Jordan Peterson, as the Failure to Think

[Guide]

This obstruction to thought is becoming daily more powerful. Humming louder; more ready to sting and tender its life for the collective cause.

The collectivist Peterson states that we all should, in order to benefit the collective, view each other as "essentially" individual. Is this a collective demand to how each one should think itself? What could be more "low resolution" than the demand that each one take the same view in order to do what is best for all? Namely, to think themselves as essentially "individual" for the sake of the collective?

Peterson, driving his ego into self annihilation, might now pick himself up and learn thought. Ergo, he might remember what is properly worthy in his inner teaching.

One detests and is done with the simple issues at once, we all can think them no further. They are absurd, their simplicity is beneath one. They must be a trick. Only the philosopher sees such difficulties for what they are. Philosophers are very rare beings, their kind is seldom seen on the earth. If novelty of the condition of being is sought, it is not to be sought among the mediocre mob of collective individuals, but at the fined and refined pinnacle of time's most free output.

--

Peterson's mistake, we should notice, is based partly on a more trivial (a mere matter of erudition and scholarship), though radical and hugely misleading for him, ignorance of the (empirical theoretical) meaning of individual in the political theory of the 18th century.

[Prismatic567]

Note:

Jordan Peterson: Atheists Are Murderers - Debunked
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmrpiCsuv6w

[Guide]

Initial notes, subject to revue upon intelligent (non-contumelious) challenge:

This discussion is verbal, no substantive knowledge: based on radical ignorance of the subject matter. I don't see anything in what these so-called atheists are professing to believe beside from that they don't like the mere word God. It's clear none of them have ever studied the monotheistic tradition, which is entirely a rationalistic and scientific tradition and most of all Aristotelian, even with Maimonides.

Belief in rationality and belief in the Catholic God means substantively the same thing. That's the Catholic determination of God, "rationality" as positive law, e.g., "potentia ordinata". The Catholics understand the heart, emotion, to lead to the rational, but one must be supranational to be moved to live practically according to reason. That is, the lacuna between knowing and being comes in in Catholic thought, as it did not with Socrates.

So far as one wants to pass off the move from a seriously considered ethics, to a utilitarianism, "most good for the greatest number", as atheism, one is clueless about one's belief in god/rationality (taken as a technical term of the rational Catholic system).

Nihilism, on the other hand, is neither rational nor the reverse. It takes no yard stick but ad hoc interpretation of the phenomena. One could, however, speak here, like someone pick-pocketed within the din of a crowd where every touch is the same, of a nihilistic god, rather than a good god. Since, the highest determination of the rational investigation would be the truth of the nihilism as understood.

[surreptitious75]

Its clear none of them have ever studied the monotheistic tradition which is entirely a rationalistic and scientific tradition

Many atheists originally came from the monotheistic tradition of specific belief systems which are not entirely rationalistic and scientific
This is because science only deals in observable phenomena and therefore has nothing at all to say about belief which is beyond its scope

[Guide]

Guide wrote:

Its clear none of them have ever studied the monotheistic tradition which is entirely a rationalistic and scientific tradition

Many atheists originally came from the monotheistic tradition of specific belief systems which are not entirely rationalistic and scientific
This is because science only deals in observable phenomena and therefore has nothing at all to say about belief which is beyond its scope

Don't you find it suspicious that the currently most powerful orthodoxy was established before your birth, and you grew into it while still unable to think for yourself? This is not an account of "science", it is technology. I.e., the blind production of "facts", as secured information, which await agendas or values. However, in reality, the values are never separable from the things. They just cease to be the principle theme of research.

There is nothing rational about upholding an unthinking prejudice about what counts as "observable" and what doesn't.

[surreptitious75]

Values are subjective and things are objective so they can be separated even though they may have a common point of reference
The simple act of observing something is not one of prejudice unless you define prejudice as any type of subjective interpretation

[Bob]

One detests and is done with the simple issues at once, we all can think them no further. They are absurd, their simplicity is beneath one. They must be a trick. Only the philosopher sees such difficulties for what they are. Philosophers are very rare beings, their kind is seldom seen on the earth. If novelty of the condition of being is sought, it is not to be sought among the mediocre mob of collective individuals, but at the fined and refined pinnacle of time's most free output.

