To live in truth and in love.
There are plenty of people on infernal anti-social media who are vehemently opposed to Jordan Peterson and condemn him viciously and harangue and unfriend anyone who dares sing his praises. I speak as I find. It says something that I daren’t post this on my main page, knowing the reaction. I consistently find him sane and insightful. Which is much more than can be said by the anti-social media mob.
In this debate with Sam Harris, Peterson shines like a star. I have long thought that many, like Harris, who seek to reclaim the moral truth and knowledge as against nihilism and relativism are drawing on a hidden God, making religious arguments whilst at the same time rejecting religion as an illusion and God as a fiction. I argued that in relation to Harris’ book “The Moral Landscape” in “Being at One” in 2016. So it is good to see someone like Peterson arguing things I’ve been arguing for years. I’m not alone, then. People like Harris use moral terms on the presumption that an amoral and indifferent Nature can serve as a moral referent. It cannot. Dante is brilliant on this – the mere existence of natural endowments in itself is not a guarantee that they will be used properly or even at all. Even with respect to potentials becoming actual, not all natural potentials are healthy and good and therefore to be realized. There is a process of discernment involved. These are moral questions, a morality that exists at a degree of independence from physical processes.
Naturalists like Harris don’t get it, hence his – worthy – attempts to reunite fact and value and stave off the arbitrariness of ethical relativism will fall into a cul-de-sac.
I’ve been arguing this for years. So I greatly appreciate the way that Jordan Peterson goes head-to-head with those who seek the extirpation of religion as an illusion to show how their views rest on a ‘transcendental internal ethic’ and ‘transcendent universal ethic.’ Every so often I think I may be alone on this, so it is hugely encouraging to hear Peterson make this argument, and to know that Peterson is inspiring so many around the world. It also indicates the scale of the problem before us that Peterson is also vilified by so many.
This discussion begins with atheists objecting to what they call ‘Jesus smuggling’ on the part of people who, building up an impressive rational edifice, suddenly introduce God and religion when reason starts to falter. Peterson turns the argument around to show that those, like Harris, who make substantive moral claims are themselves doing a form of smuggling, drawing on metaphysical and religious arguments they openly reject.
I have been saying for years and years now – there is a hidden God in the best philosophies and theories of the modern world, which goes to prove that reason, scientific or moral, cannot dispense without metaphysics (and that’s a modest claim).
What struck me most of all about Peterson’s words here is how closely they describe Dante’s journey of the soul in The Comedy. It is the same moral psychology. I’ll have to write it in more Dantesque form – the embodiment of personality is character, the imitation of Christ as the ideal is the likeness to God through rationality, speech, and sociality – communication and connection.
‘the best way to embody that is actually to live in truth. Because the fundamental Christian ethic is to accept in love, which is to assume that being is acceptable and can be perfected and to pursue that with truth and that you should embody that.’
Basically, Jordan Peterson digs deep into the moral hardcore of Sam Harris' book “The Moral Landscape.” I did this myself in “Being at One,” noting that Harris is indebted to Aristotle, pulling himself clear on account of Aristotle’s essentialism, teleology, and argument for final cause. These things, Harris fears, lead to God. Harris is right to suspect this. His mistake is not to realize his arguments for moral truth and knowledge require those very things and cannot work on natural grounds alone, certainly not the neurophysical processes he proposes. The likes of Harris don’t give us a genuine ethics of human flourishing, simply the proper functioning of a body. That’s fine as far as it goes, but as Aristotle argued, the purpose is not merely to live, it is to live well. That entails notions of moral choice and spirituality that are not given.
Peterson thus identifies a moral idealism at the heart of Harris’ “Moral Landscape,” which is nothing less than the Ethics of Christianity, the very thing that Harris is concerned to repudiate. Harris is not the only one throwing out religion through the front door only to smuggle it in by the back. Identity politics does the same thing. Harris draws on the good, and leaves the unforgiving judgementalism, punishment, and retribution to the warriors in the culture wars. To be fair to Harris, it was precisely to avoid these unwinnable wars between relativists (who become absolutists and authoritarians very quickly when it comes to triumphing over their rivals) that he wrote “The Moral Landscape.” His attempt to reclaim moral truth, though, fails for want of a moral referent worthy of the name. Neurophysical processes is somewhat of a comedown from God, it has to be said.
