Originally Published on 6th of July, 2017 in the r/JordanPeterson Forum
Despite this title, I should note that I have little interest in Peterson’s more controversial political positions regarding gender and transsexualism, which have been the focal point of the criticisms leveled against him. Personally, I found immense value in his lectures, and books and am grateful for the wisdom and insight he has offered my life on an intellectual and personal level. Also, I witnessed the positive effect he had in practice on my own immediate circle, and there is nothing more worthwhile than that. Moreover, though Peterson’s political stances may be important to consider, let alone for their just far-reaching effect, at the end of the day, they are simply much less interesting to understand and dissect than his core philosophical axioms which are at the root of all of his theories.
Following this disclaimer, in this essay, I will write about the issues and problems I have observed in Peterson’s thought, which does require some basic familiarity with his work and lectures. Here, I would like to discuss the claims Peterson has made or implied which seem implausible or far-fetched:
- His pragmatic definition of truth.
- The unverifiable method of interpretation of the biblical texts.
- Peterson examines religion as a theologian rather than as a historian, making him excuse too many of the harmful and dogmatic elements of the Judeo-Christian texts and history.
- The insight Peterson derives from the texts (Clean your room, sacrifice for your future, tread lightly into chaos… etc…) is not inherent in the texts themselves, but rather are a modernized modified interpretation of Peterson.
- Peterson’s unwillingness to give simple answers (“the devil is in the details”) makes him unclear on certain topics, namely his most fundamental assumptions as well as his belief to the ultimate goal of life and his value system
The first and most striking issue I have found is Peterson’s definition of “truth”. As was evident in his podcast with Sam Harris (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31Ud7-EkZEI), Peterson holds that “Pragmatic truth” has equal standing to “Scientific truths”. This type of truth is a truth of meaning, significance, and universality. He seems to define it by what is “sufficiently true” to the Darwinian subjective-being seeking to rise in the competence hierarchy. The problem with this definition is that it attempts to change the way most people use the term “truth”. It is not well distinguished from objective truth and this, in turn, causes Peterson to sound to some confusing or “unscientific”. I do not disagree with Peterson’s observations on the way people view the world, which is sophisticated and on-point, yet I think using the term “truth” to describe them is not ideal. Rather, it might be better to define these truths along the lines of “relevant truths” or rather to replace the term for “truth” altogether.
This first assertion leads to the second problematic aspect of Peterson’s theory: his interpretation of the religious texts as well as the archetypes of the world’s myths. After he has defined truth in a manner that does not necessarily take into account objectivity or the author’s intentions, the main criteria for valid interpretation become the pragmatic value to the reader, or to the majority of readers. This is why, as he has argued, Dostoyevsky’s works, though fiction, are true in the same way that numbers are true. This quasi-platonic\pragmatic definition gives Peterson a rather wide area of interpretation, which cannot be refuted or debunked. Of course, since he deals with fiction and myths, and currently he is interpreting the Old Testament, there does not seem to be any way to discern what is a plausible reading of the Bible to what is implausible. The moment Peterson tries to explain people, authors, and characters by their unconscious motives, he is free to interpret them in countless ways. As much as I enjoy watching his lectures and his attempts to interpret the Bible, it often appears that it is more Peterson’s wisdom for life than anything that can be found in the text alone.
This leads me to my third criticism of Peterson. Unlike the “New Atheists” (e.g. Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins) or Nietzsche, Peterson does not examine religion as a historian but rather as a theologian, as he himself said in the Biblical series. This, in turn, makes him more apologetic of Christianity than seems fitting. All of his genius and clever interpretations were, for the most part – never a part of main Judeo-Christian thought. Both in the Middle Ages as well as today, most Christians do not view the Bible in any way close to the way Peterson sees it.