I was struck by this as being a statement that assumes that we are all our own makers, as though we did not thoroughly profit from the struggles of previous generations throughout millennia. If Philosophers are so rare, why not value the work of those who have gone before, and not assume that the simple issues have to be sorted by each and every one of us, and are therefore not absurd or “below us”? There seems to be an arrogance about these days that is hard to understand, except in assuming that those people who are arrogant are ignorant of basic truths. They are steeped in many theories but either shy away from the lessons that reality teaches us or they cling to the most fashionable “ism” around at the time.

Perhaps it is because I have a very complex psychology that I think that the task of socialisation is such a struggle, and finding the right path so confusing. It took me decades to understand myself fully and only then are we really in the position to understand history and the development of philosophy throughout the thousands of years we have been developing. If I take this personal experience and assume that I am not so very different from other people, then the ups and downs of history are understandable, but also the horrific suffering that people have gone through before we came to be. The human rights that we have become accustomed to having been cut out of a bloody history, and acclaimed although they still remain utopian for many people.

There has been a variety of criticism of Jordan Peterson, most of which I fail to agree with because it misses the mark. I am by no means someone who would defend Peterson at every occasion because there are things he says that I disagree with. However, coming from a parallel development, discovering Jung late in life, having a Christian background but being disappointed with the church, and discovering suffering very close up through my vocation as a geriatric nurse, I must agree with Peterson on his starting point: Life is suffering. From there, we can develop different ideas about how to cope with that, indeed to combat suffering, as many in the past have already done, but we tend to find similarities despite cultural differences, which is what Jung and now Peterson have picked up on.

My criticism of Peterson isn’t that he is wrong, but that he fails to find an integral approach to history. The developments of the past, in history, but also our own developments, have aspects towards which we may now find animosity, but they are a part of our development and not all wrong. Some things we do because it is the lesser of two evils; sometimes we have been struggling to survive, and therefore unable to find the higher ground that we assume ourselves to be on today. I know that I have had many occasion to be frustrated at the path I took, but benevolent onlookers have appeased me by telling me that they didn’t see anything bad about what I did, it is just that today I would do something different.

I find that Peterson has laid down a worthy psychological description of what value mythology has in our lives, and has had throughout time. His 12 Rules are in a way just an excerpt from the bigger work Maps of Meaning, which is worth a read, even though it is pretty large. His Youtube videos can give further insight. I just can’t accept that people who have not yet achieved anything similar should ridicule 15 years of intense study and thirty years of clinical experience.

[Guide]

"Values are subjective and things are objective so they can be separated even though they may have a common point of reference
The simple act of observing something is not one of prejudice unless you define prejudice as any type of subjective interpretation"

This is a theory worked out over thousands of years. That's what we all have to see before we can approach it seriously. Georg Simmel first introduced the modern distinction around the year 1900 into the German universities.

Once we take it up that way we are suspect of formula that produce easy synonyms, or insufficiently elucidating circularity. "Values are subjective", for instance, is a closed dogmatic or authoritative definition which posits a difficulty.

If we learn these things when very young, and docile, we hardly notice it. Later we take it as if it were our own thought.

Thinking of it that way, now one must be more serious with the question about observation. What counts as observation is a matter of the rigor of this or that discipline. It involves authritative standards concerning what counts as a good observation. In the fundamental science, physics, this is a matter of quantification by an apparatus rather than a description in common sense terms.

Huge and vast difficulties open up the more one seriously survey and scrutinize the difficulties.

I repeat what I have written elsewhere: What we now call science is a part of philosophy or science (the two being names for the same thing as laid down already by Aristotle more than two thousand years ago) that is predominant in the contemporaneous period, now when we live. What we now call "philosophy" is held as useless because if one is already playing a game with rules, talking about what lies outside the rules is de facto of no serious interest.

