If you've dabbled in cultural sensation Jordan B. Peterson as I have, and got through his Maps of Meaning, and if you are not mad at him, like the New York Times set and alt-right Vox Day, you want to check the backup. Because Peterson owes a lot to Nietzsche and Jung.
Nietzsche is a problem, because Nazism and Nationalism and Anti-Semitism. And Jung--
Also, Jordan Peterson is proposing the primacy of instinct and affect, rather than reason. And that is a problem for most of us moderns, because whether you are on the left or the right, you believe that your side is based on reason and the other side is based on emotion, or worse. Because science.
But Peterson is saying that humans are basically instinctive creatures, and that the great issues of life are not reducible to reason. Moreover in his system, if it is a system, the highest and best is the sacrificial hero, the one that dares to live on the border between the known and the unknown, between order and chaos, the man that surrenders his life to the exploration of this dangerous territory, and bringing it into our understanding and consciousness, and sharing that understanding with the rest of humanity.
From Jung Peterson brings the notion that the unconscious mind is primary, both in its manifestation of the personal unconscious, our personal instinctive response to day-to-day life, and also in the manifestation of the collective unconscious, the ways in which humans as a whole symbolize and experience the larger meaning of life in spirits and gods and the like.
You can see how foreign this is to the official narrative, which is that we are rational creatures. In the right-wing version we are rationally seeking a way from serfdom and subordination to freedom and liberty. In the left-wing version we are rationally seeking a way from slavery and oppression to liberation along the arc of history bending towards justice.
And yet I propose that the right-wing version of reason has brought us to the neo-serfdom of the welfare state, and the left-wing version of reason has brought us to the über-slavery of the communist state. So maybe there is a problem.
What if this is all wrong, and reason is not the means to anything in particular? What if, as settled science is starting to discover, reason evolved out of humans rationalizing their social behavior, and just accidentally happened to be a good basis for math and physics?
In many ways, the whole story of the last 200 years of western culture is the realization, beginning with Romanticism at the turn of the 19th century, that reason cannot be the whole story. How can it be when humans are overwhelmingly consumed by "affect" or passion?
It really changes things when you decide that the meaning of life, the universe, and everything is not the construction of the best rational system but something else.
Then comes Nietzsche with the scandalous notion that the Christian framework of the last 2000 years is outta here, and the only reality is the will to power, and that morality is a cheap trick.
Now I have been slowly trudging through the Germans in the last few years, from Kant to Hegel to Schopenhauer and now Nietzsche.
The thing about Nietzsche is that you are never sure when he is being serious and when he is just trying to nudge you off dead center and make you think. For instance, in Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche praises the Jews for their amazing survival down the ages through all travails and hardships -- "the strongest, toughest, and purest race now living in Europe"-- and sneers at German anti-Semitism. Later on he develops his notorious "master morality and slave morality." But by The Genealogy of Morals he divides the noble masters into the "warrior caste" and the "priestly caste," and while the warriors are simple and forthright, the priests are the most appalling haters. And guess what: the most obvious instantiation of a priestly people is the Jews, and Christianity is a 2000 year cunning plot to dethrone the warrior caste. And the Jews are therefore the world-historic leaders of a slave revolt that has demolished the old aristocratic masters.
Hey Fritzi! Doesn't your division of the masters into warriors and priests rather chip away at your initial notion of the masters as true unselfconscious aristocrats?
I know! Why not divide the human race in three, according to my reductive Three Peoples theory. Then we still have the slaves, the People of the Subordinate Self, we still have the masters, divided into the natural aristocracy of the business world and the priestly haters of the politically correct. In between are the People of the Responsible Self that are neither leaders nor followers, but partaking of something in-between: neither groveling slaves sucking up to their liege lord in return for handouts, nor ego-maniac masters, either business masters-of-the-universe or priestly left-wing haters. What's not to like?
Notice that your business masters-of-the-universe can be the sacrificial heroes of Jordan Peterson's narrative, for in business many are called but few are chosen. Here is how the natural aristocrat lives, from Nietzsche:
But as for the lefty priestly haters.-- Yeah. Hating, remembering accidents and misdeeds, forgetting nothing. And doing nothing. That is where they live and breathe. For the whole point of a lefty activist is to live in the festering wound of a grievance, and make it bigger.
The thing about reason is its one-dimensionality, its uni-directionality. But life, the universe, and everything is contingent, uncertain. Oh, and hidden. Could it be that the means that living things have appropriated for life in this world, instinct, passion, archetypes, "affect," are necessary and flexible ways of getting on the world whereas reason, with its path to freedom and its arc bending towards justice, is not?
