Jordan's Philosophy

This article attempts to provide a coarse (low resolution) summary of the overall philosophy proposed and promoted by Jordan B. Peterson. Throughout his career as researcher as well as clinical psychologist, Jordan has mostly written and spoken related to how individuals can appreciate their personality as an expression of Archetypal patterns, how these personality aspects provide signals to conscious experience, and that the ultimate utility of these is to allow individuals to seek and find meaning, whereas that meaning transcends each individual's life, and is what connects all humans to what in Christianity and other religions is called God.

The World as a Place of Meaning and Narrative

The world we perceive, we move in and interact with, and which we inhabit as individuals can be either seen as (primarily if not exclusively) material objects (matter, energy, and force relations) or as narrative elements that provide meaning. In the former case, meaning and purpose (of life) are difficult if not impossible to define and find, since by reducing everything we experience to the materialistic elements, we cannot explicitly localize the level of analysis where meaning "emerges". Thus, a purely materialistic worldview (extreme atheism, incompatible with Panpsychism) and approach to life ultimately lends itself to nihilism, if one is willing to follow the purely rational and scientific logic.

The individual as the central (heroic) character

One of the most emphatically made arguments by Jordan is that the Western (Judeo-Christian) tradition has been instrumental in developing a hierarchy of values in which the individual takes a position just under God, who is at the top of the most generic hierarchy. This was achieved by considering the individual as having been created "in the image of God" (see Jordan's Biblical Lectures series).

Jordan has frequently refused to answer the common question of "Do you believe in God?" with a simple "Yes" or "No" response. And in several debates (reference: Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris), Jordan has made it clear that whether or not someone expressly declares a belief in God, that person must have some ultimate value they seek. In short, every living organism, humans included, is compelled to choose between alternatives that present itself (decision making). And as part of this choosing, a value hierarchy and orientation is necessary. And whatever is at the most positive pole in the conscious reflective experience (the ultimate value) of human beings has in Western religious tradition been identified as God (or God's will).

Responsibility for being truthful

Taken together with the seeing the world as a place of meaning and narrative, each individual has the option to experience themselves as the heroic subject of their own narrative. When each of us demonstrates the truthful application of our consciousness, that is by shining light of attention and awareness on our sense of meaning that emerges from our perception of the world and ourselves, and by accepting what we perceive, we can--similarly to God in the first book of Genesis and other creation myths--create order out of chaos, albeit on a much smaller scale of course.

This does not necessarily mean that our experience will always be joyful or positive, quite the opposite. Many times in life, we will go through hardship and painful moments. The critical value of accepting that life takes the form of a heroic narrative geared towards achieving a meaningful outcome, however, is that by finding meaning in existence, all of that pain and hardship can be endured without "losing one's mind." Thus, the conscious experience of being connected to a transcendental source of meaning, outside of own's one life, provides a protection again nihilism.

Over the past several hundred years, however, an additional movement has led to the replacement of God and similar transcendental sources of meaning by a more or less scientifically oriented concept of humanity, something Friedrich Nietzsche called the Übermensch. And it seems that several precursors led to this development.

Scientific vs. Mythological causality

For thousands of years, humans sought to explain the causes of their perception and experiences in narrative form. As part of this explanatory model, a relatively small set of archetypes and personalities emerged, which allowed humans to explain pretty much every phenomenon of import.

While some amount of physical causal reasoning was certainly already present during the times of the Greek philosophers (e.g. Archimedes), none of this replaced the need of people for an ultimate explanation behind the physics. That is, the ultimate cause--and with it the ultimate reason and meaning of life--was not affected by our collective ability to discover and ascribe localized, materialistic causality.

This changed dramatically over the course of the past several hundred years, during which purely materialistic causal explanatory models emerged, of which the Big Bang theory is a prominent example. In such a model, there is no room for purpose and meaning.

A Return to Meaning

Jordan's fundamental assumption, however, is that as living creatures, human perception and decision making is not concerned with the question of material (objectively measurable) reality, but with significance or meaning. In other words, the problem a human brain constantly solves is not best described with understanding and engaging with (objective) reality, but with questions like

• Does what I perceive have meaning?
• What is that meaning?
• How can my actions help me achieve my purpose in relation to that meaning?
• What kinds of actions generally serve my purpose (identity as a "good person", etc.)?

To this end, Jordan's latest book (12 Rules For Life) has been an attempt at re-focusing our consciousness on what matters rather than on (physical) matter.