On the Ideas of Jordan Peterson
A Book Review of “Myth, Meaning, and Antifragile Individualism”
I’ve encountered Jordan Peterson back in 2016, with the whole C-16 polemic. I started getting into his material, and I found him tremendously insightful. Ended up watching all lectures available at the time and reading Maps of Meaning. My JBP streak ended a year later or so. In part because there was nothing new I could get from him and he was just repeating himself. Not that this is bad, just a consequence of studying someone in depth. In addition, I found many other thinkers that dealt with the topics that he did (and in a more detailed form), and navigated towards that instead. Lastly, I hated that he got associated with the whole self-help movement and politics.
But despite not reading or watching anything about him, I couldn’t stop seeing stuff about him in one way or another, usually with news or attack pieces. And that always left a bitter taste in my mouth, because even though he was all over the place, his ideas were almost never discussed. It was always about either self-help or politics. And that’s a shame, because what I valued so much about him, his particular system of psychology, philosophy, and religion, was never addressed. This always made me want to write a book about his ideas so that people could learn and engage with them without all the drama. However, that would be a gigantic project that I was never able to justify spending time on.
Lo and behold, I found this book. Precisely what I had wanted to do ages, and ordered it immediately. It is written by Marc Champagne, with 2 different PhDs, one in the philosophy of mind and another in the philosophy of signs. The academic rigour is clear and makes me glad that I did not write the book.
It is divided into 2 parts. The first he calls “exposition” and deals with explaining Peterson’s ideas across 9 chapters, like facing ignorance, the phenomenological map of the known and the unknown, meaning, morality, personality, speech, and individualism. They are well written, and I was happy to see direct JBP quotes. I didn’t read this part very much. I already know his ideas and didn’t want to invest too much time on it. I mostly wanted to see if this was a good resource for his thought. Overall I think he made a fair characterization, although I felt it was pulled too hard towards individualism. I found that some important aspects of cognitive science and religion should have been better emphasized.
The second part is called “evaluation”, where he criticizes some of his ideas. This what I was interested in the most. First I immediately realized why religion was lacking in the first place, as the author didn’t seem too sympathetic towards it. Nevertheless, I did enjoy his criticism. I disagree with most of it, but I think in general they are well argued for. And most importantly, they are criticisms of his ideas, in a fair manner, and not to his popularity, politics, or anything else. This is what I was looking for, and I was glad to see it happen.
Overall it’s a very solid book. Both in the summary of his ideas and some criticisms towards it. I would have approached it differently in some ways, but that might just be my specific bias of course. If you want either a summary of Peterson’s thought or a fair take at his ideas, it’s worth buying. And I congratulate Champagne for writing this book which was more than necessary.
I have another article on Peterson you might be interested in:
https://tiagofaleiro.medium.com/a-leftist-critique-of-jordan-peterson-d27e60402b76
Thanks for reading. If you like non-fiction book reviews, feel free to follow me on Medium or subscribe to my Substack.
I also have a philosophy podcast. If you want to check it out look for Anagoge Podcast.
Tiago V.F.
