"But is there any coherent alternative, given the self-evident horrors of existence? Can Being
itself, with its malarial mosquitoes, child soldiers and degenerative neurological diseases, truly
be justified?... I... don’t think it is possible to answer the question by thinking.
Thinking leads inexorably to the abyss." — JerseyFlight

I think this needs to be put in context. What does he mean by 'thinking'? Trying to think it through and come to some kind of conclusion or resolution? Perhaps he is right in this but it is a good thing to think and see that 'naive' thinking won't resolve the issue; there is no Eureka moment. He goes on the say-

thinking collapses in on itself. In such situations—in the depths—it’s noticing, not thinking, that does the trick. — JerseyFlight

So things can be resolved? When thinking ends, being begins. Being is a more exalted form of thought. You might be interested in Simone Weil's 'The need for roots' which deals with these issues.

He's a bit of a joke really isn't he?

But Anyway, {quote= Jordan-the-Moron} Wiffle waffle. {/quote} will format your quotes nicely if you replace the curly brackets with square ones, like this:

Wiffle waffle. — Jordan-the-Moron

Quoting a post is even easier; select the bit you want and a quote button appears and a click does the same thing wherever your cursor is in your reply.

.

The absence of thought is not a solution, it's a resignation. Further, as I mentioned above, Peterson could only arrive at, his equivocated and superficial solution, through the medium of thought. You have not even made contact with my point. His action presupposes the negation of his prescription.

JerseyFlight — JerseyFlight

I think what he is saying - S. Weil says something similar - is that abstract intellectual cogitation will not resolve the issue. One must find something better.

Here, you've claimed that he uses "Nihilistic language", yet you've provided no example and no reason for saying so. — whollyrolling

The quotes I provided are more than proficient, more could be referenced. Does Peterson believe man can arrive at meaning absent the premise of supernaturalism? The answer is no. So entrenched is he in this idealism that he has even fallaciously tried to attribute it to Nietzsche, claiming that Nietzsche knew morality/values could not be bolstered without some kind of supernatural foundation(???). This is Nihilism! This is also a distortion and woefully incompetent mischaracterization of Nietzsche's position [see Peterson's exchange with Susan Blackmore]. (This proves that he is exactly the kind of Nihilist Nietzsche warned about.)

I do wonder if you were able to comprehend Adorno's position? Would be interesting to see where you object?

See above.

My advice: don't waste any time on Jordan Peterson, whether as criticism or not. Better off digging a ditch and filling it back up.

My advice: don't waste any time on Jordan Peterson, whether as criticism or not. Better off digging a ditch and filling it back up. — Xtrix

Think there's some value in him. Well. About him. What concerns does he speak to that made him so popular? What is it about his language and work that was appealing?

(1) Self help that
(2) has a veneer of academic respectability targeted at
(3) millenial white dudes with little sense of personal identity that
(4) are all too happy to palliate their terrible social adjustment using
(5) pseudoscience dreck pretending it's Enlightenment Modernism which
(6) synergizes with far right nostalgia that permeates dude culture on the internet by
(7) promising that individual enlightenment will neuter the unacknowledged social ills that
(8) produce all of the above as a symptom.

Deepak Choprah for woke rationalist buckos.

My advice: don't waste any time on Jordan Peterson, whether as criticism or not. Better off digging a ditch and filling it back up. — Xtrix

This is indeed the proper and initial response, but there is a serious problem here. The attitude you embody, though it truly does come from a place of higher critical intelligence, fails to see that Peterson is doing damage in culture. Whether one likes it or not, he has become relevant, people are influenced by him, they look up to him and see him as the very thing he is not, an intellectual example. When intellectuals like yourself withdraw from the advancing public discourse, the narrative is lost to people like Peterson, it regresses. What is required is an intellectual fight. Those who actually read literature across the domain of the social sciences, know that this fella is a charlatan, the problem is that we expect other people to know it as well, but they cannot connect the dots. In the shadow of religion's collapse many have become Nihilistic, they feel the weight of reality without the crutch of God. Peterson comes along and says, "don't worry, I feel the same Nihilism that you do, but I have real answers, I know the way forward." Tragically, his answers are entirely reactionary, conformity to authority, "go back to the old slave masters and you will feel safe again." People are so intellectually bankrupt and frightened that they will take anything they can get, hence the strong man doctrine, hence a return to authority, the mindless affirmation of delusion on the basis of pragmatism: religion, because it helps us cope with our Nihilistic feelings of terror.

