Peterson came to Internet prominence with his free speech stand regarding LGBTQ+ He became the intellectual darling of the Right. He sees himself as a centrist but the temptation to appeal to the right wing crowd from which he was getting the cheers was there. His new book seems to be an attempt to achieve balance based on his description of it. [I haven’t read it.] youtu.be/Iu635BJxBQE
I’m still taking in the Pageaus. Admittedly I didn’t listen to the four hour interview of Jones with Joe Rogan.
Here’s an interesting dialogue: youtu.be/D2Sdas8_c04 The Rationality Rules guy appears to be making an sincere effort at comprehending Pageau who laughs at him smugly. Pageau seems to be averse to anything less than total acceptance of his symbolic system. How does that not fall under Peterson’s critique of ideologies?
Understand, my comments are preliminary and not conclusive.
Pageau claims that the symbolic system he’s touting is based on phenomenology. That is, it’s the way we experience the world writ large sans modern objective scientific theory. You would think if that were the case more people would have it intuitive grasp of what are he is talking about without having to get it from him.
Now based on our dreams and the imagery of our minds it seems clear to me that we are all natural symbolizers. And this occurs spontaneously whether we will it or not. And we don’t know how we do it. It’s a product of our neuroanatomy.
But there seems to be enormous diversity in how people process their internal imagery and the conclusions they reach about it. This diversity was already evident in the wide range of pre-socratic philosophies circa 2500 years ago.
So if we’re all symbolizers then Pageau’s burden is to show how his system is somehow better then others. If it’s just adopted externally it becomes one more heteronymous system imposed from without. But these are preliminary thoughts/questions. I haven’t even finished his brother’s book yet.
Oh and here’s a tidbit I picked up on Wholeness on the metaphysical side from AJ Ayers in philosophy in the 20th century.[pp71ff] Speaking of William James, Ayers says that the monism James was hostile to was that of contemporary followers of Hegel in particular FH Bradley and Josiah Royce.
They were alike and identifying reality with a Spiritual Whole which they called the Absolute. According to Bradley all relations are internal to their terms with the result that everything is inextricably mixed with everything else. According to Bradley it depended on his inability to see how our thoughts could refer to reality whether truly or falsely unless both the thinker and the object of his thought were themselves ideas in an all-knowing mind. James parodied the latter as the belief that a cat cannot look at a king unless some higher entities looking at them both.
Bradley and Royce were alike in taking the absolute to be perfect. Bradley thought the absolute transcended good and evil. Royce believed that the absolute held good and evil in harmony existence of evil being as he saw it a necessary condition for that of the highest good.
James opposed this kind of monism by showing the variety in the world and rejecting its dismissal as mere appearance. He was shocked by Bradley’s statement “the absolute is the richer for every discord and for all the disunity which it embraces” with its implication that pain can be assumed to disappear into a higher unity. Suffice it to say for the moment, that it seems that James rejected absolute idealism on the basis of the problem of evil.
Pageau develops the biblical symbol of man as a microcosm. Carl Jung’s view of the psyche as split into zones of consciousness and unconsciousness fits in this worldview but in a way that deviates from the Orthodox perspective. Orthodoxy favored the light of tradition. Jung favored symbols of transformation of darkness to light via the exploration of the soul.
I think that conservative people thought that he was on their “side”, but instead he was criticising the law imposed that said that a certain language had to be used. It is one thing to forbid certain statements, another to say how one should speak, and was a precedence. On the other hand, he realised that there were many people, above all young men, who reacted positively to his 12 Rules. My son included, who I wouldn’t see as right-leaning. I also see a problem in thinking that straight white men are all the same, but members of the LGBTQ+ community are diverse.
There were issues as well that weren’t covered by the people saying that everything was a social construct and claiming that women were the better human beings. Peterson went out of his way to show that this contradicts science and experience and caused in young men a meaning crisis and chaos. It cannot be equality if, instead of the patriarchy, a matriarchy takes over. There are natural reasons for the differences in temperament and society is served by the fact that men are statistically more disagreeable than women. I see wholeness served by joining differing temperaments together.
