I read the contents of the link. I wonder, why do you continue to pander to dishonesty?
@buka001 I would appreciate an answer to my question.
Here are quotes that show that Peterson follows
Carl Jung in supposing that archetypal myths are universal across cultures.
- “We also presently possess inaccessible and complete form the traditional wisdom of a large part of the human race—possess an accurate description of the myths and rituals that contain and condition the implicit and explicit values of almost everyone who has ever lived.”
- “The world as a forum for action is composed, essentially, of three constituent elements, which tend to manifest themselves in typical patterns of metaphoric representation. First is unexplored territory—the Great Mother, nature, creative and destructive, source and final resting place of all determinate things. Second is explored territory—the Great Father, culture, protective and tyrannical, cumulative ancestral wisdom. Third is the process that mediates between unexplored and explored territory—the Divine Son, the archetypal individual, creative exploratory Word, and vengeful adversary.”
The assumption of the cultural universality of myths is important for Peterson because he wants mythology to provide the basis for the psychological, philosophical, and political understanding of morality. But his evidence for the generality of such myths is limited to the tradition that runs from Mesopotamia through Judaism to Christianity, with occasional references to Buddhism.
Plato and Aristotle originated Western ethics 2500 years ago with a stark
divorce between philosophy and religion. Hence normative judgments about right and wrong do not depend at all on myth or religion.
David Hume and Adam Smith based morality on sympathy and other moral sentiments, independent of religion.
David Hume is in fact famous for saying that "Reason is and ought only be slave of the passions" as part of his position endorsing the notion of moral sentimentality.
The sticking point in particular can be revealed by the following chain of words:
Greek: Logos
Latin: Ratio
French: Raison
English: Reason
Plato made the distinction between philosophy and religion by drawing a distinction between mythos and logos, unless I'm very much mistaken, and logos is where the word "logic" derives from. Peterson, in making a distinction between the world as a forum for action and the world as a place of objects, followed the same logos/mythos distinction to make a case that is basically similar in character to Hume's argument
against the idea of being able to derive a purely logical notion of morality. But this clown thinks he's taking Peterson down while actually appealing to outside authorities who basically undermine the central thesis of his argument? Lol.
And btw, you try communicating anything about morality without resorting to
story to do so. Myth = drama = narrative = story. The view of reason, which this muppet champions so readily, tells everyone that the universe is not unfolding according to some grand narrative and that all causation is basically mindless inertia; nobody can make sense of morality using this framework, so that leaves story the victor of this contest by default. If you disagree, you've got two choices: you can either show how one can derive morality from pure reason (doubtful since Hume basically showed that the gap between is and ought cannot be traversed using pure reason), or you can nominate a third alternative that nobody has heretofore considered. If you can't do either of these things, though, it's time to sit down and shut up and give Peterson his due by contending with the actual implications of his arguments without just assuming that he doesn't know what he's talking about.
What the ancient Greeks—at least in the archaic phase of their civilization—called muthos was quite different from what we and the media nowadays call “myth”. For them a muthos was a true story, a story that unveils the true origin of the world and human beings. For us a myth is something to be “debunked”: a widespread, popular belief that is in fact false. In archaic Greece the memorable was transmitted orally through poetry, which often relied on myth. However, starting with the beginning of the seventh century BC two types of discourse emerged that were set in opposition to poetry: history (as shaped by, most notably, Thucydides) and philosophy (as shaped by the peri phuseōs tradition of the sixth and fifth centuries BC). These two types of discourse were naturalistic alternatives to the poetic accounts of things. Plato broke to some extent from the philosophical tradition of the sixth and fifth centuries in that he uses both traditional myths and myths he invents and gives them some role to play in his philosophical endeavor. He thus seems to attempt to overcome the traditional opposition between muthos and logos.
There are many myths in Plato’s dialogues: traditional myths, which he sometimes modifies, as well as myths that he invents, although many of these contain mythical elements from various traditions. Plato is both a myth teller and a myth maker. In general, he uses myth to inculcate in his less philosophical readers noble beliefs and/or teach them various philosophical matters that may be too difficult for them to follow if expounded in a blunt, philosophical discourse. More and more scholars have argued in recent years that in Plato myth and philosophy are tightly bound together, in spite of his occasional claim that they are opposed modes of discourse.
Ah okay, I suppose you can go the Marxist route of trying to appeal to history. Although history is just another kind of story.
Maybe that explains the vapidity of the author you decided to cite as someone who can take a bite out of Peterson.
Oh, and just btw:
Researchers long wondered how the billions of independent neurons in the brain come together to reliably build a biological machine that easily beats the most advanced computers. All of those tiny interactions appear to be tied to something that guarantees an impressive computational capacity.
medicalxpress.com
Researchers long wondered how the billions of independent neurons in the brain come together to reliably build a biological machine that easily beats the most advanced computers. All of those tiny interactions appear to be tied to something that guarantees an impressive computational capacity.
Over the past 20 years, evidence mounted in support of a theory that the
brain tunes itself to a point where it is as excitable as it can be without tipping into disorder, similar to a phase transition.
This criticality hypothesis asserts that the brain is poised on the fine line between quiescence and chaos. At exactly this line, information processing is maximized.
However, one of the key predictions of this theory—that criticality is truly a set point, and not a mere inevitability—had never been tested. Until now. New research from Washington University in St. Louis directly confirms this long-standing prediction in the brains of freely behaving animals.
You have the territory of the great father, that's order, then the territory of the great mother, that's chaos, and then you have the boundary between them, which is what Peterson identifies with the heroic individual. Insofar as self-organising criticality is a basic function of brain activity, it can be pretty certain that however the brain produces narratives, those three elements will fundamentally shape the structure of it. Peterson's little theory about how the world as a forum for action is put together is actually
very sophisticated, which unfortunately means that in all probability it will go straight over your head.
www.nature.com
