I'm writing this post mostly as a diary entry rather than an explainer, so it will probably make no sense to anybody. Whatever. For posterity, I should note that I'm about 3 months into writing a book on our society's present normative vacuum and how to address it. I'm having a blast.
I'm about halfway through Jordan Peterson's Bible lecture series. Great stuff. Certainly some odd bits, like when he contorts himself to whitewash sleeping beauty of patriarchal allegory, but mostly phenomenal insights. Remember that Peterson should be read as a prophet more than an academic (see Slate Star Codex's review of 12 Rules For Life, which is a bad book but an important cultural product).
One thing that I find odd in Peterson is that he loves Nietzsche but seems to me to miss the key Nietzschean insight, metaphysical principle, and means of living well, namely embracing ambiguity. Peterson is constantly telling people that nihilism (which he correctly associates with the postmodern condition) is a dark and dangerous mode that we should be careful not to adopt. A lot of his ideas, notably Darwinian truth and maps of meaning, are frequently framed as a means to rescue some certainty from the nihilistic abyss. I'm very fond of many of these ideas, but I am disappointed that Peterson, like everybody else, can't seem to stare down nihilism.
I am particularly disappointed because I think staring down nihilism is precisely what Nietzsche councils. Consider the following quote, which I think is Nietzsche's best but one that, strangely, never seems to be used by scholars:
It's plain as day: "take leave of all faith and every wish for certainty". Peterson is all about secular faith and rescuing some certainty. So is everybody, and he's better at it than most, but why is it so hard to find someone who embraces ambiguity (what Peterson calls chaos)?
One might wonder why embracing ambiguity is so important. After all, isn't Peterson right in saying that nihilism is dangerous? Doesn't it lead to depression and anxiety? Doesn't it collapse into relativism? Doesn't Nietzsche himself say "if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you"?
Let me answer first with a metaphor. Peterson talks about nihilism as a dark place that you should walk past rather than towards. He also talks about the abyss in the mythical language of primeval chaos and a flooded basement or underground. So this abyss is like a pit that you fall down into that dark chaos and salty water. Peterson tries to find a road that takes you past nihilism and, in my opinion, builds a layer of thin ice under you so that you can talk across the abyss. But it's still ice! Like any kind of faith, it is so easy for some dickhead to come along, poke you in your axioms, crack that ice and send you tumbling into the chaos.
What I suggest instead, and what I think Nietzsche suggests instead in his notion of Amor Fati and De Capo, is that you instead walk through nihilism. Confront it, embrace it (the eternal recurrence is about this), sit with it, deal with it, and at the end you will float over the abyss. You don't need ice anymore (you have taken "leave of all faith and every wish for certainty") because you're weightless - you are practised in "maintaining yourself on insubstantial ropes and dancing ever near abysses". I feel like this nowadays. Nihilism is with me all the time. It doesn't dwell in some suppressed part of my psyche. I feel it every day, several times a day. But it doesn't bother me. Moreover, once you walk out the other side of nihilism you experienced a profound value-freedom. You are no longer beyond to some cosmic order. You can define good and evil yourself. And you then must convince others with the weight of your reasons and the passion of your conviction. You cannot justify your moral beliefs with recourse to some objective order - this is precisely what the existentialists called bad faith.
People associate this value-freedom with relativism. So what? Morality is relative. It is sustained inter-subjectively by communities of people. Moral legitimacy must be created over and over again on the basis of argument and value propositions - when someone puts a value into the world. It is precisely because morality is relative that our values change all the time. They adjust to suit our circumstances.
What people really fear, I think, is not moral relativism but moral nihilism: the idea that there is no such thing as value. Cursory self reflection will demonstrate that this is not true - you care about stuff. You might not know why, but you do. So figure out why and convince other people that they should also care. There will be no magic bullet, incontrovertible argument that you can use. So what? It doesn't take a cosmic order to convince people that slavery is beastly. Conscience, which Nietzsche talks about a lot as a responsibility, doesn't brook nihilism. If you can't obey yourself your life will go to shit. But conscience also doesn't brook objective moral truths, because they make you a slave. If Nietzsche was explicit about one thing it was that he thought moral truths didn't exist and anyone who thought otherwise was a slave. The value-freedom that one realises as a metaphysical truth (the ontological freedom of the existentialists) and a mode for oneself at the other side of nihilism is a much more appropriate foundation for a liberal society than some belief in moral truths that we just haven't discovered yet but will with a few more trolley problems.
Like everyone else, Peterson is obsessed with foisting logos (order) upon the chaos. But he recognises that chaos is the fundamental structure of the universe. It is always there. No matter how much logos we manifest in the positive realm (science, technology, organisation), chaos will remain in the normative realm. And this is good! Moral truth is always the domain of the self-righteous. If we acknowledge that morality is maintained intersubjectively we accept that it must be recreated and recontested every moment. This is an ideal metaphysics for liberalism.
I accept that your average punter can't handle nihilism, and I am working on how to build normative structures and their associated social institutions in a secular context (that's what my next book is about), but Peterson is not your average punter, so I'm a bit disappointed that he needs God of all things to feel stable. A free spirit he is not.
