read to get acquainted with him, assuming he's worth reading?

As for the contradictory nature of Nietzsche, I can't say that I can readily point to different examples of this, but I don't have him on my night stand, either. My reaction is to blame the subject matter, specifically existentialism as a whole, but you've piqued my interest, I'll have to pull out my old books. I do think it's undeniable that people have been misusing the God is dead line for quite some time, though.

What I always found interesting is that as a "religious" person who often uses Nietzsche as a reference point, Peterson has never once, to my knowledge, referenced Kierkegaard. And as for him being religious, I think many people are still questioning whether or not he is a theist, which I don't think is a coincidence since he explicitly stated that he doesn't like answering the question because he doesn't like being put in one of those two boxes.

One last interesting thing I'll note, which really surprised me, is that Peterson praises the use of anti-depressants, and has been on SSRIs for years. He said that he has no intention of ever coming off them, and claims that his decision to use them was a pivotal moment in his life. Perhaps my surprise is not warranted and the result of my own bias, but it definitely took me back.

 

[ReAnimator Reagan]

As an atheist, I'd say he's religious in the best possible sense. He's religious the way Joseph Campbell was religious. Personally, I think it'd be more accurate to call the type of relationship to religion people like Campbell had and Peterson has mythological, as they relate to the stories as stories, as concretizations of metaphysical/moral abstractions. At the risk of bringing up Ayn Rand in my very first post in here, her theory of art was that it was the arena in which humans objectify their values and make them available to others for contemplation. That's the way Peterson treats religion.

I think you are conflating two things. There is what Peterson believes personally, and there is what Peterson does in his lectures. He said he believed in God.
Now, his lectures are great on the bible that he has been doing. He is not doing it from a typical apologist. He is doing it as in the stories are true in a way that like fiction is truer than true accounts because it distills the truth from among many tales that are basically the same.

Now how much he is presenting on screen vs what he personally believes but is unable to articulate is unknown.

But I would not think that personally he believes in God as only the stories have truth to them, that is what he presents in lectures. Which honestly I think would very much help the churches to adopt this take on Genesis and books like that, which are in a prehistory kind of, and how the stories are meant to be taken IMO.


Right here from his mouth he says he is a Christian. Now, the literal rising of Jesus from the dead he says he is agnostic on that, but says more info on upcoming lectures.

I have never read one word from Derrida, and I've noticed that Peterson has dropped his name in dozens of lectures. What can you recommend that I read to get acquainted with him, assuming he's worth reading?

As for the contradictory nature of Nietzsche, I can't say that I can readily point to different examples of this, but I don't have him on my night stand, either. My reaction is to blame the subject matter, specifically existentialism as a whole, but you've piqued my interest, I'll have to pull out my old books. I do think it's undeniable that people have been misusing the God is dead line for quite some time, though.

What I always found interesting is that as a "religious" person who often uses Nietzsche as a reference point, Peterson has never once, to my knowledge, referenced Kierkegaard. And as for him being religious, I think many people are still questioning whether or not he is a theist, which I don't think is a coincidence since he explicitly stated that he doesn't like answering the question because he doesn't like being put in one of those two boxes.

One last interesting thing I'll note, which really surprised me, is that Peterson praises the use of anti-depressants, and has been on SSRIs for years. He said that he has no intention of ever coming off them, and claims that his decision to use them was a pivotal moment in his life. Perhaps my surprise is not warranted and the result of my own bias, but it definitely took me back.

1) Don't waste you time with derrida--- the Hicks guy mentioned earlier will tell you all you need to know about that shit
2) He mentions Jung as an answer to Nietzsche
3) He references Fyodor Dostoyevsky a lot in terms of how religion plays a role and how it is antithetical to marxist bullshit. I never read him before, but just started Notes from the Underground and it is fucking good.

 

[Devout Pessimist]

I have never read one word from Derrida, and I've noticed that Peterson has dropped his name in dozens of lectures. What can you recommend that I read to get acquainted with him, assuming he's worth reading?

