I was waiting for someone from our circle to come out and talk about this. Thanks for delivering.
I find it absolutely hilarious, as a Catholic, that Peterson has done much to curry favor with the religious world, but it seems that this debate has lost him most of his credibility and goodwill, at least with the Catholic world.
Something that I believe is worth mentioning here is that Jungianism is totally inextricable from nearly all of Peterson's claims about anything. He approaches everything with a Jungian lens, and therefore something should be said about Peterson's interpretations thereof.
Jung seems to affirm the existence of ubiquitous universals that each have different modal representations in accordance with the epistemic framework of people. In other words, there are universal things in the world that we are attuned to, and expressions thereof are products of our particular situation in the world. When Peterson says that atheists don't know what they're rejecting, he's trying to lure them into the trap that there is a pervasive attunement to God (as a universal) that exists for every person--the "God-shaped hole," so to speak. Sure, at it's most basic level, he might be trying to do the old Aquinas trick wherein people must concede that there at least logically must be space for God as a primum mobile, or at the very least an explanatory heuristic.
For Jung, and for Peterson, all particulars are towards truth, but ultimately fall short from it. God is true, but God qua Christianity is not necessarily true, but rather towards the higher order truth of God as such. For instance, Jung made the radical claim that the kenosis of Christ is a particular, culturally situtated manifestation of absolute nothingness; absolute nothingness as a metaphysical category can be observed across cultures such as in Zen Buddhism. It is not so much then that the kenosis is truth, but absolute nothingness is.
The deeper point I am trying to convey is that language is not essential for delineating facts about the world for Jung; everything is symbolic in nature, and symbols are a priori. Language is completely heuristic, and it serves to function as references towards more complex truths about the world. Peterson believes this, and so he lacks the rigor to speak about the semantics of his concepts. To him, everyone has an answer to the God question that they are simply unaware of insofar as they are incapable of expressing it adequately.
I feel it is a little bit disingeuous to chalk up Peterson's failures in this debate to merely semantic confusion, but of course, I am not disputing that Peterson's absolute L in this debate. I think Peterson ultimately fails also because he is philosophically homeless and spiritually bankrupt. He has an idea of truth, but he has only pursued it insofar as he can say things about it non-committally. It's almost like he anticipates failure, and he's just waiting for the right kind of failure to come along for him to absorb into his middling worldview. (It's funny; this failure came when Zizek absolutely wiped the floor with him. Yet he still hasn't read Hegel. Maybe fraternizing with communists is bad for his paycheck with conservative media.).
On that note about James, I do believe that Peterson swings more thoroughly towards Feuerbach more than James--God is a product of projection, and is thus innately anthropological. It is not so much that we believe in God because it is necessarily pragmatic to do so, but rather we believe in God because we existentially find ourselves in a situation in which we must be ordered towards something that is larger than us, yet comprehensible in some capacity--a symbol, in other words.
The grand irony is that this agnosticism informs Marx's view of ideology in his material dialectic, wherein it is, to speak loosely, a necessary evil for the status quo to function. (But, as most of us have observed in Peterson vs. Zizek, Peterson has never read Marx).
Peterson is most definitely an agonstic because he is unable to universalize the very particular soteriology of Christianity. As a metaphysician, he is a cautionary tale for anyone that decides to put an unearned emphasis on universal categories whilst discounting the particular modes these categories manifest in. His theology is at best benign, but far from the complexities of Jung.
On another note, when I saw Zizek at Edinburgh, Zizek mentioned that Peterson indeed challenged Zizek to a round 2 and has invited him multiple times to his podcast. Zizek has rejected each time and eventually stopped responding altogether. He says that Peterson was "no longer interesting" and is generally "much stupider."
I am in full agreement with you that Peterson lacks a coherent metaphysics, and because of this lack he is out of his depth with traditional atheist-theist debaters. But I think his primary problem is not a lack of metaphysics, but a lack of wisdom, in a very precise sense that I’m gonna explicate.
I think the issue here at least in part is that Peterson’s hero Jung was never a fan of metaphysics. As far as I know, Jung read little philosophy after Kant, who probably exerted the strongest influence on Jung when he derived his theory of the archetype. As Kobe gestured at this, Jung did believe in universals, and that particular meaning, form, and symbols are all imperfect instantiations of the universal within particular culture and historical situatedness, and this is Kantian insofar as the source of the intelligibility of the universals do not lie beyond the agent in contact with the particulars.
