The Problem of Jordan Peterson

How to Beat a Dead Horse Correctly

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In a brief, anonymous online interaction, I once asked why it was that no serious philosopher, academic, or writer had ever challenged Jordan Peterson’s profound lack of understanding vis à vis all of the topics about which he so confidently speaks. The reply I received was truly strange: “because it would be like beating a dead horse.” Peterson has been through a lot of personal turmoil, and enthusiastically confronting him now would risk being cruel. But Peterson is not an avatar of the overworked and exhausted horse of Crime and Punishment, brutally beaten to death by an impatient crowd of party-goers. In fact, if Peterson is a dead horse, he certainly is a very active dead horse.

There may be some reluctance by academics to appear to take his ideas seriously enough to criticise them - on the battleground of philosophy, you generally have to possess at least some respect for a figure as a premise to critiquing them. But this is an entirely disingenuous rationale. Peterson’s influence combined with his inept theorising has led to millions of nascent thinkers accepting wholly ridiculous arguments: that wokeism and political correctness is the product of a ‘sleight of hand’ by post-structuralism to disguise Marxism in the form of identity politics; to be suspicious of anyone that does not embrace the substanceless and theoretically moot insights of classical liberalism; and even to dismiss those who criticise Bolshevism for having little to do with Marxism as “narcissists claiming they could have done it better”.

If these are the consequences of Peterson’s continuing influence, then he is neither a dead horse nor unworthy of serious criticism. By serious criticism I mean that calling him a fascist, a misogynist, or transphobic is not enough. Peterson is no exception to the satirist G. K. Chesterton’s claim (relating to cubism) that the inability to make a substantially meaningful statement on something may in fact mean that the thing itself is worthless, not just that we lack the adequate words to express it. Peterson’s frequently inflammatory and misguided comments on politics and culture are not peripheral accidents concealing a nevertheless useful idea - they reflect the general absence of any substance at the heart of his thought itself.

Peterson is frequently called a philosopher by the fact that he refers to philosophy, but this is as accurate as calling a man a firefighter because he gazed at a distant burning building from his bedroom window. He claims, for example, to maintain a fidelity to enlightenment thought - in particular to Kant, it seems. Yet in a conversation with Roger Scruton, Peterson pointed out what he thought Kant missed: “Kant claims that the world is constituted by space and time, but I would add that it’s also made up of stories…” Even a child who watched a 15 minute YouTube lecture on Kant would recognise the multiple faults in this comment. Space and time, in Kant’s critical philosophy, do not “make up the world”, they are a priori intuitions that furnish the formal possibility of the categories of the understanding, from which a phenomenal (subjective) apprehension of things becomes possible. Narratives, myths, and stories are not a transcendental precondition for the possible apprehension of objects. Heidegger would be a similar victim of Peterson’s spectacular vulgarisations. In a televised interview, he made the profound claim that ‘Heidegger argued that the world is made up of meaning.’ Not only is there nothing recognisable about Heidegger here, but has there ever been a philosopher who claimed that no single thing can in any way ‘mean’ anything to anything else? Even the a-subjective, object oriented ontology of Graham Harman recognises that the movement of the wind ‘means’ something to the leaf that is carried by it.

Yet the most tragic victim of Peterson’s paranoid speculations are post-structuralism (which he hastily equates to an obscure notion of postmodernism as “radical relativism”) and Marxism. A general anticipation of the end of his engagement with Marxism arose prior to Peterson’s debate with Slavoj Žižek, but this anticipation led mostly to disappointment, with Žižek failing to confront him on his most basic errors, and even spending most of the debate in agreement. The dimension of “radical relativism” that Peterson attributes to Foucault, Lacan, and Derrida (the three post-structuralists, according to him), is nevertheless nowhere to be seen. Unlike the claims made by right-wing summaries of 1960’s French theory, Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault do not abandon a previous epistemology of absolute reference-points (if such a tradition ever existed) to an endless and disoriented sliding of meaning into incomprehensible relativity. In the Archaeology of Knowledge, for example, Foucault clearly introduces the possibility of a ‘cut’ to his discursive historicism, or to to the regress of shifting epistemological pre-conditions to the construction of objects of scientific enquiry. This cut is the nomadic or independent effect of the statement (énoncé) which endlessly rejects assimilation to relative discursive contexts, and rather displays a capacity to penetrate them, to reveal their incompleteness or the formal conditions under which these temporary ‘modes of knowledge’ (epistemes) arise.