[Guide]

“I was struck by this as being a statement that assumes that we are all our own makers, as though we did not thoroughly profit from the struggles of previous generations throughout millennia.”

I understood this to mean something quite different. Closer to the reverse of your interpretation. We, we ourselves, I presuppose, are historial, and thus the historial ones alone can know what it is to have a history because we are that history. This is what makes the thesis that we can’t treat the simple straightforwardly as do most people make sense. We can’t act as though history were not part of us, a "nature" or preexistence, and therefore naively assume that it is wholly sound as a foundation for knowledge.



“ Life is suffering.”

So: Leiden leiden, Kreuz Kreuz. (Suffering suffering, the cross the cross.) ― Martin Luther

Then, in the “secular” form: “Suffering is real, happiness is a dream.” Volitare

One interprets one's experience (or, experiences properly by explaining to oneself what is happening rather than simple sensing or empirical happening) as a western, now planetary, human. The real meaning of Jung’s observations of the western God, or what he calls the phylogenetic unconscious, must not be thought as mythology (if that is some sort of "story"), but as ourselves as living our history.

My criticism of Peterson, who may become philosopher, one never knows, here, has to do with a specific defect of his account. The modern transformation was from a duty-bound individual, to a right-bearing individual. His notion of collective movements is misleading. The American and French Revolutions, still in effect in many ways, are as much collective movements as the Nazi or Bolshevik revolutions. All of these concern individuals or citizens.

[Bob]

I understood this to mean something quite different. Closer to the reverse of your interpretation. We, we ourselves, I presuppose, are historial, and thus the historial ones alone can know what it is to have a history because we are that history. This is what makes the thesis that we can’t treat the simple straightforwardly as do most people make sense. We can’t act as though history were not part of us, a "nature" or preexistence, and therefore naively assume that it is wholly sound as a foundation for knowledge.

After checking the dictionary, the word “historial” must be a “Wortschöpfung” of yours. You probably mean that we have a knowledge of history, base our knowledge on that of historical examples and are indeed making history all the time. However, the simple must at some time in our lives be treated straightforwardly, even if we derive the answers to simple questions from the experience of others. The very simple experiences in life have to be made personally, or we lack the learning incentive. It isn’t as though we are born and grow up in a box.

“ Life is suffering.”

So: Leiden leiden, Kreuz Kreuz. (Suffering suffering, the cross the cross.) ― Martin Luther

Then, in the “secular” form: “Suffering is real, happiness is a dream.” Volitare

One interprets one's experience (or, experiences properly by explaining to oneself what is happening rather than simple sensing or empirical happening) as a western, now planetary, human. The real meaning of Jung’s observations of the western God, or what he calls the phylogenetic unconscious, must not be thought as mythology (if that is some sort of "story"), but as ourselves as living our history.

We interpret everything by our values or what meaning we give our life. This we generally derive from the stories we are told, those we witness unfolding and those we tell ourselves. The strange thing about such stories, if they are of any value to anyone but ourselves is, that they often have archetypal figures in them which we have in common with other human beings. The collective unconscious is assumed to be phylogenetic but archetypes are embedded in stories all the same. In being meaningful fiction, they are mythologies that resonate with people over centuries.

My criticism of Peterson, who may become philosopher, one never knows, here, has to do with a specific defect of his account. The modern transformation was from a duty-bound individual, to a right-bearing individual. His notion of collective movements is misleading. The American and French Revolutions, still in effect in many ways, are as much collective movements as the Nazi or Bolshevik revolutions. All of these concern individuals or citizens.

First of all, I’m not sure Peterson cares whether he is regarded as a philosopher or not.

Secondly, Peterson is trying to help people make sense of their lives after the ancient mythologies were thrown out by modernity, and post-modernity has started making its own deficient ideologies. These have been confusing to people, to say the least. The constructivist view that all order is only a social construct, and can be treated with contempt goes one step further to complete that confusion. I see Peterson as making the mistake of failing to accept the failings of postmodernity as a necessary evolutional step, which goes hand in hand with overcoming the fanatical rationalism of modernity.

