On Pages 34 and 35 of his book, 12 RULES FOR LIFE AN ANTIDOTE TO CHAOS, Jordan Peterson will justify how Yahweh made the world through application of his divine, creative speech, or applied Logos: "To understand Genesis I, the Priestly story, with its insistence on speech as the fundamental creative force, it is necessary to review a few fundamental, ancient assumptions (these are markedly different in type and intent from the assumptions of science, which are, historically speaking, quite novel)."
My response: If speech is the fundamental creative force--if speech and thought or reasoning are identical or very similar, it would not be a stretch for physicalist Ayn Rand to agree with Jordan that speech is the fundamental creative force--then speech as a creative force is most creative when the speaker or thinker is an individuator of advanced intellectual reasoning, then her speech must be nearly, completely untrammeled, any talk of censorship or hate speech is an abomination.
Jordan (J): "Scientific truths were made explicit a mere five hundreds years ago, with the work of Francis Bacon, Renee Descartes and Isaac Newton. In whatever manner our forebears viewed the world prior to that, it was not through a scientific lens (any more than they could view the moon and the stars through the glass lenses of the equally recent telescope). Because we are so scientific now--and so determinedly deterministic--it is very difficult for us to even understand that other ways of seeing can and do exist. But those who existed during the distant time in which the foundational epics of our culture emerged were much more concerned with the actions that dictated survival (and with interpreting the world in a manner commensurate with that goal) that with anything approximating what we now understand as objective truth."
My response: Jordan is reminding those of us that grew up on science and whose lives have been blessed by science that the pre-Modernists view the world from a drastically different vantage point than those us living in the Modern Age. Objective truth seeking in the material realm was not their thing.
J: "Before the dawn of the scientific worldview, reality was construed differently. Being was understood as a place of action, not a place of things. It was understood as something more akin to story or drama. That story or drama was lived, subjective experience, as it manifested itself moment to moment in the consciousness of every living person. It was something similar to the stories we tell each other about our lives and their personal significance, something similar to the happenings that novelists describe when they capture existence in the pages of their books. Subjective experience--that includes familiar objects such as trees and clouds, primarily objective in their existence, but also (and more importantly) such things as emotions and dreams as well as hunger, thirst, and pain. It is such things, experienced personally, that are the most fundamental elements of human life, from the archaic, dramatic perspective, and they are not easily reduced to the detached and objective--even by modern, reductionist, materialist mind."
My response: It is apparent that here Jordan is setting up a compare/contrast exercise between the Chistian/irrationalist/subjective world view of the Pre-Moderns versus the Modernist rational, materialist, objective world view. The medieval Christian, mostly uneducated, view life as a drama that they lived, and that perspective was much more vital and basic than the scientific outlook of today.
It occurred to me that Jordan's effort to synthesize facts and values is a moderate cosmology, and my Mavellonialist, moderate attempt to construct a higher civilization for living angels going forward to enjoy, is a similar synthesizing of fact and value.
Stephen Hicks has a 2-minute clip on the Internet, from his appearance on stage in Melbourne in March, 2020, where he characterizes Jordan Peterson as a credible scientist and biological psychologist, well-versed in and contributing to the world of facts and its increase in knowledge, who, also is concerned with values and how the two are to be reconciled. I believe the paragraph above captures this tension nicely.
Hicks describes Jordan as caught between two worlds, the world of fact orientation, and how to synthesize it with value orientation. Peterson is worried about the postmodernist attack on Western civilization and offers that our civilization has two sources, the ancient Judeo-Christian source as well as the Modern scientific culture. He wants to blend the values gained from the pre-Modernists with the physicalist values from the Modernists to reassert how fine is Western civilization, and to push back against the nihilistic premodernists. Hicks admits that values and meaning are important for humans, and indeed they are critical.
Philosopher and author Sandra Woien edited a book on Jordan Peterson (Jordan Peterson Critical Responses). Philosopher Marc Champgagne has written a book on Jordan Peterson's ideas. His book is: Myth, Meaning and Antifragile Individualism: On the Ideas of Jordan Peterson.
If my Mavellonialist philosophy agrees with Peterson a lot, criticisms of him would also apply to me, so that is an exerciser I may one day undertake, among 1,000 other projects.
Here is what Stephen Hicks wrote online is a review of Champagn's book on Peterson: " 'Philosopher Marc Champagne’s analytic skills are impressively on display as he presents and variously dissects, agrees with, and critiques Jordan Peterson’s hugely ambitious project to integrate modern science with the essential themes of Western religious and humanist traditions. In an age of specialty, Peterson’s attempt at synthesis is most welcome, and Champagne’s clear overview and argued response is enormously valuable.' — Stephen R. C. Hicks, Professor of Philosophy, Rockford University"
Here is a clear, succinct capturing by Hicks of Jordan's ambitious project to integrate modern science (facts) with the (values), the essential themes of Western religious and humanist traditions.And on Pages 34 and 35 of his book, Jordan is introducing the need to integrate facts and values in a way that preserves Western Civilization as the new culture, the new high civilization emerges. Let me call it Neo-Modernism or post-postmodernism.
J: "Take pain, for example--subjective pain. That is something so real no argument can stand against it. Everyone acts as if their pain is real--ultimately, finally real. Pain matters, more than matter matters. It is for this reason, I believe, that so many of the world's traditions regard the suffering attendant upon existence as the irreducible truth of Being."
My response: Here is where Jordan's genius and originality blazes through resplendently. Pain is an ontological reality, an irreducible truth of Being. Pain a feeling, a value of horror and dislike as emotive response to feeling it, trumps or matters more than matter, the objective world, the world of things, and science.
Peterson wants the synthesis between facts and values to be made, but pain matters more than matter, matters so is Peterson the existentialist making his synthesis with Feeling and Will as our primary concerns, and reason and science as minority partners in emphasis in his synthesizing facts and values. It would appear so.
My Mavellonialist synthesis too would favor values over facts, with the understanding that values or religious belief is of the rational religious, Deist variety.
That paragraph also shows why Peterson consistently declares that suffering is core to living, and I agree but enjoy, loving and seeking happiness are primordially as worthy too.
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