Is Jordan Peterson a Perennialist?

In the sense that the Traditionalists like Evola/Guenon were? Both seem to acknowledge the underlying truth found in all religious traditions. What would they think of one another and how do their beliefs differ?

Other urls found in this thread:

youtube.com/watch?v=QiCtdi5nCoA
rkpayne.wordpress.com/2017/02/19/huston-smith-one-more-time/
nytimes.com/1989/11/06/arts/after-death-a-writer-is-accused-of-anti-semitism.html
mystical-politics.blogspot.com/2006/11/mircea-eliades-fascism.html
web.archive.org/web/20140902011702/http://thompkins_cariou.tripod.com/id15.html
twitter.com/NSFWRedditVideo

He is familiar with the milieu that reads Guenon. He reads Jung, Eliade, Campbell. I wouldn't be surprised if he knew about the major esoteric circles. But I doubt he's an orthodox Trad, let alone of the Evola variety. If you've met them, you know they have all internalized a kind of monkish way of talking, and they have way too much focus on their fixed corpus.

Peterson is just tapped into the same '60s/'70s quack and esoterica-lite streams that happened to lead a lot of people to things like Guenon.

Also, it should be said that the university he teaches at is one of the major Traditionalist camps on the continent.

The same university which tries to fire him for not using 70+ gender-neutral pronouns?

He's also named dropped Eliade on some lesser publicized discussion, and favorably too

He's actually lectured on Eliade apparently, they're up on Google

But that's not such a big deal.

Welcome to UofT, where you're either a neo-Islamic cultist, a post-genderism cultist, a trust fund baby, a chinaman, or some combination of all of the above

Very interesting anons. I seem to be a Peterson Jr. without the neuroscience learnings. Sad.

Has anyone used his self-authorship program? I just bought a license and am gonna get started this weekend. Can't wait to uncover the layers of personality deadwood that I comprise of.

Yup it's very interesting and well worth doing.

God speed.

Peterson is much more read in Campbell and Jung than the Traditionalists. He attempts to provide an "evolutionary" explanation for symbols and other such related material i.e. religion, morality, et cetera. The Traditionalists heavily denounced Jung and his ilk for this very reason: they attempted to reduce, what the Traditionalists would call, symbols of a supra-individual order, to a mere bio-material substrate.

The differences consist primarily in symbolism and practice. As to the former, I have already said a few words. Jung claimed he was drawn to religious symbolism and myth because he noticed, in his eyes, a particular "affinity" with the drawings and musings of psychotic patients with the symbols of traditions. Further, he worked with Freud, the same Freud who flirted with the popular sociological "totemism" of his day and attempted to draw a connection between totemism and his own theories of the subconscious. Jung primarily criticized Freud for his narrowness vis-a-vis the potential scope of the subconscious and what it could mean in terms of symbolic consciousness. Here we can see quite directly what the trajectory is heading for: Jung thought we could rectify the psychotic by means of traditional practices; pathology must be concerned with some disorder of the elements whose only explanation must have come from a biological, ancestral influence. The biological substratum becomes "deified," a potential egg carrying collective symbols and meanings that are, in principal, "universal." Though, something often overlooked in his thought is the racial aspect (see some of his comments on Hitler for a good example.)

Thus was the justification for employing religious symbols and practices for disordered patients. They would also go on to employ pseudo-initiatic techniques, such as inducing trance and the like. They even supposed that dreams bore a verdurous forest full of divine symbols, a state where the seat of the senses is subject to all sorts of chaotic and infernal influences from the body. This fed a further criticism the Traditionalists would lavish against the psychoanalytics, in that they presuppose a psychologically weak person, whereas the initiatic doctrines presuppose a man of healthy mind, stable in being and firm in approaching the "elements." There's a reason the Alchemists referred to the point where exteriorization met interiorization i.e. Mercury, the seat of senses and imagination, as "volatile" and "combustible." Thus, there was a certain danger in evoking infernal forces, and this where precisely the psychoanalytic trajectory stays, that is, it never "rectifies" anything, but rather further wounds already psychologically weak individuals by engendering their descent.

This may help to accentuate some points of divergence. This isn't to say there wouldn't be any purpose in reading the psychoanalysts, but from the perspective of the Traditionalists, they "invert" the symbolism and practices of initiatic doctrines. This last point is what caused Rene Guenon to refer to them as "satanic," that is, forces of inversion. Regarding personal perspective, I think the modern "psychoanalysts" and perhaps the original ones to an extent, along the popular, New Age occultism and the like I would couple with them, I think appeal to the idea of a biological substratum in order to add some "validity" to their ideas. That is, we live in an age where you can, effectively, believe what you want as long as it meets a few conditions, namely, "scientific" and humanist. Of course, the Traditionalists didn't care much at all for appeasing the popular academic discussion, and probably would have ripped the entire epistemological project of the Enlightenment out of history if they could have.

Jordan Pseuderson

>He attempts to provide an "evolutionary" explanation for symbols and other such related material i.e. religion, morality, et cetera. The Traditionalists heavily denounced Jung and his ilk for this very reason: they attempted to reduce, what the Traditionalists would call, symbols of a supra-individual order, to a mere bio-material substrate.
I think that Peterson believes more, but only speaks out this bare minimum. I can't speak for the man, however. Jungian philosophy does reduce things and is rightfully criticized for it. However, I have encountered something important relating to religious truth. Fractals.
Multilayered, identical, evolving, permanent patterns.

