>Only bad review of his book 'maps of meaning' on amazon idk what to think
This book was a huge disappointment. It abounds with dense, often impenetrable, verbiage. Basic points are made repeatedly, but subtle ones occasionally appear in the middle of an argument and are never referenced again. Even worse, this text makes at least one statement that is factually wrong. This mistake is not a small oversight, either. It is one that demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of the topic being discussed at that part in the text, and throws into question the validity of other points made throughout the rest of the book.
I first encountered Maps of Meaning on TV Ontario as a lecture series with the same name. I found the lectures by Dr. Peterson fascinating, but, unfortunately, confusing in parts. There were details I wasn't able to fully grasp, and I wanted to know more. That led me to this book, in hopes of filling in the gaps and developing a better understanding of the topics that were covered.
One of the blurbs on the back cover says the book is "... exciting not just for the general reader ... ", suggesting that it should be accessible to the layman. Although I'm a layman in the area of psychology, I do have a graduate degree in computer science and took a handful of psychology and philosophy courses as an undergraduate. Dr Peterson teaches a course based on this text that only has a couple of second year psych courses as prerequisites, so I figured I should be well-prepared to study, and understand, the book's contents.
Things were slow-going from the start. There were repeated instances where the text could have said something simply, or at least with more clarity, but instead chose to obfuscate. Try this passage on for size (from page 13): "Active apprehension of the goal of behavior, conceptualized in relationship to the interpreted present, serves to constrain or provide determinate framework for the evaluation of ongoing events, which emerge as a consequence of current behavior." Now imagine 400+ pages in this style.
But I soldiered on. I took my time and tried to understand the details Dr. Peterson was presenting. In fact, there were parts of the book that I found genuinely fascinating and well-written. Unfortunately, these parts were overshadowed by a slowly growing feeling that I was having the wool pulled over my eyes.
It was when I reached the middle of the book that this feeling fully crystallized. On page 235, Dr Peterson writes: "A moral system -- a system of culture -- necessarily shares features in common with other systems. The most fundamental of the shared features of systems was identified by Kurt Godel. Godel's Incompleteness Theorem demonstrated that any internally consistent and logical system of propositions must necessarily be predicated upon assumptions that cannot be proved from within the confines of that system."