Jung’s dismissal of metaphysics is similar in spirit as the later periods of Husserl (In Crisis in particular) and other phenomenologists that followed (particularly Heidegger and Merleru-Ponty). The charge is essentially that European scientists and metaphysicians have forgotten the place from which their philosophizing, scientizing, and intellectualizing originate. For Husserl, for instance, the originating place is something like the constituting acts of consciousness. I take it that the phenomenologists’ central point is that people have tried to reach some essential and reductive source of intelligibility of the world that is totally beyond the place from which the theorizing happens, that this forgetfulness has produced a variety of problems for societies plagued with the European metaphysics, and that to remedy this it is up to the philosopher to go back to the source and clarify it structure again. As far as I see it, however Husserl complexifies his categories and the constituting activities of consciousness, the picture he puts forth is still largely Kantian in origin. Jung’s dismissal of metaphysics is first a foremost an influence from Kant and were similar in orientations as the phenomenologists in diagnosing the problems of European society as a kind of forgetfulness of the origin and source of intelligibility. Similar to Husserl and other phenomenologists, Jung’s solution is to clarify, work out, and table the structures of intelligibility (most prominently in the theory of archetypes and personality types), with the crucial difference that he tries to clarify the structure and constituting activities of the unconscious and how it is rooted in the greater reality of what he called the collective unconscious.
But unlike Husserl and other phenomenologists (maybe with the exception of Heidegger), Jung blends the Kantian epistemology with a Gnostic mysticism. And I think this is where Jung’s metaphysics and systematization really blow up. At least in Kant and the phenomenologists, they were careful in deriving and tabling the categories and detailing what kinds of constitution give rise to the rational intelligibility of the world. As soon as this got blended with Gnosticism, it all went down the drain. An example is Jung’s interpretation of astrology and alchemy. He didn’t think of these as pre-modern scientific efforts at all to study and document the movements of the heavens or the matters but the manifestations of genius mystics who have projected their unconscious (which is always a partial instantiation of the collective unconscious) activities onto the physical world in order to purify and transform the psyche. This transformation consists in the nested twofold activities of on the one hand individuating the personal psyche from the collective unconscious, and on the other hand, establishing a divine connection with the collective unconscious. It is with the Gnostic that Jung’s metaphysics and systematization really go to the toilet because he saw that every alchemist had a different kind of cryptic language and systematization, and that the essence of what they were trying to say isn’t in the language at all, but in the direct experiencing of Gnosis, a type of ineffable, pre-propositional, pre-symbolic, esoteric knowledge, which helped each alchemist simultaneously individuate and find their own way back to the source of meaning and intelligibility in the collective unconscious.
Long story short, I think Peterson has largely inherited Jung’s orientation. He and his hero are not on an intellectual path but a mystical one that seeks to individuate the psyche and establish a divine connection with the Motherland.
Peterson’s mistake I think isn’t with his metaphysics or lack therefore. The mistake is for him to be out in the wide open with his personal mystical project. I guess “P-God” is quite appropriate also because it is also a Personal God. The mistake is to confuse the esoteric Personal God with the exoteric almighty and all perfect God. The atheists and theists play the exoteric game, which involves putting out one’s propositions about the almighty, all perfect God out in the open and debate their existence and their validity. But Peterson and Jung are playing the esoteric game, not involving propositions or facts about the world or properties of the almighty exoteric God, and therefore not suitable for public debates. I think this confusion makes Peterson foolish. Jung and the alchemists in contrast were much wiser in being private and personal about their esoteric work. Many asked for their work to be destroyed after death because they understood that the nature of their work is so esoteric that they will be inevitably misunderstood. Peterson is foolish precisely in the sense that he confusingly brought the esoteric game to people playing the exoteric game.
Fascinating perspective Hongyu. The distinction between esoteric and exoteric is interesting as well, I hadn't thought about it in those terms. I'd also never heard of Jung's thoughts on astrology and alchemy, but it checks out.
I think Peterson has been esoteric about his belief in God, and that's why he "dodges" the question of theism so much. But, as you're pointing out, he doesn't articulate this esoteric vs. exoteric distinction well, and puts himself into the exoteric dialogue without understanding it or explicating it. We can both be right about our positions, because Peterson lacks the exoteric language and positions demanded by a basic position about metaphysics. He ought to be having a more coherent meta-discussion about these concepts, but lacks the wisdom, as you put it, to do so. I also think because he's so Western-civilization pilled, he misses the mysticism--he is a clinical psychologist by training (scientist) after all.