Thank you user

i am former trad, and i endorse this copypasta or whatever it is

i stopped being trad when i finally read the Upanishads and realized that there is no possible overlap with christianity there.

that being said, I encourage everyone to pay attention to this post and the difference between psychologism and Guenon who critiqued it in "reign of quantity." freudianism/jungianism is a TRAP.

read premodern shit. go after wherever you think the truth might be hiding... and ignore the pseuds on Veeky Forums

i have not read peterson, but that sort of "bare minimum" thinking is typical of careerists. Mircea Eliade is a good example, he kind of wanted to be trad but knew it wouldn't work in the academy, so he inverted his true inclinations and turned them into new age hogwash, even in his own head.

He speaks like a perennialist sometimes, but he still considers the Logos the most important thing in life, which means he considers himself planted squarely in Christianity in some idiosyncratic sense.

In many ways he's like a individualist Christian like Kierkegaard, heavy on the individualism.

...

a lot of people who have career positions in the humanities are suspicious of methodological naturalism but are scared of speaking out against it openly, not for their jobs necessarily, but because they want to get cited without being called a kook.

don't think you can learn praxis or virtue from those vain ass motherfuckers. high school teachers are regularly wiser and more ethical

Bear in mind that Campbell, Eliade and Huston Smith were once the darlings of the religiously (or "spiritual") academe, until shock horror! revelations of anti-semitism (Campbell), fascism (Eliade and confusionism (Smith) struck.

Little wonder JP would be familiar with their work.

Revelations or accusations?

accusations is probably more accurate. it's not like any of them were secret nazis.

zomggggg eliade wrote something during WW2 praising a Romanian fascist group, and regretted it in retrospect

sorry eliade, you were just too early :(

>you know they have all internalized a kind of monkish way of talking
evola is goofy af
youtube.com/watch?v=QiCtdi5nCoA

In what way? This was an amazing interview.

Yeah but talks like his post in real life.

Traditionalism is a cult. The Sufi wannabe ones are insane.

nope.

Campbell was documented as saying bad things about jews and nogs.

Eliade was in the Iron Guard (as opposed to just writing about it) and never reneged his Captain, my Captain (Codreanu).
Smith, you can see online.

Give some sources to those things then. I'm interested.

His general mannerisms aren't exactly what one would expect from a traditionalist super-fascist aristocrat who has a history in dadaism.

I don't know if it is a good interview or not: the subtitles are so horrible that I haven't watched it completely.

the big bad internet teems with sources. have a gawk around and don't be pestering us for sources on Veeky Forums of all places. wild accusations fly like migrating geese round these parts, that's where all the fun lies.

joking aside, i'm not joking. Eliade did try to cover his ass at one point by claiming that Evola was an authentic fascist (untrue) but that has more to do with counter-attacking claims of plagiarism and so on.

Huston Smith: see here: rkpayne.wordpress.com/2017/02/19/huston-smith-one-more-time/
Joseph Campbell: nytimes.com/1989/11/06/arts/after-death-a-writer-is-accused-of-anti-semitism.html
Eliade: mystical-politics.blogspot.com/2006/11/mircea-eliades-fascism.html
OK, it just says "supported the IG" but I heard elsewhere he was actually in it. dig into it.

i bet the details will come up if you google eliade + russell mccutcheon

it's still stupid blame game accusations and not a real "revelation." eliade was essentially a jungian poet, not a military general

personally I find his work all the more elevated *because* of this association, and not despite it.
But maybe that's just little nazi me.

If he wasn't part of it, he was a close associate. He and Evola even meet each other when Evola went to Romania to meet Codreanu.

That article on Campbell doesn't really show anything; it just says that one person who knew him claimed he joked that Jews belonged on the moon, another claimed that he was concerned about black people being admitted to Sarah Lawrence, and another who calls him a cryptofascist who "tended to lump people". It more sounds like the guy who raised these claims up, Brendan Gill, was buttblasted about Joseph Campbell becoming famous. There's even the bizarre claim at the end that his "follow your bliss" ethos is just a Reaganite justification for greed.

Don't you speak French, pleb?

Sometimes it's hard to differentiate between actual legitimate criticism of people, and materialists being asspained someone dare bringing up religion as a serious topic of discussion.

Why exactly was Codreanu so well-regarded by Evola? The Legion was in many ways antithetical to Evolean philosophy.

>''He wasn't my enemy when he was an obscure person full of eccentric notions,'' Mr. Gill said in a telephone interview the other day. In The New York Review of Books, Mr. Gill describes discussions with Campbell at the Century Association club in Manhattan during which, despite disagreements on many questions, they remained friends.

>''But,'' Mr. Gill continued, explaining his decision to publish his anti-Campbell essay, ''when he became a conspicuous public figure and got a response of millions of people, then I had to take up arms against him.''

This passage really set the tone of the article for me. Gill is whining that someone considers spirituality a worthy topic of investigation and that people are paying attention to him for it. And he leaves out a key part of this: he is brining all this up right after Campbell died, so that he is unable to defend himself.

So I struggle to see how it's a traditionalist camp

see his articles on same, e.g. here: web.archive.org/web/20140902011702/http://thompkins_cariou.tripod.com/id15.html

It would explain why Peterson is such a pseud.

Really says a lot about someone when they publicly shit on someone who can no longer defend themselves, indeed.

How is a psychologist with over a thousand research citations a pseud?

Not wasting your time exposing a nobody is good advice. The only time it is worth exposing such a person is when they become a meme like Campbell did. Not that Gill isn't a coward for waiting until after he died but it's not as outlandish as you make it seem. Certainly it's information worth noting and not at all difficult to believe.

top kek

Great answer, pseud.

>Not wasting your time exposing a nobody is good advice.

I generally agree with you, and I'm not saying that Campbell and his ideas shouldn't be subject to scrutiny, especially when he is famous. But criticizing or "exposing" someone shouldn't be done through gossip about what he may or may not have said, which is what these accusations amount to; and it is particularly unusual to use gossip as criticism right after the person has died because, as you said, it's cowardly and the deceased is unable to reply to it.