I watched that video and thought that they were in different spaces. Pageau tends to laugh rather than get anti. I agree to the fact that any human being wants to feel accepted and so it should be possible for LGBTQ+ people to have that feeling, it was just that Pageau wasn’t clear that this was what they were talking about. He was talking about the cosmology of the Bible with reference to the condemnation of homosexuality. I don’t think it was a very good talk from him.
I think he’s right, we do experience life in that way, we talk about the sun rising and other things from the perspective we have at that moment. We have to move outside of that experience to start talking about the solar system and movement of planets, because that is something that is shown us via screens. It is something that we have added to our knowledge but not everyday experience.
I’m not sure that Pageau can show that his symbolism is “better”. Instead he talks about it being a biblical symbolism, just as other traditions have their own symbolism. He is really trying to show that much of the criticism of the Bible is due to our modern worldview, which has a different language. I found the attempt of Mathieu Pageau to decipher Genesis noteworthy, especially in view of the fact that early Christianity was at odds about whether the OT was actually Christian.
There are many that have pointed to the connection of Christian teaching to Platonism, saying that Platon could have been the OT for Christians. That shows me that even then, the biblical symbolism wasn’t understood as that, but probably taken literally. So, it is very interesting that some of the Church fathers (like Origen) pointed to the need for and allegorical exegesis of the OT but failed to teach the symbolism as the Pageaus are professing.
The idea of spiritual wholeness being the absolute is human experience inasmuch that human beings are continually finding themselves divided or disjoined, even if it is for a short time, but a source of joy is when that is overcome and a kind of completion takes place. It is like when a couple are joined in love and thereby perfect. The same happens when a team experiences flow, when everything comes together, and goals are achieved.
I can’t hear the thoughts of my wife, let alone the thoughts of God. But then, I don’t believe that anyone can. Rather, through silencing my own monologue to a certain degree, getting away from the noise of civilisation I manage to find back to the existential assurance that life is a good idea. It is a good idea for this and that reason; I can interact with this or that person; I should heed what this or that person has said.
Integrating contemplation into that solitude, a verse is repeated silently, or the Lord’s Prayer is chanted, or a song or a poem is recited. I have a small book in which I collect such things and which serves me as a personal prayerbook.
Usually the recognition of having been “touched” comes afterwards when my voice has quietened and I’m back in operating modus. And although I always feel benefited by doing this, there is always a reason beforehand for not using up my time for this. It is sometimes a struggle but always worth it, even if I don’t have the feeling of being “touched”.
Mormons believe God can talk to anyone.
But there are things you can do to increase clarity and reception.
It’s something that takes a life-time to produce in good form.
Right. I get that and agree. Yet, I see him invariably critical of the “Far Left” as “Social Justice Warriors” and identifying them with collectivism and largely silent about the Fascist Right. So I’ll keep listening for him to find the unifying center which is where he says he wants to go. Balance isn’t easily achieved I suppose.
Of course. I found his 12 Rules with its emphasis on personal responsibilty by and large helpful myself.
Yes. Peterson takes on the notion that there is no human nature–that everything is socially constructed. Particularly, he’s famous [or infamous]s for showing the evolutionary basis of hierarchy and why its not going to go away. He’s also big on the societal distribution of intelligence and the big five personality factors and the relationship to adaptive success. Also notable is his pragmatic/Darwinian POV on truth, and his symbolic exegesis of the Bible, and his application of existential Jungian and Taoist principles. He synthesize all this in a unique and brilliant way. I don’t think he should be ignored. I’m still dialoging and assimilating his thinking. I don’t accept his propositions uncritically, however.
Right. Laughing while your opponent is bad form in a debate. Better than screaming or talking over the other guy though. His comment on homosexuality in Leviticus–they only stone you for male homosexual acts not female ones was jaw dropping. Was that a defense? What?
I see the importance of recognizing when one is looking phenomenologically versus theoretically and then recognizing the limits of one’s knowledge. Now, where does Pageau’s Biblically based symbolic system fall?
