Jun 7, 2025 04:29 PM
(This post was last modified: Jun 7, 2025 05:58 PM by C C.)
COMMENT: So if even his patrons at times wonder what Peterson is babbling or hand-waving at, it is (according to the article) maybe because he is mimicking the styles, tactics, and affectations of 20th-century French philosophers. While this is seemingly self-conflicting (since he also castigates postmodernist and related Neo-Marxist schools of thought), the scenario is perhaps not as bizarre as it initially appears.
If one of the goals of the far-left is liberation of the world from the cultural hegemony of the West, then that entails not just disempowering the Eurocentric legacy, but idealistically returning those once subjugated societies to their original heritage or nationalist identities, customs slash practices, and beliefs. But as a traditionalist, there is accordingly a crossing of paths with respect to Peterson wanting to retrograde the West itself back to an earlier phase (classic liberalism and other results of the Enlightenment).
That means -- via postmodern techniques and evasiveness -- ironically undermining contemporary grand narratives that Anglophone literary intellectuals have outputted for interpreting the affairs of the world. The latter concepts and activist movements which progressive capitalists have assimilated to suit their own political and economic purposes, that -- in a way, parallels Peterson likewise adopting the obscurantism of his own "bogeymen" targets for personal motives.
This coincidentally overlaps in very feeble respects with the other two articles below (particularly the one about nostalgia for the Enlightenment).
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Is Jordan Peterson just making it up as he goes?
https://thewalrus.ca/is-jordan-peterson-...s-he-goes/
EXCERPTS: "The multiplicity of possible interpretations [here] is very important. It makes it almost impossible to beat Peterson in an argument, because every time one attempts to force him to defend a proposition, he can insist he means something else.” (Compare to the Searle quote further down.)
[...] That success, improbably, comes from a unique fusion of obscurantism and conservative pomposity. There’s a certain genre of left-coded writing, for example, that’s rightly derided for its convolution, even meaninglessness. [...] The incredible thing about Peterson is that, in writing and speech, he somehow manages to be both a sententious reactionary and a purveyor of postmodern gobbledygook.
[...] The left, Peterson says, may dislike inequality and hierarchy, but they’re right there in the animal kingdom. Just look at how the humble lobster has lived since time immemorial.
Peterson’s longstanding bête noire has been the scourge of postmodernism, alternatively represented in the catch-all signifier “postmodern neo-Marxism.” Once again, the irony here is not just that Peterson’s own writing so regularly mirrors the worst stylistic tendencies of both post-structuralist academia and social media identity politics. It’s that his work and ideas are fundamentally postmodern in substance... (MORE - details)
-RELATED- John Searle (excerpt): "With Derrida, you can hardly misread him, because he's so obscure. Every time you say, 'He says so-and-so,' he always says, 'You misunderstood me.' But if you try to figure out the correct interpretation, then that's not so easy."
The Enlightenment, then and now
https://libertiesjournal.com/articles/th...0cd46d51cf
EXCERPT: But is some sort of “return” to the Enlightenment the answer? In recent years, many prominent intellectuals have made this case, albeit in contradictory ways. In Enlightenment Now, the psychologist Steven Pinker credited the Enlightenment with virtually all human progress since the eighteenth century, equated it with his own brand of technocratic neoliberalism, and argued that everyone would agree if only they overcame some regrettable cognitive biases.
The philosopher Susan Neiman, by contrast, in Left Is Not Woke, eloquently identified the Enlightenment with the promise of progressive politics and warned about the hijacking of that politics by “woke” activists hostile to Enlightenment values.
The historian and legal scholar Samuel Moyn took an oddly similar position in Liberalism Against Itself, except that for him the nefarious force that has dragged the left away from its optimistic Enlightenment roots is not wokeness but a fearful “Cold War liberalism.”
Historians, too, have been pressing the case for the Enlightenment’s living relevance, at sometimes inordinate length... (MORE - details)
AI signals the death of the author
https://www.noemamag.com/ai-signals-the-...he-author/
EXCERPT: The concept of the author, as both Barthes and Foucault demonstrate, emerges from the confluence of these historically important innovations. But this does not mean that the author as the locus of literary authority is just a subject for theory — it also evolved to be a practical matter of law. In 18th-century England and its breakaway North American colonies, the author became the responsible party in a new kind of property law: copyright. The idea of an author being the legitimate owner of a literary work was first introduced in London not out of some idealistic dedication to the concept of artistic integrity, but in response to an earlier technological disruption that permitted the free circulation and proliferation of textual documents: the printing press.