All collective movements that are based on a radical ideology will make the same mistakes, as he often demonstrates to people. His argument for Christianity is that it is the foundation of western society, and attempting to rip a foundation from beneath a hugely complex society such as ours can only lead to the kind of horrific result that we have witnessed in Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and Communist China. He sees the problems in both extremes, in both fascism and Marxism, it is just that the line we must not cross is clear in fascism, but not in Marxism.

[Guide]

“After checking the dictionary, the word “historial” must be a “Wortschöpfung” of yours.”

No. Avital Ronnell and Corbin, &c. al., use this to stand for “Seynsgeshichtliche”, the history or fate of being, in the ergon with the title Heidegger. However, it is not unhelpful to treat the word afresh as a new coinage because we are, here, modifying it as we speak and thinking under the labour of its subject matter. As an interpretation it has many expressions of more or less minute nuance according to the thinker.

“ It isn’t as though we are born and grow up in a box.”

We do in a decisive respect. The box (or, better, the book) of our age out of which, looking back, all the dominating idiosyncrasies of primary substances “individuals” in the Aristotelian sense of “this one” the one we point to, rather than experience as a characteristic person or particular human, belongs to an age. The Meiji, the Hellenistic Judaism of the first Rabbis, the time of the Borgias or of the modern feminism where juridical homosexuality comes into being. Each have a belonging which is not available from outside, this is, also, in keeping with the principles of Anthropology since Boas; ergo, “participatory observation” as the belonging which transforms one into the collective character of being so far as is possible.

In a certain sense, what you name, is the meaning of the old outlook which held only God can see the intense loneliness of the inner self, for it has no representation from without and even to our nearest friends and most dear and close to hand.

“We interpret everything by our values or what meaning we give our life.”

I don’t accept this formula. There is nothing that is not thought, and therefore all is “meaning”, i.e., it is understood. A theory of values is always misleading, because it has nothing to distinguish itself from. Nouns are already (collective, characteristic) agendas (e.g., the rat for the Chinese, for the Westerner). That is what we are speaking of here, in the history of being. The fullness of being. not some “meaning” as distinguished from a theory about something else. The whole. The final end is what such-like as Nietzsche speak against, e.g., that the world is an apple that can be nurtured to perfection or ripeness (ergo, nihilism in the sense of no teleology doesn't deny collective meaning, which would make no sense).

“The constructivist view that all order is only a social construct, and can be treated with contempt goes one step further to complete that confusion.”

This is a misunderstanding of the issue. The idea of the social, as opposed to the natural or the artificial is distinctly Greek. It’s empirically so. This goes deeper in that, for instance, even the notion of being is not coeval with human beings (cf. Leo Strauss), a word for this had to be invented by the medieval Rabbis, for instance.

The simpler issue is this. When something seems possible, it seems unjust that it is not done. And the rapidity of change in our time makes any judgment concerning what is and is not possible monstrously difficult. Think of Aubrey de Grey. Beside from myself, no one has noticed how violently this shakes the tradition, based on the certainty of death, into a blurred image in contemporaneity.

Obviously Christianity is a “collective” movement that led to more harm than the short lived failed regimes named (the good of which was not allowed to mature at length). His views, and what you write, are not credible. He should drop the notion of the collective if what he wants to speak about is dangerous experiment. It’s childish though, since European science is most manifestly the greatest danger to all life on the earth and the most comprehensive collective identity movement on the planet controlling the education of the young. (Cf. my “abiotic Mirror” thread., which speaks very importantly to this).

[Bob]

“After checking the dictionary, the word “historial” must be a “Wortschöpfung” of yours.”