The modern tendency is to dismiss the Biblical cosmology as pre-scientific and therefore obsolete. Peterson says not necessarily obsolete since there may be things that the ancient scriptures say that still apply today because they are enduring patterns of being and therefore of the utmost meaning. Enter the Pageaus with their worked-out symbolism. That’s what I’m looking at through the lens of my own experience.
Platonism was hugely influential on Christianity from early on. Philo of Alexandria, a contemporary of Jesus interpreted the Hebrew Bible in Platonic terms and his way of thinking can be seen in the hermeneutics of Paul and the author of the Gospel of John. I haven’t had time to thoroughly compare the symbolic/analogic systems of the ancient writers with Pageau’s but obviously they are all variations of the tradition cosmology.
This is where I find Jung helpful. He mainly wrote as a psychologist. So when he’s talking about wholeness he is in the first place talking about the wholeness of the human psyche. And there he was describing and analyzing imagery of his patients and himself. This is before any metaphysical inference. And in addition to Jungian analysis of archetypes, world mythology, and perennial philosophy we have the findings of Gestalt psychology on the tendency to seek wholeness and closure. Of course, in James we see a movement in a different direction toward pluralism which was also religiously motivated. So what can we say about that tendency?
I think he said in one talk that the dangers of fascism are apparent, whereas the West seemed to romanticise the idea of communism, saying that the real, experienced communism wasn’t the true communism. He picks up the criticism of George Orwell, who portrayed famously the gradual transition in Animal Farm, and of Solzhenitsyn, who portrayed what happened in terrible images. His worry is that one day the West could slide into such a regime and that it would be downhill from there on.
I don’t think we should accept anyone’s propositions uncritically.
Yes, he’s managed to rationalise these issues and has thereby lacked the empathy for those suffering. That is a big mistake because Christianity is built on love and compassion. It is notable that rationalisation is what caused the inquisition and slaughter of Jews – also by the Nazis. If anything, Christians should let compassion rule, despite the outcome.
I think it falls because it is hardly transmittable. People will struggle with his ideas because they portray the OT as a collection of allegories and metaphors, symbolically pointing to a higher good. People want to know if that is reliable and trustworthy, otherwise they will turn to what they consider is trustworthy.
Now Peterson takes what he has heard from Pageau and makes it reachable. He makes the stories relevant to human experience. That is because he is well read and able to formulate in a manner that’s helpful, which probably goes back to his clinical experience.
I have been reading several people, even Paul Wallis with his UFO theory, although at the end of his book “Escaping From Eden” he points to the platonic connection to Paul and John. It is the cosmic Christ that moves them and the love inherent in the world, despite appearances.
The fact that the whole of anything is greater than its parts is clearly obvious in ourselves. We know what organs are there but the fact that everything works so perfectly together is a mystery. There are aspects of human life that just remain unaccounted for by the mechanistic worldview. The same could be said of the planet we live on that is becoming to look like one great big organism, which, like the human body, is made up out of smaller organisms.
The human psyche is as complicated as it gets and it needed a mind like Jung’s (and others) to realise the role of archetypes and their connection with world mythology and perennial philosophy. I feel though that especially with perennial wisdom, you see how interconnected we are, if we can let appearances drop and meet each other without our social trappings and baggage.
In the first chapter of the Bible, Genesis 1:27 it says “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” If God doesn’t have a feminine side, how could the female be created in God’s image?
“The psychology of individuation also has a teleological aspect. It points out that the life in us is striving toward a goal that is usually unseen and unrecognized by consciousness but is known somewhere in the unconscious. The increasing recognition by consciousness that such a goal exists and the increasing cooperation of the ego with the fulfillment of this goal make up an important part of psychological development. The fact that the achievement of such a psychological goal seems to be intrinsically important fortifies the faith that there is an overall purpose to life.”
“the life in us is striving” sounds very mystical indeed. I’ve noted the book, but I’ve been buying so many recently that I have to put it on hold. I’m having difficulty catching up
The goal of individuation is wholeness which can be defined as psychic integration or unification . Individuation seems to correspond to symbolically on the cosmic level with the Omega Point, the idea that “everything in the universe is fated to spiral towards a final point of unification.” en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega_Point