[...] Criticism of tools like ChatGPT tends to follow on from this. They have been described as “stochastic parrots” for the way they simply mimic human speech or repeat word patterns without understanding meaning. The ways in which they more generally disrupt the standard understanding of authorship, authority and the means and meaning of writing have clearly disturbed a great many people. But the story of how “the author” came into being shows us that the critics miss a key point: The authority for writing has always been a socially constructed artifice. The author is not a natural phenomenon. It was an idea that we invented to help us make sense of writing... (MORE - details)
If one of the goals of the far-left is liberation of the world from the cultural hegemony of the West, then that entails not just disempowering the Eurocentric legacy, but idealistically returning those once subjugated societies to their original heritage or nationalist identities, customs slash practices, and beliefs. But as a traditionalist, there is accordingly a crossing of paths with respect to Peterson wanting to retrograde the West itself back to an earlier phase (classic liberalism and other results of the Enlightenment).
That means -- via postmodern techniques and evasiveness -- ironically undermining contemporary grand narratives that Anglophone literary intellectuals have outputted for interpreting the affairs of the world. The latter concepts and activist movements which progressive capitalists have assimilated to suit their own political and economic purposes, that -- in a way, parallels Peterson likewise adopting the obscurantism of his own "bogeymen" targets for personal motives.
This coincidentally overlaps in very feeble respects with the other two articles below (particularly the one about nostalgia for the Enlightenment).
- - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Is Jordan Peterson just making it up as he goes?
https://thewalrus.ca/is-jordan-peterson-...s-he-goes/
EXCERPTS: "The multiplicity of possible interpretations [here] is very important. It makes it almost impossible to beat Peterson in an argument, because every time one attempts to force him to defend a proposition, he can insist he means something else.” (Compare to the Searle quote further down.)
[...] That success, improbably, comes from a unique fusion of obscurantism and conservative pomposity. There’s a certain genre of left-coded writing, for example, that’s rightly derided for its convolution, even meaninglessness. [...] The incredible thing about Peterson is that, in writing and speech, he somehow manages to be both a sententious reactionary and a purveyor of postmodern gobbledygook.
[...] The left, Peterson says, may dislike inequality and hierarchy, but they’re right there in the animal kingdom. Just look at how the humble lobster has lived since time immemorial.
Peterson’s longstanding bête noire has been the scourge of postmodernism, alternatively represented in the catch-all signifier “postmodern neo-Marxism.” Once again, the irony here is not just that Peterson’s own writing so regularly mirrors the worst stylistic tendencies of both post-structuralist academia and social media identity politics. It’s that his work and ideas are fundamentally postmodern in substance... (MORE - details)
-RELATED- John Searle (excerpt): "With Derrida, you can hardly misread him, because he's so obscure. Every time you say, 'He says so-and-so,' he always says, 'You misunderstood me.' But if you try to figure out the correct interpretation, then that's not so easy."
The Enlightenment, then and now
https://libertiesjournal.com/articles/th...0cd46d51cf
EXCERPT: But is some sort of “return” to the Enlightenment the answer? In recent years, many prominent intellectuals have made this case, albeit in contradictory ways. In Enlightenment Now, the psychologist Steven Pinker credited the Enlightenment with virtually all human progress since the eighteenth century, equated it with his own brand of technocratic neoliberalism, and argued that everyone would agree if only they overcame some regrettable cognitive biases.
The philosopher Susan Neiman, by contrast, in Left Is Not Woke, eloquently identified the Enlightenment with the promise of progressive politics and warned about the hijacking of that politics by “woke” activists hostile to Enlightenment values.
The historian and legal scholar Samuel Moyn took an oddly similar position in Liberalism Against Itself, except that for him the nefarious force that has dragged the left away from its optimistic Enlightenment roots is not wokeness but a fearful “Cold War liberalism.”
Historians, too, have been pressing the case for the Enlightenment’s living relevance, at sometimes inordinate length... (MORE - details)
AI signals the death of the author
https://www.noemamag.com/ai-signals-the-...he-author/
EXCERPT: The concept of the author, as both Barthes and Foucault demonstrate, emerges from the confluence of these historically important innovations. But this does not mean that the author as the locus of literary authority is just a subject for theory — it also evolved to be a practical matter of law. In 18th-century England and its breakaway North American colonies, the author became the responsible party in a new kind of property law: copyright. The idea of an author being the legitimate owner of a literary work was first introduced in London not out of some idealistic dedication to the concept of artistic integrity, but in response to an earlier technological disruption that permitted the free circulation and proliferation of textual documents: the printing press.
[...] Criticism of tools like ChatGPT tends to follow on from this. They have been described as “stochastic parrots” for the way they simply mimic human speech or repeat word patterns without understanding meaning. The ways in which they more generally disrupt the standard understanding of authorship, authority and the means and meaning of writing have clearly disturbed a great many people. But the story of how “the author” came into being shows us that the critics miss a key point: The authority for writing has always been a socially constructed artifice. The author is not a natural phenomenon. It was an idea that we invented to help us make sense of writing... (MORE - details)