Your argument seems to take the form:

Some of Peterson's statements are akin to nihilism
Therefore Peterson is a nihilist
Nihilism is bad
Therefore Peterson is bad.

So what? This sort of argument could be applied to any original thinker who thinks outside the (stultifying) norm.

Some of Peterson's statements are akin to nihilism
Therefore Peterson is a nihilist
Nihilism is bad
Therefore Peterson is bad. — A Seagull

Strawman. See above, reply to whollyrolling.

Lol .. its your OP!!

"[Nietzsche] knew that, when we knocked the slats out of the base of Western civilization by destroying this representation, this God ideal, we would destabilize and move back and forth violently between nihilism and the extremes of ideology." Jordan Peterson's Bible Lectures, May 17, 2018, I Introduction to the Idea of God.

This is not what Nietzsche knew, this is Peterson's mischaracterization of Nietzsche. What Nietzsche knew is that Christian ideals had been so entrenched into western culture that people would (as Christianity engineered) fall into Nihilism. The Nihilism was not the result of an inability to handle reality or construct more intelligent values (we have been doing this for hundreds of years), this Nihilism was the direct result, pre-programmed, cult reaction to having the error of Christianity ripped out of the brain. Peterson tries to make it sound like Nietzsche believed man needed the ideal of God! This is false. The culprit is not reality, but the negative indoctrination that Christianity has done to culture.

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I think you may be a little unclear about the word 'nihilism' and what it represents. — whollyrolling

Here the formal game does not work, but more importantly, it will not save you. Nihilism is the denial of existential positivity, it is the militant affirmation of the negative. Those who preach the happiness of another life are always in the business of condemning this one. The question still stands, and indeed has already been answered, Peterson, like so many religionists, teaches that value cannot exist in the absence of supernaturalism. And to make matters worse, maybe he wants to follow Lewis and admit that this supernaturalism is really just a game of delusional comfort? The outcome is simply more Nihilism. (Here reality is projected as being so negative that one must turn to delusion, one must swallow this delusion as though it were reality, merely to cope with what is projected).

If you affirm existential value then you are not a Nihilist. However, if you only affirm value, via the premise of supernaturalism, then you are a Nihilist because you deny existential value. No formality can save you from this.

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His popular stuff is all self help and DESTROYing the left. It's one thing to talk about his arguments, it's another to consider why he's appealing and to what demographics. (Some) People find him helpful, he's reassuring and inspiring. Thinking about Peterson as a narrative event is kinda different from thinking about him as a scholar.

I think you're missing his point entirely on the topic of "thinking". If you listen to him in a broader context, what he seems to be referring to is the kind of 'intellectualism' which attempts to deconstruct the status quo and to replace it with a vacuum or with violence. This seems to be what he's spent his life studying. — whollyrolling

I'm not gonna criticize his views here, I'm gonna look at what they do as a narrative intervention (which seems to be in the spirit of the thread). What conversations and values does he promote/enable? What conversations and values does he silence/disenable? How does he fit into discourse?

Essentially, he's a Youtube star. A few years ago there was that memetic clip of him arguing about leftist opposition to Free Speech and Stalinism in a Canadian court that was discussing hate crime legislation against transgenders and nonbinary people at the time. He did so eloquently, and he leveraged a few tropes (as I remember) that link really well into American influenced discourse.

The Free Speech and Stalinism thing fits right in; people saying that leftist counterprotest and deplatforming is against free speech is at least as old as Oswald Mosley and Carl Schmitt. Anyone who frequented news sites and blogs that had a similar ideological climate to Breitbart will have seen the Free Speech thing in that context at the time. The Left is against Free Speech is a handy trope that also follows from anti-Soviet propaganda efforts - a closed loop of leftism=authoritarianism=free speech restrictions. He was fire on top of kindling.