As for the contradictory nature of Nietzsche, I can't say that I can readily point to different examples of this, but I don't have him on my night stand, either. My reaction is to blame the subject matter, specifically existentialism as a whole, but you've piqued my interest, I'll have to pull out my old books. I do think it's undeniable that people have been misusing the God is dead line for quite some time, though.

What I always found interesting is that as a "religious" person who often uses Nietzsche as a reference point, Peterson has never once, to my knowledge, referenced Kierkegaard. And as for him being religious, I think many people are still questioning whether or not he is a theist, which I don't think is a coincidence since he explicitly stated that he doesn't like answering the question because he doesn't like being put in one of those two boxes.

One last interesting thing I'll note, which really surprised me, is that Peterson praises the use of anti-depressants, and has been on SSRIs for years. He said that he has no intention of ever coming off them, and claims that his decision to use them was a pivotal moment in his life. Perhaps my surprise is not warranted and the result of my own bias, but it definitely took me back.

Peterson has a few videos on Kierkegaard. Here is a shorter one:



Here is another one:

2015 Personality Lecture 12: Existentialism: Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard




I am positive you will be interested in conservative philosopher Sir Roger Scruton. He has an excellent book titled
Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left which explains, and strongly criticizes, the ideas of thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, Jurgen Habermas and Slavoj Žižek.

Roger Scruton is favorable towards Christianity. I find Scruton's books are more interesting than his lectures. He is definitely worth taking some time to read and listen to.

 

[Lead]

Not sure. I just search for Barro's stuff and often see links to other stuff on the site. Never actually click the front page. Barro used to write for the National Review and the NY Times (the Upshot, specifically), among other places.

Here's a sampling of recent stuff from him:

http://www.businessinsider.com/civi...ica-is-not-heading-for-new-a-civil-war-2017-8

http://www.businessinsider.com/trump-poll-voter-fraud-fake-risk-2017-8

Calling out the exact stuff you seem to be critical of.

Looked into him more and I already know this guy from a podcast he hosts. Never read any of his articles before til now.

 

[Devout Pessimist]

They do a lot of good work. Josh Barro, in particular, is excellent. Their editorial standards are pretty high. Smugness is definitely part of the package, and some clickbait, too.

If the editorial standards are pretty high, then how did the ridiculous hit-piece on Jordan Peterson and James Damore get published?

 

[dontsnitch]

I think you are conflating two things. There is what Peterson believes personally, and there is what Peterson does in his lectures. He said he believed in God.
Now, his lectures are great on the bible that he has been doing. He is not doing it from a typical apologist. He is doing it as in the stories are true in a way that like fiction is truer than true accounts because it distills the truth from among many tales that are basically the same.

Now how much he is presenting on screen vs what he personally believes but is unable to articulate is unknown.

But I would not think that personally he believes in God as only the stories have truth to them, that is what he presents in lectures. Which honestly I think would very much help the churches to adopt this take on Genesis and books like that, which are in a prehistory kind of, and how the stories are meant to be taken IMO.


Right here from his mouth he says he is a Christian. Now, the literal rising of Jesus from the dead he says he is agnostic on that, but says more info on upcoming lectures.





1) Don't waste you time with derrida--- the Hicks guy mentioned earlier will tell you all you need to know about that shit
2) He mentions Jung as an answer to Nietzsche
3) He references Fyodor Dostoyevsky a lot in terms of how religion plays a role and how it is antithetical to marxist bullshit. I never read him before, but just started Notes from the Underground and it is fucking good.

I've seen this video, and I'll point out that while he says he's a Christian, almost begrudgingly, he claims he's agnostic about many of the central Christian tenets, including the resurrection, which is to say that I'm not certain he's not simply a Christian-atheist who finds meta-truths in the Bible. It's why I specifically used the term "theist" and not Christian, because I'd like to know if he believes in a creator God, but I think it's pretty obvious he's a weak theist in the truest sense of the word.