No. Avital Ronnell and Corbin, &c. al., use this to stand for “Seynsgeshichtliche”, the history or fate of being, in the ergon with the title Heidegger. However, it is not unhelpful to treat the word afresh as a new coinage because we are, here, modifying it as we speak and thinking under the labour of its subject matter. As an interpretation it has many expressions of more or less minute nuance according to the thinker. [/quote]
Okay, found it: “The French philosopher Henry Corbin used the neologism historial in order to translate the meaning of Heidegger’s expression Seynsgeshichtliche (“onto-historical”) into French.”

“ It isn’t as though we are born and grow up in a box.”

We do in a decisive respect. The box (or, better, the book) of our age out of which, looking back, all the dominating idiosyncrasies of primary substances “individuals” in the Aristotelian sense of “this one” the one we point to, rather than experience as a characteristic person or particular human, belongs to an age. The Meiji, the Hellenistic Judaism of the first Rabbis, the time of the Borgias or of the modern feminism where juridical homosexuality comes into being. Each have a belonging which is not available from outside, this is, also, in keeping with the principles of Anthropology since Boas; ergo, “participatory observation” as the belonging which transforms one into the collective character of being so far as is possible.

So you’re saying that there are dominating idiosyncrasies that are particular to an age, whether or not they are present in particular people. However, that doesn’t really address my point, which was that individuals must at some time in their lives treat the simple straightforwardly, even if we derive the answers to simple questions from the experience of others. The very simple experiences in life have to be made personally, or we lack the learning incentive. I think sometimes that aspiring philosophers forget that they are biological beings that have to pee sometimes, in a metaphorical sense.

In a certain sense, what you name, is the meaning of the old outlook which held only God can see the intense loneliness of the inner self, for it has no representation from without and even to our nearest friends and most dear and close to hand.

Suffering, as far as I can make out, is universal. This has the advantage of being something that everyone can identify with, given the right example for a particular life and time. The collective unconscious seems to reflect this in the contribution to tragic mythologies over time, which seem to have a universal application.

“We interpret everything by our values or what meaning we give our life.”

I don’t accept this formula. There is nothing that is not thought, and therefore all is “meaning”, i.e., it is understood. A theory of values is always misleading because it has nothing to distinguish itself from. [/quote]
Again, this is down to basic survival. However, the brain thinks, the body is attuned to survival mechanisms and can override at times. Ask those suffering from psychosomatic illnesses. Finding meaning in life may be a social construction, but it is based on these basic instincts of survival and becomes more complex depending on the degree of satisfaction of human needs.

Nouns are already (collective, characteristic) agendas (e.g., the rat for the Chinese, for the Westerner). That is what we are speaking of here, in the history of being. The fullness of being. not some “meaning” as distinguished from a theory about something else. The whole.

Okay, but if you want the whole, you have also to account for the simple aspect of survival, or at least the protection of conditions that guarantee survival to a certain degree. I have always been someone who has called for non-violence even though I have a violent temper. Of course, I have to contain that temper within the values I want to uphold. However, I am witnessing generations growing up with no sense for danger. They try to wipe it out of their minds – a kind of Huxelian “Brave New World” is forming. I feel like I am the “savage” speaking out against the “clones of postmodernity”. It is the mythology of the traditions that feed us stories that can get us out of this lethargy, and make us wary for the dangers that our times still pose for us.

The final end is what such-like as Nietzsche speak against, e.g., that the world is an apple that can be nurtured to perfection or ripeness (ergo, nihilism in the sense of no teleology doesn't deny collective meaning, which would make no sense).

I read Nietzsche as a prophet against the developments of his age and, of course, Peterson says he was very right and points to the terrible wars and atrocities of the twentieth century as examples of that. There is a similarity to be seen in Europe before WWI and today. It also had a short revival in the 1920s, just before Hitler arose. The German elite didn’t take him seriously and couldn’t imagine the people wanting another war. In Russia, where the revolution was thought to free people, it turned on them tragically and brutally. The idea of “perfection” is a dangerous imagination. “There is no being, just becoming” I have heard. I believe it to be right.

“The constructivist view that all order is only a social construct, and can be treated with contempt goes one step further to complete that confusion.”