To demonstrate this point, let us examine two quotes of Peterson which seem to me to illustrate Peterson’s thought quite well: 1) “Whether gods are inside or outside makes very little difference to whether there are gods.” 2) (Referring to the writers of the Bible) “They were not scientists!”. He seems to approach the religious texts as if the people of the time were in a process of coming to understand the world of meaning. They did not yet have the scientific worldview of the 21st century, so to accuse them of being primitive and naïve is anachronistic, “they were not stupid”. That is why Peterson spends so much time trying to extract the meaning and value of those texts as moral guidelines on how to live. That is how he interprets the act of sacrifice – giving something of value in order to appease the gods of the future.
Obviously, there is a difference between a metaphorical God and a literal one. There is a difference of sacrificing people needlessly than sacrificing your time to go to college. People did and still believe that God created the world in seven days. Dawkins and Harris are criticizing religion because most people believe and believed them literally. This belief is detrimental in many respects, which there is no point in outlining here. Peterson, being able to construe and address religion in a much more sophisticated manner, allows the countless terrible aspects of religion to never be criticized. His thought is not representative of the masses or of all theologians, today and for most of history.
Being a secular Jew living in Israel I was learning Jewish thought from the Talmud to Maimonides. With the needed respect, appreciation, and skeptical outlook I would always say, “The Greatness of the Jewish Tradition lies not in the Bible, which for a great part of it constitutes only ambiguous stories, but rather in the interpretations themselves”. I do not think the text deserves the wisdom Peterson attributes it, it is rather more of a medium for him to express his own insight on human stories and life. There should be a separation between the insight of Peterson and the insight of the Bible, for they are not the same.
Lastly, I would like to point to a question that was put forth in the fourth lecture in the biblical series. When asked if one could build a Utilitarian ethic from the existence of pain, Peterson responded by saying, that such a question, like a trolley problem, is problematic: “There is an intellectual reduction to make a philosophical point… The devil is in the details… The answer to that question is to decompose the question…” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44f3mxcsI50). This is a very interesting response. I am not trying to imply that Peterson is trying to escape the question by rationalizing and making it unnecessarily complex. I honestly believe he is smart enough, and his thought is nuanced enough for him to be sincere and true – he has no simple answers. Besides this being a problem when trying to summarize him to my friends, (“you should check him out, he talks about… well, everything…”), his answer felt unsatisfactory. Peterson is so articulate, that at times; his overall ethics and views are obscured by the details of each case. This is why, after reading his book, watching more than 100 hours of his lectures, I still am not able to understand the most basic philosophical underpinnings of his philosophy. The trolley problem is used to understand the fundamental assumptions of one’s morals. The particulars do not matter – what matters is the abstracted, general value system that this instance tries to evoke and expose.
Every other philosopher I know can be summarized in one way or another. Sartre was an Existentialist… John Stewart Mill a Utilitarian… with Peterson, it is quite hard to box him in. the upside of this is that he is not brushed aside to adhering to any one school of thought, and thus he is much more complex. The problem is that some very basic questions are not addressed properly in his lectures. Does he believe that we should strive to be at the top of the dominance hierarchy? The top of all possible dominance hierarchies? Is life more than just pleasure and pain?
There are more elements of Peterson’s thought that I have found inaccurate, misleading, or troublesome. This post is meant to remind us that we should keep being skeptical as much as we can while watching Peterson, because frankly, he is too charismatic and clever, and it is easy for us (and me especially) to just nod again and again to every word spoken. Peterson like any person is prone to error. His psychoanalytic theory is not mainstream in the academic field by any stretch of the imagination, and in each lecture, Peterson seems to describe another radical idea, which requires our inspection and scrutiny before being accepted as true. By the words of Carl Sagan, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”.
Also, more often than he should, Peterson speculates on some extremely unlikely and potentially damaging notions: e.g. implying that the reason that women on the left ally themselves with Islam are because of unconscious desire to be dominated… Or implying (although very speculatively) that there is a connection between the structure of the D.N.A and certain ancient statues and paintings of the unification of man and woman.