Jordan Peterson’s Three Limitations

 

 

I am not a disciple. Still less do I take pleasure in opposing anyone for opposition’s sake. I was sympathetic to his struggle against the totalitarian drift in Canada, when the state presumed to regulate speech. To transfer into law what belongs properly to good manners is always a mark of base breeding. And when I see men eager to police freedom of expression, I see in them the cap and apron that never quite departed from their souls. Blood does not lie.

Many criticize him, generally with the usual platitudes. And since I am not a follower, I do not follow either the crowd or its rituals.

Yet there is something to be said about his limitations: those which no one points out to him, and which he himself does not name.

They are three:

a)      He gives a distorted account of Marxism;

b)      He fails to understand the historical role of the nobility;

c)      He does not understand, or does not wish to state, that Jung was a Gnostic in his personal life and an intelligent exploiter of Gnosticism in his intellectual life.

The Marxism he attacks is a late and derivative species, associated with a Western petty-bourgeois tradition, produced by people who loved Marxism so ardently that they did everything possible either to preserve themselves from it or to escape to so-called capitalist countries. It is a Marxism that scatters the word “critique” in every direction, combines itself with a hedonism that was never Marxist, and attaches the prefix “post-” to everything, whether modernism or structuralism.

These are the same people who say that there is no referent, only language; that the sign is arbitrary; that everything is a social construct; and that essences do not exist. Persons of such sophistication perform metaphysics in this manner without knowing it. They are heirs of Monsieur Jourdain, both in spirit and in origin.

A classical and cultivated Marxist would never utter such nonsense. Luciano Canfora and Guido Oldrini, for example, show that the referent and hierarchy are consubstantial with Marxist thought. The neo-Marxists are like the neo-intelligent or the neo-beautiful: the prefix advertises a perishable advantage; the adjective betrays a frustrated desire.

His references to the nobility are rare, but sufficient to reveal that he imagines them chiefly as feudal lords living at the people’s expense and devoting themselves to the hunt, in contrast with entrepreneurs who create wealth. Only the latter are his heroes.

Here he reveals a certain weakness in economic and cultural history. Duby argued that European economic expansion owed much to aristocratic lordship; and a considerable part of the capitalist economy he so admires was fostered by the Counts of Champagne, the Counts of Flanders, the Dukes of Burgundy, and many other sovereigns.

He likes to quote Dostoevsky, yet forgets that Dostoevsky was an aristocrat and proud of it. The list of aristocratic creators of culture is inexhaustible: Cavendish, Maxwell, Ariosto, Tasso, Cervantes, Camões, Eça de Queiroz, Abelard, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Saint Albert the Great. Yes, the list is inexhaustible.

Thirdly, he does not state Jung’s limits explicitly. Jung was always careful, in his written work, to say that he was not speaking of God, but of the imago Dei. I have always thought that Jung’s essential discovery—or rather rediscovery, since Saint Irenaeus of Lyons already knew it—was not that the anima is naturaliter christiana, as Tertullian said, but that it is naturaliter gnostica. The soul is not naturally Christian; it is naturally Gnostic. That is to say: instead of accepting the profoundly repugnant idea that man is made in the image of God, it prefers God to be made in the image of man. This is far more comfortable, and far more amenable to scientific testing. We are saved only by History, which tells us that Jesus Christ has been incarnate.

His discourse on the Bible, fascinating and yet unsatisfactory to those who know Christian theology, inhabits the same ambiguity as Jung’s. He says that he speaks of the imago Dei, but says nothing of God. The difference is that Jung, in conferences and interviews, allowed the suspicion to escape that it was indeed God of whom he was speaking. The famous “I don’t believe in God; I know,” among other examples.

It is profoundly irritating to hear a man criticized for the wrong reasons, especially when his critics imagine themselves cultivated and enlightened. They miss the target; they fail as critics. And in a single movement they fail to see the defect for the very same reason that they fail to see the merit.

 

Alexandre Brandão da Veiga