I love Peterson’s words on the way that religion is a multi-dimensional experience, incorporating rationality, art, architecture, music, drama, literature, cities – that defines Dante’s Comedy in a nutshell. Christianity isn't simply, nor even mainly, a metaphysical or ontological claim concerning the existence of God and the nature of the universe permeated by God’s Love: it a total, all-encompassing worldview. I read Harris's “Moral Landscape” closely and warmed to its themes. But I saw immediately that he appropriated Aristotle to his naturalism, and totally discarded Aristotle’s cosmology and ethics. Aristotle does not propose a quasi-scientific ethical naturalism in the manner of contemporary neo-Aristotelianism. It staggers me how people seeking to reclaim moral truth against the dangers of relativism will go only so far before – brave soldiers of logical positivism as they are – recoiling in horror at the first sign of the Holy Ghost. Harris and his like therefore seek to embody Aristotelian, Platonic, and Judaeo-Christian ethics but without the essentialist and religious metaphysics. And for that reason the effort will fail and damn us to picking sides between competing relativisms and nihilisms in an unwinnable and pointless war.
Peterson is braver and goes further, opening up a route that will lead to the contemplation of the divine. Why people will go so far and then pull back, even knowing the dangers of moral nihilism and relativism, is disappointing, evidence of failing intellectual imagination and moral courage. Peterson is trying to get people to see that in the absence of metaphysical account, warrant, and support, Harris's moral landscape has nothing to sustain its value system but pure abstract rationality. It can’t work. There is nothing new in this position; it is a restatement of the view that humanity come to govern its affairs by way of a self-legislating reason. That was once my view, presented in terms of ‘rational freedom.’ Dante also presents the possibility of the Earthly Paradise within reach of natural human reason. But he also gives grounds as to why, shorn of the spiritual dimension, it may not be sustainable. Human beings are defined by the quests for meaning, truth, and belonging and cannot live on a destinationless voyage. Harris’ ‘moral landscape’ is very different to, for instance, Andreas Kinneging’s “The Geography of Good and Evil,” which openly argues for an ethics based on God and metaphysics. Christianity posits the same ethics offered by naturalists claiming moral truth, but does so on the basis of the metaphysics of God and the world. The basis of that truth cannot be natural processes. What really impresses is the way that Peterson seems to know that he is going out on a limb, going beyond fact and evidence, in front of people – like Harris – who hold religion in contempt and seek to extirpate it as a virus. Peterson seems remarkably insecure here. He knows that the view he is presenting is not a fashionable one. I’ll give him this – he can see that the attempts to reclaim moral truth by the likes of Harris are needed, but won’t succeed as a restatement of the old rationalism and naturalism. It’s like everyone is scared of having to come to terms with God and religion again, for fear of being associated with the baggage of religion past and present, the practices of religious adherents who have succeeded only in taking religion further away from God than any atheist could ever have done. People don’t trust religion, and ask for proof and evidence knowing that none will be forthcoming.
And yet Peterson ventures forth, making his argument in the form of plea. Life has meaning. The quest for meaning and truth are twin poles: lose one and the other soon falls, since they exist and thrive in relation. Reason frequently tells us that we are beaten and that our situation is hopeless. And yet we pull through through moments of grace that can’t be summoned by logic and fact. What was it that Nietzsche said? A man can bear any ‘how’ if he has a ‘why’ to live by. You pull through because you cleave to something stronger than immediate facts. Peterson doesn’t insist on his conclusions, but his reasoning makes them clear - Harris's moral landscape, like that of others who continue to advance moral claims without referents, is nothing but Judaeo-Christian ethics appropriated from the entire Judaeo-Christian worldview, but without the metaphysical supports to sustain them. The moral landscape only makes sense on account of the underlying Christian metaphysics, something built over centuries and taken for granted. That view is complacent. I keep repeating this point: you cannot have your transcendent cake and eat it too; once it is gone it is gone, leaving only the clash between self-created gods/goods – endless culture wars involving the protagonists in a constant arm wrestle.
I made notes as I went. (I am an inveterate note taker, I was an expert note taker at university, identifying key points and writing as quickly as the lecturer spoke).