After that video of him criticising trans hate crime legislation in Canada went viral, people discovered that he had a large Youtube repository of lectures that flesh out why he thinks what he thinks. He's dealing with themes of modern social isolation, the powerlessness of modern life, pent up and barely held in anger, and changing cultural concepts of masculinity/femininity. He does so using psychology and psychoanalytic references as well as textual analysis of old stories and moves like the Lion King. It's accessible, , he speaks well, he's quick on his feet when improvising. This is his political/cultural posture, these are the issues his ideas weigh in on.

He's styled as a prof who speaks hard truths accessibly and has a frame of interpreting them; a hodge podge of the Protestant work ethic, Jungian terms, and psychotheraputic interventions. He manages to tie the three together in a consistent science-flavour aesthetic that speaks to cultural issues. The personal transformation and anti( anti - X ) politics side well with center right values and individualist emphasis.

Put the politics that he's negating together with the cultural posture he's cultivated; his messages' target demographic are those who feel uneasy with those political developments he negates and their contexts (anti-sexism, anti-racism, anti-transphobia stuff...) - allegedly apolitical socially alienated white blokes. He sells a journey of personal transformation and self discovery as against the political positions his target demographic was uneasy with anyway. That's a convenient scapegoat - the suppressed shadow of left liberal politics being authoritarian imposition - sold to the suppressed rage of his target demographic. Now it's not about them. it's about (blah). And that frees them. They can work on themselves now that they're disburdened of feeling like maybe they're the problem (spoilers: complicity requires emotional work to deal with and even then that's not enough!). He's basically managed to sell milquetoast conservatism to millennial white gamer dudes through an aesthetic of personal transformation. An intellectual voice for the old Youtube atheism demographic.

He's basically managed to sell milquetoast conservatism to millenial white gamer dudes through an aesthetic of personal transformation. — fdrake

This is exactly it, and tragically these young people don't have the resources to place him in context as an intellectual. There is nothing there. Even in the domain of psychology this guy is a joke. The amount of revolutionary research and progress in psychology, in the last 20 years alone, is breathtaking. Peterson exemplifies and embodies none of it. He is still trying to preach the moth-eaten narrative that will power is the agent of human psychological salvation. We know this is nonsense, many other factors are at work. Like I accurately said, he's a conformist and a reactionary. But what is most tragic is that he's not turning out thinkers, he's creating more like himself, those who mindlessly validate the status quo. It should be noted, this is the direct opposite of what it means to be a thinker.

1) The role that religion plays in poisoning life — JerseyFlight

What do you mean by this?

What do you mean by this? — EnPassant

With all due respect, I don't find it very productive to engage with you.

The amount of revolutionary research and progress in psychology, in the last 20 years alone, is breathtaking. — JerseyFlight

A great deal of psychology is a tautology; they have renamed and relabeled many elements of the psyche and bleached it of spiritual reality. What is the psyche? Ask a psychologist. I doubt that many of them care much so long as the tautological edifice is self sustaining. At least Peterson realizes it is not an abstraction.

In this thread I will critically examine the writings of Jordan Peterson. I will periodically update the thread from time to time with new criticisms. — JerseyFlight

So we have a rather new member that hates Jordan Peterson (or what Jordan Peterson is supposed to stand for). Ok, that's a very popular stance among the leftists here.

The first thing to be said is that Peterson uses Nihilistic language with the insinuated promise of offering a solution or having found a way out of a tragic dilemma. (Never mind the fact that much of contemporary despair is generated by religious thought in response to its own collapse). — JerseyFlight

So even before the OP starts to look at what is said, it's already mentioned that, "never mind", the whole thing collapses. Wonderful objectivity here.

It's not that Peterson is wrong, — JerseyFlight

Really? He wouldn't be wrong???

he is ignorant on at least two fronts: 1) The role that religion plays in poisoning life — JerseyFlight

Which seems to be for you self evident. How does religion poison our life?

For Peterson, there is a God behind the world, and mankind is in a fallen state, this means humans are, in one sense or another, predestined to the production of negativity. — JerseyFlight

If so, please give the direct quote for this.

This is a false metaphysics that religion has assaulted mankind with for thousands of years. It has also been a vital point of justification for tyranny and violence, that is, man "must be controlled" as opposed to nurtured. — JerseyFlight

This seems to show just why you are so against of Jordan Peterson, the larger than life metaphor for what is so wrong in conservatism and with religion. For thousands of years.

