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.
The World as a Place of Meaning
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) ultimately yields itself to nihilism, if one is willing to follow the purely rational and scientific logic.
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 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).
Over the past several hundred years, however, an additional movement has led to the replacement of God by what 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.)?