Nietzsche is a problem, because Nazism and Nationalism and Anti-Semitism. And Jung--
Also, Jordan Peterson is proposing the primacy of instinct and affect, rather than reason. And that is a problem for most of us moderns, because whether you are on the left or the right, you believe that your side is based on reason and the other side is based on emotion, or worse. Because science.
But Peterson is saying that humans are basically instinctive creatures, and that the great issues of life are not reducible to reason. Moreover in his system, if it is a system, the highest and best is the sacrificial hero, the one that dares to live on the border between the known and the unknown, between order and chaos, the man that surrenders his life to the exploration of this dangerous territory, and bringing it into our understanding and consciousness, and sharing that understanding with the rest of humanity.
From Jung Peterson brings the notion that the unconscious mind is primary, both in its manifestation of the personal unconscious, our personal instinctive response to day-to-day life, and also in the manifestation of the collective unconscious, the ways in which humans as a whole symbolize and experience the larger meaning of life in spirits and gods and the like.
You can see how foreign this is to the official narrative, which is that we are rational creatures. In the right-wing version we are rationally seeking a way from serfdom and subordination to freedom and liberty. In the left-wing version we are rationally seeking a way from slavery and oppression to liberation along the arc of history bending towards justice.
And yet I propose that the right-wing version of reason has brought us to the neo-serfdom of the welfare state, and the left-wing version of reason has brought us to the über-slavery of the communist state. So maybe there is a problem.
What if this is all wrong, and reason is not the means to anything in particular? What if, as settled science is starting to discover, reason evolved out of humans rationalizing their social behavior, and just accidentally happened to be a good basis for math and physics?
In many ways, the whole story of the last 200 years of western culture is the realization, beginning with Romanticism at the turn of the 19th century, that reason cannot be the whole story. How can it be when humans are overwhelmingly consumed by "affect" or passion?
It really changes things when you decide that the meaning of life, the universe, and everything is not the construction of the best rational system but something else.
Then comes Nietzsche with the scandalous notion that the Christian framework of the last 2000 years is outta here, and the only reality is the will to power, and that morality is a cheap trick.
Now I have been slowly trudging through the Germans in the last few years, from Kant to Hegel to Schopenhauer and now Nietzsche.
The thing about Nietzsche is that you are never sure when he is being serious and when he is just trying to nudge you off dead center and make you think. For instance, in Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche praises the Jews for their amazing survival down the ages through all travails and hardships -- "the strongest, toughest, and purest race now living in Europe"-- and sneers at German anti-Semitism. Later on he develops his notorious "master morality and slave morality." But by The Genealogy of Morals he divides the noble masters into the "warrior caste" and the "priestly caste," and while the warriors are simple and forthright, the priests are the most appalling haters. And guess what: the most obvious instantiation of a priestly people is the Jews, and Christianity is a 2000 year cunning plot to dethrone the warrior caste. And the Jews are therefore the world-historic leaders of a slave revolt that has demolished the old aristocratic masters.
Hey Fritzi! Doesn't your division of the masters into warriors and priests rather chip away at your initial notion of the masters as true unselfconscious aristocrats?
I know! Why not divide the human race in three, according to my reductive Three Peoples theory. Then we still have the slaves, the People of the Subordinate Self, we still have the masters, divided into the natural aristocracy of the business world and the priestly haters of the politically correct. In between are the People of the Responsible Self that are neither leaders nor followers, but partaking of something in-between: neither groveling slaves sucking up to their liege lord in return for handouts, nor ego-maniac masters, either business masters-of-the-universe or priestly left-wing haters. What's not to like?
Notice that your business masters-of-the-universe can be the sacrificial heroes of Jordan Peterson's narrative, for in business many are called but few are chosen. Here is how the natural aristocrat lives, from Nietzsche:
To be incapable of taking one's enemies, one's accidents, even one's misdeeds seriously for very long -- that is the sign of strong full natures is whom there is a excess of the power to form, to mold, to recuperate, and to forget{.]He has a point. If you are a man of action you really don't have time for worrying about enemies, mistakes, because it is always time to get on with the next thing.
But as for the lefty priestly haters.-- Yeah. Hating, remembering accidents and misdeeds, forgetting nothing. And doing nothing. That is where they live and breathe. For the whole point of a lefty activist is to live in the festering wound of a grievance, and make it bigger.
The thing about reason is its one-dimensionality, its uni-directionality. But life, the universe, and everything is contingent, uncertain. Oh, and hidden. Could it be that the means that living things have appropriated for life in this world, instinct, passion, archetypes, "affect," are necessary and flexible ways of getting on the world whereas reason, with its path to freedom and its arc bending towards justice, is not?
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