Excellent contribution. Thanks for reading and sharing your thoughts as usual.
Peterson's unserious performance in the 20 atheists debate seems to me to plainly follow from his unserious work on the Bible in general. Take the example you provide here, where Moses cannot see God's face, only his back. Peterson's reading, that this indicates that God is unknowable, is directly contradicted by the text, because immediately following God passes by Moses and verbally describes himself. This description goes on to be one of the most quoted passages of the Torah in the rest of the Hebrew Bible. Peterson's reading is pseudo-profound psychobabble that appeals only because so many many people understand that the Bible is supposed to be an important work but have no familiarity with it themselves. If Peterson were to directly engage with anyone rigorously familiar with the tradition of Biblical interpretation he would be shredded like he was in this debate, not because his psychology is shoddy but because he treats a text that has something to say to us as if it's merely a mirror for that psychology. In this sense he treats the Bible just like he treats those atheists: by claiming knowledge of them without ever listening to them.
Great thoughts Adam. I mostly agree. I think it's fair to say Peterson takes the Bible seriously, just that he doesn't take two thousand years of hermeneutics seriously. His analysis can be helpful. For example, his insights into the Cain and Abel story/pattern are extremely illuminating. Fundamentalists will struggle with a story like this, whereas good hermeneutics will allow the story to breathe as a profound pattern of human behavior. However, in this way, Peterson can only see one side of a short--namely, as a psychological mirror, as you say.
Peterson gives can shed light on a story like this by thinking existentially/outside the box as a psychologist. That said, he certainly doesn't believe in the divine inspiration of Scripture and doesn't take interpretive tradition seriously (just like, in my opinion, fundamentalists don't take these things seriously either). He also ignores the bigger picture, or how the books, stories, and ideas relate to one another. Specifically, he will miss the way the Torah points to a messiah.
Either way, I agree that, at his worst, Peterson is spouting "pseudo-profound psychobabble" that entirely ignores Christian and Jewish tradition of reading.
I was waiting for someone from our circle to come out and talk about this. Thanks for delivering.
I find it absolutely hilarious, as a Catholic, that Peterson has done much to curry favor with the religious world, but it seems that this debate has lost him most of his credibility and goodwill, at least with the Catholic world.
Something that I believe is worth mentioning here is that Jungianism is totally inextricable from nearly all of Peterson's claims about anything. He approaches everything with a Jungian lens, and therefore something should be said about Peterson's interpretations thereof.
Jung seems to affirm the existence of ubiquitous universals that each have different modal representations in accordance with the epistemic framework of people. In other words, there are universal things in the world that we are attuned to, and expressions thereof are products of our particular situation in the world. When Peterson says that atheists don't know what they're rejecting, he's trying to lure them into the trap that there is a pervasive attunement to God (as a universal) that exists for every person--the "God-shaped hole," so to speak. Sure, at it's most basic level, he might be trying to do the old Aquinas trick wherein people must concede that there at least logically must be space for God as a primum mobile, or at the very least an explanatory heuristic.
For Jung, and for Peterson, all particulars are towards truth, but ultimately fall short from it. God is true, but God qua Christianity is not necessarily true, but rather towards the higher order truth of God as such. For instance, Jung made the radical claim that the kenosis of Christ is a particular, culturally situtated manifestation of absolute nothingness; absolute nothingness as a metaphysical category can be observed across cultures such as in Zen Buddhism. It is not so much then that the kenosis is truth, but absolute nothingness is.
The deeper point I am trying to convey is that language is not essential for delineating facts about the world for Jung; everything is symbolic in nature, and symbols are a priori. Language is completely heuristic, and it serves to function as references towards more complex truths about the world. Peterson believes this, and so he lacks the rigor to speak about the semantics of his concepts. To him, everyone has an answer to the God question that they are simply unaware of insofar as they are incapable of expressing it adequately.