What I find most disturbing in Peterson's thought (and this should be enough for any serious thinker to walk away from Peterson forever) — JerseyFlight

Now showing the true feelings about the issue...

he actually denigrates thought:

"But is there any coherent alternative, given the self-evident horrors of existence? Can Being
itself, with its malarial mosquitoes, child soldiers and degenerative neurological diseases, truly
be justified?... I... don’t think it is possible to answer the question by thinking.
Thinking leads inexorably to the abyss." Ibid RULE12 — JerseyFlight

At least I don't know what the context is here, what coherent alternative is Peterson talking about? Sorry, but a simple reader loses the red line here.

1) The role that religion plays in poisoning life
— JerseyFlight

What do you mean by this? — EnPassant

With all due respect, I don't find it very productive to engage with you. — JerseyFlight

Ah, so you are also condescending.

Right, It figures.

Don't engage.

You obviously are correct. Why bother?

This is exactly it, and tragically these young people don't have the resources to place him in context as an intellectual. There is nothing there. Even in the domain of psychology this guy is a joke. The amount of revolutionary research and progress in psychology, in the last 20 years alone, is breathtaking. Peterson exemplifies and embodies none of it. He is still trying to preach the moth-eaten narrative that will power is the agent of human psychological salvation. We know this is nonsense, many other factors are at work. Like I accurately said, he's a conformist and a reactionary. — JerseyFlight

Eh, I'm somewhat sympathetic to him. The social issues he's speaking about are pretty real. Even if he presents some of them in an inverted reactionary form. If you grew up in the 80's or 90's and you're a white dude in the political north, the societal norms and expectations you grew up with involved stable careers ending in a pension+retirement, social mobility tied to educational attainment, and widespread belief that formal legal equality had been attained for all "identity politics" issues. The culture screams it at you, get a job, get a skill - "pick your sacrifice" as Peterson terms it.

But now the peers are educated, the gig economy is a thing, industrial jobs got outsourced or automated out of existence, white worker political institutions like unions (which your parents + grandparents relied on and benefitted from) have less and less influence (how could they keep it?) and worse still we might mostly be dead by then from the climate change pressure cooker. There's widespread distrust in "mainstream media", and we form these little online spaces based on largely consumer interest. Occupy happened and was ignored. We're living through the death rattle of (something), there's widespread awareness that it's a death-rattle... so... What?

The left's vague slogans about community and solidarity don't tell you what to do, and in all this ambiguity and weirdness, it makes sense to invest in nostalgia - clinging onto anything that makes it all seem like it's gonna be okay, and reassure you that doing the things that people've always done (IE, our parents expected to be...) will restore order and make sense of life again. No coincidence that Peterson's a Christianity inspired therapist! "Pick a frame" as Peterson puts it in the same breath as "you get to pick your sacrifice". I have the same nostalgia but channel it into unions and protest. Hell, a good conversation in person with a stranger would be fandabbydosy (no, 4chan mayoboys recognising a kindred spirit from my sandals and odd socks in a bar don't count).

Peterson has all the right creds to sell confidence; he's a therapist (and we're all pretty fucked up right about now), he can cite scientific studies (very badly, lobster anthropology and not in that cute Deleuzian way, thinking the alpha wolf study had ecological validity). He's a damn prof for god's sake, but he speaks critically of the social conditions generating all this malaise.

And as much as I hate to admit it, it's not like left critique is going to sell his target demographic anything but horrific superego flagellation (a phrase I learned from @csalisbury). So what? Leave them to it?

Yeah probably. A missed opportunity. The right has Jopo, the left has BreadTube. Pick your gateway drug and tune out reassured for the evening.

If so, please give the direct quote for this. — ssu

It would seem to me that this is not necessary, Peterson's position evidently presupposes this. This is not my mere invention. Allow me to connect the dots, if man can indeed achieve positivity apart from the supernatural, then there is simply no reason to run to God, or in Peterson's case, argue he is necessary! Such an act would be a violation of the premise of positivity. When Peterson makes the claim that God is necessary for value, he presupposes all kinds of unspoken things. One of these things is that man cannot produce the positive without God. (As I already demonstrated, he is such a fanatic in this sense that he tried to attribute his own error to Nietzsche). And let's be frank, Peterson is a Christian, Christianity contains the idea of original sin, it asserts that mankind is fallen and must be born again. When you imply that Peterson must directly assert this line for line in order to prove that he believes it, this is false. All one needs to do is calculate backward from his conclusions. One merely has to presupposes something in their position in order to be charged with it. In fact, this is how most high level philosophical thinking proceeds.