“Peterson states that he read The Moral Landscape a lot. I did too. Peterson likes the part of the book I also liked, the rejection of ethical relativism and the argument that we need to be able to make substantive moral claims. Peterson agrees with the proposition that we have to bridge the gap between facts and values, ‘otherwise our values are left hanging unmoored, and that certainly brings about the danger of nihilism. But also a potential danger of a swing to totalitarianism.’
Agreed.
Then it is Harris who performs a conceptual operation, outlining a story of a woman who lives a horrible life in a horrible country, arguing that ‘surely we can all agree that that’s not good,’ and then Harris contrasts that with the sort of life we would all like to have. And, Peterson claims, Harris starts with the proposition that we can move about from the hellish life of this character and move towards the ideal perspective. Harris, Peterson says, employs his own strategy of smugly, saying that ‘if we can only agree on that, then’ the rest follows.
So far, so good. But there are a couple of things that go along with that that are quite interesting. ‘The first is that what Harris is claiming is that the highest moral good isn’t existing in that better space, the highest moral good is in acting in the manner that moves us from the Hellish domain to the desirable domain. So there is a pattern of behaviour that constitutes the effort.’
We could ask what the ultimate Hell is.
It might be existing in the Hell that Harris describes. [But Dante knew that Hell was a praxis and that there was such a thing as infernal production. ‘But it also might be, something worse, I think that participating in the process that brings about that Hell is actually a Hell that’s even deeper than the Hell.’
So there is a state of being in a good state but there’s also the state of being that brings you to that good state; then there’s the state of being that’s in a terrible state and the process that brings you to that terrible state.
One of the things that Peterson claims to have learned from the archetypal religious texts as well as the philosophical texts is that the process that transforms society into something approximating Hell is a lower Hell.
We want to separate out two things, we want to separate out the states of being and the process that brings them into being.
The appropriate way to act ethically is to act in a manner that moves us away from Hell and moves us towards a desirable state.
There is a couple of things about that.
The first thing is that I wouldn’t say that mode of acting is a fact, I would say it is a personality [character] and that what you are suggesting is that people embody the personality that moves society away from Hell towards Heaven.
Here, Peterson claims that Harris re-capitulates the essential Christian message precisely, because, symbolically speaking, stripped of its religious and metaphysical context, that the purpose of positing the vision of the ideal human being, which, independent of the metaphysical context, is certainly what the symbol of Christ represents is the mode of being that moves us most effectively from something approximating Hell to something approximating Heaven.
And part of that message is – something which Peterson claims is dead along the lines of what Harris is arguing – is that the best way to embody that is actually to live in truth. Because the fundamental Christian ethic is to accept in love, which is to assume that being is acceptable and can be perfected and to pursue that with truth and that you should embody that. And then I would say that the purpose of the representation, we can call the meta-fictions or archetypal representations, is to show that is an embodied format so that it can be imitated [The Imitation of Christ] rather than to transform it into something that’s deluded in some sense to an abstract rationality. Because I don’t think the abstract rationality in itself has enough flesh on it .. which is partly why in the Christian ethic there is an emphasis on the Word, which is something roughly akin to rationality, has to be made flesh, it has to be enacted.
Peterson notes that Harris appeals to or presumes the existence of a ‘transcendental internal ethic.’ ‘Which I would say … seems to me to be something very akin to the idea of the Holy Spirit. Which is something like the internal representation of the transcendent universal ethic.’
Peterson repeats that he is trying to strip these concepts of their metaphysical substrate – he’s not making a case for the existence of the Great Man in the sky – he promises that we can get to this later.
‘what seems to be the case is that we have beneath our cognitive architecture and our social architecture a layer of symbolic and dramatic narrative representation that instantiates the same concepts but in a multi-dimensional context.
“The religious enterprise doesn’t only emphasise rationality, it brings music into the play, it brings art into the play, it brings drama, and literature, and architecture, and it brings the organising of cities around a central space. It is pushing itself, it is manifesting itself across multiple dimensions of human existence simultaneously. To me that gives it a richness that cannot be denuded without loss. And also a motive power that a pure appeal to rationality I don’t think can manage.
“There are things that need protecting, freedom, a cognitive structure that can act as a bulwark against those forces that seek to undermine and destroy. Christianity, for all its faults, Judaeo-Christianity, might provide something approximating that bulwark, if we could only figure out how to utilize it properly.”
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