I feel it is a little bit disingeuous to chalk up Peterson's failures in this debate to merely semantic confusion, but of course, I am not disputing that Peterson's absolute L in this debate. I think Peterson ultimately fails also because he is philosophically homeless and spiritually bankrupt. He has an idea of truth, but he has only pursued it insofar as he can say things about it non-committally. It's almost like he anticipates failure, and he's just waiting for the right kind of failure to come along for him to absorb into his middling worldview. (It's funny; this failure came when Zizek absolutely wiped the floor with him. Yet he still hasn't read Hegel. Maybe fraternizing with communists is bad for his paycheck with conservative media.).
On that note about James, I do believe that Peterson swings more thoroughly towards Feuerbach more than James--God is a product of projection, and is thus innately anthropological. It is not so much that we believe in God because it is necessarily pragmatic to do so, but rather we believe in God because we existentially find ourselves in a situation in which we must be ordered towards something that is larger than us, yet comprehensible in some capacity--a symbol, in other words.
The grand irony is that this agnosticism informs Marx's view of ideology in his material dialectic, wherein it is, to speak loosely, a necessary evil for the status quo to function. (But, as most of us have observed in Peterson vs. Zizek, Peterson has never read Marx).
Peterson is most definitely an agonstic because he is unable to universalize the very particular soteriology of Christianity. As a metaphysician, he is a cautionary tale for anyone that decides to put an unearned emphasis on universal categories whilst discounting the particular modes these categories manifest in. His theology is at best benign, but far from the complexities of Jung.
On another note, when I saw Zizek at Edinburgh, Zizek mentioned that Peterson indeed challenged Zizek to a round 2 and has invited him multiple times to his podcast. Zizek has rejected each time and eventually stopped responding altogether. He says that Peterson was "no longer interesting" and is generally "much stupider."
I am in full agreement with you that Peterson lacks a coherent metaphysics, and because of this lack he is out of his depth with traditional atheist-theist debaters. But I think his primary problem is not a lack of metaphysics, but a lack of wisdom, in a very precise sense that I’m gonna explicate.
I think the issue here at least in part is that Peterson’s hero Jung was never a fan of metaphysics. As far as I know, Jung read little philosophy after Kant, who probably exerted the strongest influence on Jung when he derived his theory of the archetype. As Kobe gestured at this, Jung did believe in universals, and that particular meaning, form, and symbols are all imperfect instantiations of the universal within particular culture and historical situatedness, and this is Kantian insofar as the source of the intelligibility of the universals do not lie beyond the agent in contact with the particulars.
Jung’s dismissal of metaphysics is similar in spirit as the later periods of Husserl (In Crisis in particular) and other phenomenologists that followed (particularly Heidegger and Merleru-Ponty). The charge is essentially that European scientists and metaphysicians have forgotten the place from which their philosophizing, scientizing, and intellectualizing originate. For Husserl, for instance, the originating place is something like the constituting acts of consciousness. I take it that the phenomenologists’ central point is that people have tried to reach some essential and reductive source of intelligibility of the world that is totally beyond the place from which the theorizing happens, that this forgetfulness has produced a variety of problems for societies plagued with the European metaphysics, and that to remedy this it is up to the philosopher to go back to the source and clarify it structure again. As far as I see it, however Husserl complexifies his categories and the constituting activities of consciousness, the picture he puts forth is still largely Kantian in origin. Jung’s dismissal of metaphysics is first a foremost an influence from Kant and were similar in orientations as the phenomenologists in diagnosing the problems of European society as a kind of forgetfulness of the origin and source of intelligibility. Similar to Husserl and other phenomenologists, Jung’s solution is to clarify, work out, and table the structures of intelligibility (most prominently in the theory of archetypes and personality types), with the crucial difference that he tries to clarify the structure and constituting activities of the unconscious and how it is rooted in the greater reality of what he called the collective unconscious.
But unlike Husserl and other phenomenologists (maybe with the exception of Heidegger), Jung blends the Kantian epistemology with a Gnostic mysticism. And I think this is where Jung’s metaphysics and systematization really blow up. At least in Kant and the phenomenologists, they were careful in deriving and tabling the categories and detailing what kinds of constitution give rise to the rational intelligibility of the world. As soon as this got blended with Gnosticism, it all went down the drain. An example is Jung’s interpretation of astrology and alchemy. He didn’t think of these as pre-modern scientific efforts at all to study and document the movements of the heavens or the matters but the manifestations of genius mystics who have projected their unconscious (which is always a partial instantiation of the collective unconscious) activities onto the physical world in order to purify and transform the psyche. This transformation consists in the nested twofold activities of on the one hand individuating the personal psyche from the collective unconscious, and on the other hand, establishing a divine connection with the collective unconscious. It is with the Gnostic that Jung’s metaphysics and systematization really go to the toilet because he saw that every alchemist had a different kind of cryptic language and systematization, and that the essence of what they were trying to say isn’t in the language at all, but in the direct experiencing of Gnosis, a type of ineffable, pre-propositional, pre-symbolic, esoteric knowledge, which helped each alchemist simultaneously individuate and find their own way back to the source of meaning and intelligibility in the collective unconscious.