Allow me to connect the dots, if man can indeed achieve positivity apart from the supernatural, then there is simply no reason to run to God, or in Peterson's case, argue he is necessary! Such an act would be a violation of the premise of positivity. When Peterson makes the claim that God is necessary for value, he presupposes all kinds of unspoken things. One of these things is that man cannot produce the positive without God. — JerseyFlight

What I gather is that Peterson doesn't even like the question (of being a believer in God) and is somewhat between what Religion and using the scientific method give as an answers. From what I can understand Peterson notices the difference between the objectivity of science and subjectivity of religion. I assume that the how seriously he takes Religion or Christianity (which he obviously knows) makes him seem as very religious.

I just have not followed Peterson so much that I would know just where and when he has said that " God is necessary for value" or that "man cannot produce the positive without God". If these are quotes from his books, please tell me.

I just have not followed Peterson so much that I would know just where and when he has said that " God is necessary for value" — ssu

The quote I cited above* where he distorts Nietzsche is enough, unless Peterson claims to do what he says Nietzsche could not? I should have use the word "implies" instead of "claim," although I honestly don't see much difference, because the implication implies the claim whether spoken or not. Clearly Peterson is not claiming that values can be constructed in the absence of God? If that was the case his entire approach to civilization would be uprooted and nullified. He tries to make it seem like Nietzsche was an advocate of his position, namely that values could not be created apart from God.

*In another place I extracted the same quote from his exchange with Susan Blackmore.

Religion wagers ideology against life, and when ideology loses, religion viciously strikes out at life in a desperate attempt to retain its authority in the world. — JerseyFlight

The role that religion plays in poisoning life — JerseyFlight

For Peterson, there is a God behind the world, and mankind is in a fallen state, this means humans are, in one sense or another, predestined to the production of negativity. This is a false metaphysics that religion has assaulted mankind with for thousands of years. — JerseyFlight

Peterson is a Nihilist, which simply means he accepts the false presumption that value must be rooted is some kind of Eternal, Absolute Idealism in order for value to exist at all. — JerseyFlight

You're a kind of anti-evangalist, right? I personally don't see 'religion' in terms of 'attaining positivity' (and I put 'religion' in quotes, because there is no such thing as a monolithic 'religion', it encompasses an enormously divergent range). IN any case, i see it as a longing for a goodnees beyond all opposites, often glimpsed but rarely realised.

I'm not a particular fan of Peterson, as I'm the wrong generation. I first heard about him through some young relatives who were impressed by him 2 or 3 years ago. He seems to have had a positive effect on them. I've heard a couple of his lectures. Actually he appeared on Australian television 18 months ago and from what I could see, wiped the floor with anyone who tried to tackle him.

As for the Adorno quote - it seems like waffle to me. What about Viktor Frankl, whose book Mankind's Search for Meaning was essentially written in one of the concentration camps?

Frankl argued that literature, art, religion and all the other cultural phenomena that place meaning at their core are things-unto-themselves, and furthermore are the very basis for how we find purpose. In private practice, Frankl developed a methodology he called ‘logotherapy’ – from logos, Greek for ‘reason’ – describing it as defined by the fact that ‘this striving to find a meaning in one’s life is the primary motivational force in man’. He believed that there was much that humanity can live without, but if we’re devoid of a sense of purpose and meaning then we ensure our eventual demise. 1

I think 'nihilism' is simply the conviction that nothing is real, or that nothing matters. Nihilism is very common in modern culture, due to the absence of a shared moral code; it doesn't have to appear dramatic or sturm-und-drung, it might simply be a shrug, a 'whatever'.

You're a kind of anti-evangalist, right? — Wayfarer

I am against stupidity and ignorance, most especially when they come to occupy a place of authority.

Bravo. Exactly right. But still not worth your time writing it.