The same can be said for Lacan, who directly discusses truth as ‘mi-dit’ (half-said), a reference to the inarticulable dawn of a new moral regime in Nietzsche’s ‘noontide’ (midi, in French). This formulation of truth as the violence of the Real that is produced by the unstable structures of the Symbolic, is faithful to a certain self-obfuscation that our confrontations with truth are liable to. Lacan is in this sense far more faithful than any classical liberal to the inherent logic of truth, which operates insofar as it is unrecognisable enough to never be fully available to our discursive perspective. Truth should be recognised for its Real quality, which forbids any pure subjective appropriation.

Even Derrida, who admittedly flirts with an endless sliding of signification in his Grammatology, bases his deconstruction of presence and the logos on the absence of any genuinely critical coordinates which these provide. Différance (the difference and self-deference operative in any form of identity or presence) is primarily an insistence on the secondary structure of writing, insofar as it is an apparent reproduction of speech, yet a reproduction which precedes the original unity of speech and presence. In other words, writing precedes speech insofar as it appears to copy it. It is this retroaction of difference into the simulacral structure of identity which furnishes a rigorously critical entry point to the otherwise permanent, indifferent sliding of systems of speech and identity.

Jordan Peterson has an astonishing influence as an authority on the nonsensical term of ‘postmodern neo-Marxism’, and yet the basic insight of its supposed horsemen is one that he cannot grasp in the slightest. By a strange reversal, his ignorance in all things related to political theory and philosophy only strengthens his position as a voice of reason or a guiding public intellectual. His support for Trump during the 2024 presidential run made this shockingly clear. Two comments in particular stand out, during an interview with Piers Morgan.

Firstly, his endorsement of Trump appealed to the fact that the return of Trump is ‘archetypal’, that his new administrative team are people who make you feel prepared to ‘charge into battle’. This is precisely the (often self-aware) pathetic sense of elation and nationalistic drive which any successful populist movement produces, and we should be deeply suspicious of one of our foremost intellectuals falling for it. Secondly, his behaviourist support of Trump was ridiculous enough to appear as a straw man of behaviourism itself: Peterson’s argument was that the best predictor of a person’s future behaviour was their past behaviour, and since Trump has been president before, it would make sense to have him be president again. Hitler and Mussolini were leaders before - by this logic it would make sense to elect them once again. Peterson does not suggest that we engage with the possibility of critically analysing a president’s policies whilst in office, but that we support them if they’ve been president at a previous point. Should this not imply that Biden himself should have been re-elected? Justin Trudeau, Peterson’s nemesis, has been prime minister - should we by implication elect him again? The answer is no, because this is an absurd logic by which to ground a political stance, and yet these are the great words of wisdom offered to us by Jordan Peterson.

There is perhaps a version of Jordan Peterson that we can think back to - a clinical psychologist interested in Jung, Carl Rogers, neuroscience, and Nietzsche - that had not yet been pushed into the public limelight. Perhaps we can be generous enough to suggest that something morphed Peterson from a somewhat interesting psychologist to a puppet for the New Republican administration. In my younger years, interested in Jung and Nietzsche, I may eve have had sympathy for this former Peterson (for encouraging clinicians to read more, although he never had much to say about Nietzsche, and for resisting the dull reasoning of the new atheists).

Since this time - more likely a retrospective idyll that never existed - Peterson’s rise in status as a public intellectual has had the reverse effect of deteriorating his critical capacities. He speaks of foreign policy, history, philosophy, political theory, and postmodernism with a confidence that perhaps only comes with a sincere lack of understanding. I nevertheless insist that he requires serious, systematic criticism - not because we should expect everyone to be erudite theorists and philosophers, nor because his ideas in themselves are interesting enough to warrant engagement, but because the endless errors in his discussions of these topics has very real effects. If we can assume one thing about the material history of the theory-practice divide (a divide that I largely reject, since it operates within theory itself), it is that bad theorising can lead to very disastrous political effects (we only have to look back through the infantile appropriation of Darwinism in Hitler’s Mein Kampf as an example). Peterson may not be Hitler, but his atrocious theorising is not exempt from producing very negative consequences.

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