Bob wrote:Many cognitively non-equivalent and mutually irreducible conceptual schemes must be used to take account of the different levels of reality. The use of symbolic language in the traditions is one way of dealing with this and can only be understood within that concept. As soon as one interprets symbolic language with scientific concepts, it doesn’t make sense.
I think the inclusion of moral features, free will, normativity, consciousness, and intentional properties in a worldview is important enough not to exclude them. Just because science has difficulty in categorising them doesn’t mean they’re not important. Therefore the use of symbols, analogy, allegory, metaphors, and fable is warranted.
Here's how the meaning crisis and the symbolic world looked to Peterson circa 1999:
The great myths of Christianity--the great myths of the past in general--no longer speak to the majority of westerners, who regard themselves as. The mythic view of history cannot be credited with reality, from the material, empirical point of view. It is nonetheless the case that all of Western ethics, including those explicitly formalized in Western law, are predicated upon a mythological worldview, which specifically attributes Divine status to the individual. The modern individual is therefore in a unique position: he no longer believes that the principles upon which all his behaviors are predicated are valid. This might be considered a second fall, in that the destruction of the Western mythological barrier has re-exposed the essential tragedy of individual existence to view.
It is not the pursuit of empirical, that has wreaked havoc upon the Christian worldview. It is confusion of empirical fact with moral truth that has proved of great detriment to the latter. This has produced what might be described as a secondary gain, which has played an important role in maintaining the confusion. That gain is abdication of the absolute personal responsibility imposed in consequence of recognition of the Divine in man. This responsibility means acceptance of the trials and tribulations associated with expression of unique individuality, as well as respect for such expression in others. Such acceptance, expression and respect requires courage in the absence of certainty, and discipline in the smallest matters. Jordan B Peterson, Maps of Meaning, page 466.
His response was to mine the psychological and ethical meanings in traditional stories. Now he's getting support from symbolic world Orthodoxy and the non-reductive naturalist points of view. The symbolic picture I'm getting is of emergence from the physical world below [earth] under the emanation from the hierarchy of meaning above [heaven] with Man in the middle mediating the process via consciousness. Without consciousness the whole process is meaningless. And reductionism in the name of the scientific cosmology, freedom, equality or whatever, denies meaning to consciousness thus it leads to nihilism AKA the crisis of meaning.