I'm about halfway through Jordan Peterson's Bible lecture series. Great stuff. Certainly some odd bits, like when he contorts himself to whitewash sleeping beauty of patriarchal allegory, but mostly phenomenal insights. Remember that Peterson should be read as a prophet more than an academic (see Slate Star Codex's review of 12 Rules For Life, which is a bad book but an important cultural product).
One thing that I find odd in Peterson is that he loves Nietzsche but seems to me to miss the key Nietzschean insight, metaphysical principle, and means of living well, namely embracing ambiguity. Peterson is constantly telling people that nihilism (which he correctly associates with the postmodern condition) is a dark and dangerous mode that we should be careful not to adopt. A lot of his ideas, notably Darwinian truth and maps of meaning, are frequently framed as a means to rescue some certainty from the nihilistic abyss. I'm very fond of many of these ideas, but I am disappointed that Peterson, like everybody else, can't seem to stare down nihilism.
I am particularly disappointed because I think staring down nihilism is precisely what Nietzsche councils. Consider the following quote, which I think is Nietzsche's best but one that, strangely, never seems to be used by scholars:
One
could conceive of such a pleasure and power of self-determination, such a
freedom of the will that the spirit would take leave of all faith and every
wish for certainty, being practised in maintaining itself on insubstantial
ropes and possibilities and dancing ever near abysses. Such a spirit would be
the free spirit par excellence.
-
Nietzsche, The Gay Science, s. 34
It's plain as day: "take leave of all faith and every wish for certainty". Peterson is all about secular faith and rescuing some certainty. So is everybody, and he's better at it than most, but why is it so hard to find someone who embraces ambiguity (what Peterson calls chaos)?
One might wonder why embracing ambiguity is so important. After all, isn't Peterson right in saying that nihilism is dangerous? Doesn't it lead to depression and anxiety? Doesn't it collapse into relativism? Doesn't Nietzsche himself say "if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you"?
Let me answer first with a metaphor. Peterson talks about nihilism as a dark place that you should walk past rather than towards. He also talks about the abyss in the mythical language of primeval chaos and a flooded basement or underground. So this abyss is like a pit that you fall down into that dark chaos and salty water. Peterson tries to find a road that takes you past nihilism and, in my opinion, builds a layer of thin ice under you so that you can talk across the abyss. But it's still ice! Like any kind of faith, it is so easy for some dickhead to come along, poke you in your axioms, crack that ice and send you tumbling into the chaos.
What I suggest instead, and what I think Nietzsche suggests instead in his notion of Amor Fati and De Capo, is that you instead walk through nihilism. Confront it, embrace it (the eternal recurrence is about this), sit with it, deal with it, and at the end you will float over the abyss. You don't need ice anymore (you have taken "leave of all faith and every wish for certainty") because you're weightless - you are practised in "maintaining yourself on insubstantial ropes and dancing ever near abysses". I feel like this nowadays. Nihilism is with me all the time. It doesn't dwell in some suppressed part of my psyche. I feel it every day, several times a day. But it doesn't bother me. Moreover, once you walk out the other side of nihilism you experienced a profound value-freedom. You are no longer beyond to some cosmic order. You can define good and evil yourself. And you then must convince others with the weight of your reasons and the passion of your conviction. You cannot justify your moral beliefs with recourse to some objective order - this is precisely what the existentialists called bad faith.
People associate this value-freedom with relativism. So what? Morality is relative. It is sustained inter-subjectively by communities of people. Moral legitimacy must be created over and over again on the basis of argument and value propositions - when someone puts a value into the world. It is precisely because morality is relative that our values change all the time. They adjust to suit our circumstances.
What people really fear, I think, is not moral relativism but moral nihilism: the idea that there is no such thing as value. Cursory self reflection will demonstrate that this is not true - you care about stuff. You might not know why, but you do. So figure out why and convince other people that they should also care. There will be no magic bullet, incontrovertible argument that you can use. So what? It doesn't take a cosmic order to convince people that slavery is beastly. Conscience, which Nietzsche talks about a lot as a responsibility, doesn't brook nihilism. If you can't obey yourself your life will go to shit. But conscience also doesn't brook objective moral truths, because they make you a slave. If Nietzsche was explicit about one thing it was that he thought moral truths didn't exist and anyone who thought otherwise was a slave. The value-freedom that one realises as a metaphysical truth (the ontological freedom of the existentialists) and a mode for oneself at the other side of nihilism is a much more appropriate foundation for a liberal society than some belief in moral truths that we just haven't discovered yet but will with a few more trolley problems.
Like everyone else, Peterson is obsessed with foisting logos (order) upon the chaos. But he recognises that chaos is the fundamental structure of the universe. It is always there. No matter how much logos we manifest in the positive realm (science, technology, organisation), chaos will remain in the normative realm. And this is good! Moral truth is always the domain of the self-righteous. If we acknowledge that morality is maintained intersubjectively we accept that it must be recreated and recontested every moment. This is an ideal metaphysics for liberalism.
I accept that your average punter can't handle nihilism, and I am working on how to build normative structures and their associated social institutions in a secular context (that's what my next book is about), but Peterson is not your average punter, so I'm a bit disappointed that he needs God of all things to feel stable. A free spirit he is not.
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