 

[dontsnitch]

Peterson has a few videos on Kierkegaard. Here is a shorter one:



Here is another one:

2015 Personality Lecture 12: Existentialism: Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard




I am positive you will be interested in conservative philosopher Sir Roger Scruton. He has an excellent book titled
Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left which explains, and strongly criticizes, the ideas of thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, Jurgen Habermas and Slavoj Žižek.

Roger Scruton is favorable towards Christianity. I find Scruton's books are more interesting than his lectures. He is definitely worth taking some time to read and listen to.

Thanks for those vids, I'll have to check them out. Kierkegaard seems right up his alley.

Scruton I'm familiar with, though I've never read anything by him, though I've heard some of his lectures. Maybe it's because he's got such an interesting accent that I like hearing him speak.

 

[ReAnimator Reagan]

I've seen this video, and I'll point out that while he says he's a Christian, almost begrudgingly, he claims he's agnostic about many of the central Christian tenets, including the resurrection, which is to say that I'm not certain he's not simply a Christian-atheist who finds meta-truths in the Bible. It's why I specifically used the term "theist" and not Christian, because I'd like to know if he believes in a creator God, but I think it's pretty obvious he's a weak theist in the truest sense of the word.

Well, he did say he was a christian, although the resurrection of Christ I don't think he has thought out yet. I don't know of any other central tenants he does not agree with.

 

[Jack V Savage]

If the editorial standards are pretty high, then how did the ridiculous hit-piece on Jordan Peterson and James Damore get published?

Can you link it to me? I'll give it a rundown.

 

[Bald1]

I've seen this video, and I'll point out that while he says he's a Christian, almost begrudgingly, he claims he's agnostic about many of the central Christian tenets, including the resurrection, which is to say that I'm not certain he's not simply a Christian-atheist who finds meta-truths in the Bible. It's why I specifically used the term "theist" and not Christian, because I'd like to know if he believes in a creator God, but I think it's pretty obvious he's a weak theist in the truest sense of the word.

I don't know what label, if any, fits his belief system. He's definitely culturally Christian, but I'm more fascinated by how he arrived at his religious conclusions. A blend of evolutionary psychology and meta-truths as you said. It puts me in mind of the "man peech" from 2nd Hand Lions. As in, he believes in the things he does because he believes they're the things worth believing in. Now that same thing can be said for many people, but few have put in as much effort into studying history, philosophy, psychology and religion in order to put it into perspective. Not to mention introspection. No matter what, the guy isn't any sort of ideologue.

 

[Bullitt68]

I have never read one word from Derrida, and I've noticed that Peterson has dropped his name in dozens of lectures. What can you recommend that I read to get acquainted with him, assuming he's worth reading?

Oh boy. We're going to have to establish how we're using the word "worth" here. He is absolutely not worth reading if what you're looking for is clear thinking, sound logic, or productive philosophy. He is worth reading, however, if you want to better understand the philosophical mechanisms behind much of the faulty thinking in contemporary philosophical circles (which, inevitably, has seeped into many other circles).

For the best sense of where Derrida was coming from with the philosophical practice of what he called "deconstruction," I'd go to his lengthy introduction to Edmund Husserl's The Origin of Geometry, from 1962; his most famous book, Of Grammatology, from 1967; and the edited collections of his essays Writing and Difference and Margins of Philosophy.

He was incredibly prolific and he wrote on tons of topics. It wasn't until the second half of his career that he started to wade into political waters, but even Simon Critchley, in his book The Ethics of Deconstruction, acknowledges that deconstruction can't function as a political tool and that it is incumbent upon Derrideans with a political interest to create something that can actually function in the world of politics (spoiler: nobody has done it yet and they never will because it's nonsense).

But that's a much longer conversation. Incidentally - and there's no way to say this without sounding like an arrogant tool, so please forgive me - in December, in the upcoming issue of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies (yes, that's a real thing), I'm going to have a very long essay published in which I offer a thoroughgoing critique of the work of Barthes and Derrida. It's in an aesthetic register (I study film, so my work is geared towards the study of art), but it's philosophical criticism insofar as what I'm doing is demonstrating (a) that their ideas make no sense and (b) why their ideas when applied to art just fuck shit up. Sadly, nobody else has ever really done that, to actually work through their nonsense and follow their illogical bullshit to the end and show that it comes to nonsense. And NOBODY has done that in the humanities/arts. It's a seriously sad state of affairs in my neck of the woods and it's why I love it that Peterson isn't just some dude saying this shit, but an academic.