Long story short, I think Peterson has largely inherited Jung’s orientation. He and his hero are not on an intellectual path but a mystical one that seeks to individuate the psyche and establish a divine connection with the Motherland.
Peterson’s mistake I think isn’t with his metaphysics or lack therefore. The mistake is for him to be out in the wide open with his personal mystical project. I guess “P-God” is quite appropriate also because it is also a Personal God. The mistake is to confuse the esoteric Personal God with the exoteric almighty and all perfect God. The atheists and theists play the exoteric game, which involves putting out one’s propositions about the almighty, all perfect God out in the open and debate their existence and their validity. But Peterson and Jung are playing the esoteric game, not involving propositions or facts about the world or properties of the almighty exoteric God, and therefore not suitable for public debates. I think this confusion makes Peterson foolish. Jung and the alchemists in contrast were much wiser in being private and personal about their esoteric work. Many asked for their work to be destroyed after death because they understood that the nature of their work is so esoteric that they will be inevitably misunderstood. Peterson is foolish precisely in the sense that he confusingly brought the esoteric game to people playing the exoteric game.
Fascinating perspective Hongyu. The distinction between esoteric and exoteric is interesting as well, I hadn't thought about it in those terms. I'd also never heard of Jung's thoughts on astrology and alchemy, but it checks out.
I think Peterson has been esoteric about his belief in God, and that's why he "dodges" the question of theism so much. But, as you're pointing out, he doesn't articulate this esoteric vs. exoteric distinction well, and puts himself into the exoteric dialogue without understanding it or explicating it. We can both be right about our positions, because Peterson lacks the exoteric language and positions demanded by a basic position about metaphysics. He ought to be having a more coherent meta-discussion about these concepts, but lacks the wisdom, as you put it, to do so. I also think because he's so Western-civilization pilled, he misses the mysticism--he is a clinical psychologist by training (scientist) after all.
Excellent contribution. Thanks for reading and sharing your thoughts as usual.
Peterson's unserious performance in the 20 atheists debate seems to me to plainly follow from his unserious work on the Bible in general. Take the example you provide here, where Moses cannot see God's face, only his back. Peterson's reading, that this indicates that God is unknowable, is directly contradicted by the text, because immediately following God passes by Moses and verbally describes himself. This description goes on to be one of the most quoted passages of the Torah in the rest of the Hebrew Bible. Peterson's reading is pseudo-profound psychobabble that appeals only because so many many people understand that the Bible is supposed to be an important work but have no familiarity with it themselves. If Peterson were to directly engage with anyone rigorously familiar with the tradition of Biblical interpretation he would be shredded like he was in this debate, not because his psychology is shoddy but because he treats a text that has something to say to us as if it's merely a mirror for that psychology. In this sense he treats the Bible just like he treats those atheists: by claiming knowledge of them without ever listening to them.
Great thoughts Adam. I mostly agree. I think it's fair to say Peterson takes the Bible seriously, just that he doesn't take two thousand years of hermeneutics seriously. His analysis can be helpful. For example, his insights into the Cain and Abel story/pattern are extremely illuminating. Fundamentalists will struggle with a story like this, whereas good hermeneutics will allow the story to breathe as a profound pattern of human behavior. However, in this way, Peterson can only see one side of a short--namely, as a psychological mirror, as you say.
Peterson gives can shed light on a story like this by thinking existentially/outside the box as a psychologist. That said, he certainly doesn't believe in the divine inspiration of Scripture and doesn't take interpretive tradition seriously (just like, in my opinion, fundamentalists don't take these things seriously either). He also ignores the bigger picture, or how the books, stories, and ideas relate to one another. Specifically, he will miss the way the Torah points to a messiah.
Either way, I agree that, at his worst, Peterson is spouting "pseudo-profound psychobabble" that entirely ignores Christian and Jewish tradition of reading.