I wish there were more academics like him.

As for the contradictory nature of Nietzsche, I can't say that I can readily point to different examples of this, but I don't have him on my night stand, either. My reaction is to blame the subject matter, specifically existentialism as a whole, but you've piqued my interest, I'll have to pull out my old books.

The American philosopher Stanley Cavell has gone a long way towards illuminating the debt Nietzsche owes Emerson, and as Emerson was himself often difficult to pin down on shit, I think it might be the case that Nietzsche's flip-flopping style could have at least a few roots in Emerson. I'm sure another part of it is whatever the fuck was going on in his head at any given time. But, with respect to Emerson (and I think this applies equally to Nietzsche), Cavell once observed:

"We know - do we not? - that one can generally find for every characteristic citation in Emerson another that contradicts it. It is said - and said that Emerson says - that he contradicts himself, that he is inconsistent [...] We who care about the Emersonian text will sometime have to make explicit how we choose citations from it - from which texts, and at what length."

That last part, about having sometime to make explicit how one uses something of Emerson's, is exactly the case with Nietzsche. Except I think Nietzsche's contradictions are deeper and darker than Emerson's, so while the nature is the same, the importance is greater in Nietzsche's case.

One last interesting thing I'll note, which really surprised me, is that Peterson praises the use of anti-depressants, and has been on SSRIs for years. He said that he has no intention of ever coming off them, and claims that his decision to use them was a pivotal moment in his life. Perhaps my surprise is not warranted and the result of my own bias, but it definitely took me back.

Hell, I'm on Lexapro (nowadays Escitalopram). I've been on it for over a decade. I'm a terribly anxious person (in the go, go, go, Tasmanian devil, can't power down sense) and I can't even begin to tell you how much Lexapro helped and continues to help. If I'm not really doing anything in my life, I don't need them, and I even went off them for about a year when I was a working stiff just grinding away between my BA and MA, but if I've got a lot of shit going and I'm pushing hard, I just can't find the off switch and that shit helps regulate me.

I don't really follow the pill arguments, so I don't know where that puts me, but I love my SSRI

I think you are conflating two things. There is what Peterson believes personally, and there is what Peterson does in his lectures. He said he believed in God [...] Right here from his mouth he says he is a Christian. Now, the literal rising of Jesus from the dead he says he is agnostic on that, but says more info on upcoming lectures.

I don't think I'm conflating those two things. I think the only sticking point would be what he means by God. Clearly, we know that when he says "truth" he doesn't mean what Sam Harris means when he says it. I think it's also safe to say that when he says "God" he also doesn't mean what Sam Harris means.

When he says "God," I think it's pretty clear that he's not talking about the white guy with the Santa beard sitting up on the clouds who created everything a few thousand years ago. For Peterson, he tends to use God the way Campbell did (seriously, people who like Peterson, read or reread your Campbell, they're working from the same playbook), as that for which we have no other words, as that beyond which we know nothing and might never learn anything. On one of his Rogan podcasts, he was talking about transcendence and about the mystery of the universe. That's what Campbell liked to emphasize (in stuff like The Power of Myth and The Inner Reaches of Outer Space) as the mysterium tremendum, which he took from Rudolf Otto's notion of the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, Otto's conception of how one experiences God, as an awe-inspiring mystery beyond all knowledge/articulation.

Peterson likes to preserve that little slice of esoterica, that unknownness, that awe-inspiring mystery of the universe and our existence in it (it's the existentialist in him, it's probably what draws him to someone like Heidegger). And I think that's his "God."

As for Jesus and the Resurrection, I think he'll go the mythological route on that and discuss the eternal death and rebirth of the human subject, which he's discussed in different places (the second Rogan podcast, IIRC, as well as in the Q&A after his "Strengthen the Individual" talk).