This is a misunderstanding of the issue. […] The simpler issue is this. When something seems possible, it seems unjust that it is not done. And the rapidity of change in our time makes any judgment concerning what is and is not possible monstrously difficult. Think of Aubrey de Grey. Beside from myself, no one has noticed how violently this shakes the tradition, based on the certainty of death, into a blurred image in contemporaneity.

I’m not sure what you are getting at here, Aubrey de Grey was pro-science, as I am too. However, there is a limit to what science can give us as a guide for life. Confusion is the last step towards chaos, where anything is possible and nothing is possible. The constructivist views are pushing society away from clarity and towards chaos. The gender issue is typical of this. Science (biology), for example, cannot cope with sex being equated with a new understanding of gender. There are biological differences between the two sexes, as well as those people born with both sexual organs. That means there are, biologically, four different sexes. However, hermaphrodites have the chance to choose their sex, if they are fortunate enough not to have had the decision made for them by doctors at birth.
The constructivists have come up with 71 differing personal pronouns and in Canada, people are being forced by law to use them. This is just one example of the chaos that is being caused.

Obviously Christianity is a “collective” movement that led to more harm than the short lived failed regimes named (the good of which was not allowed to mature at length). His views, and what you write, are not credible. He should drop the notion of the collective if what he wants to speak about is dangerous experiment. It’s childish though, since European science is most manifestly the greatest danger to all life on the earth and the most comprehensive collective identity movement on the planet controlling the education of the young. (Cf. my “abiotic Mirror” thread., which speaks very importantly to this).

Christianity is the basis of our society and helped the modernists to make rationality the basis of finding the truth. Modernity may have turned on Christianity since then, and we have the abomination of the consequences of celibacy (a relatively new and non-biblical tradition), but the majority of harm done in the name of Christianity was by making it into an ideology, rather than a religion. Peterson went to the trouble of explaining this in his lectures. The narrative of the Bible, which is incredibly viable, despite having numerous sources and idea of the metaphysical God is a safeguard against such harm, as much as it can be. That means that those doing the harm actually turned away from their own confession. They betrayed their belief for an ideology.

[Bob]

“After checking the dictionary, the word “historial” must be a “Wortschöpfung” of yours.”

No. Avital Ronnell and Corbin, &c. al., use this to stand for “Seynsgeshichtliche”, the history or fate of being, in the ergon with the title Heidegger. However, it is not unhelpful to treat the word afresh as a new coinage because we are, here, modifying it as we speak and thinking under the labour of its subject matter. As an interpretation it has many expressions of more or less minute nuance according to the thinker.

Okay, found it: “The French philosopher Henry Corbin used the neologism historial in order to translate the meaning of Heidegger’s expression Seynsgeshichtliche (“onto-historical”) into French.”

“ It isn’t as though we are born and grow up in a box.”

We do in a decisive respect. The box (or, better, the book) of our age out of which, looking back, all the dominating idiosyncrasies of primary substances “individuals” in the Aristotelian sense of “this one” the one we point to, rather than experience as a characteristic person or particular human, belongs to an age. The Meiji, the Hellenistic Judaism of the first Rabbis, the time of the Borgias or of the modern feminism where juridical homosexuality comes into being. Each have a belonging which is not available from outside, this is, also, in keeping with the principles of Anthropology since Boas; ergo, “participatory observation” as the belonging which transforms one into the collective character of being so far as is possible.

So you’re saying that there are dominating idiosyncrasies that are particular to an age, whether or not they are present in particular people. However, that doesn’t really address my point, which was that individuals must at some time in their lives treat the simple straightforwardly, even if we derive the answers to simple questions from the experience of others. The very simple experiences in life have to be made personally, or we lack the learning incentive. I think sometimes that aspiring philosophers forget that they are biological beings that have to pee sometimes, in a metaphorical sense.

In a certain sense, what you name, is the meaning of the old outlook which held only God can see the intense loneliness of the inner self, for it has no representation from without and even to our nearest friends and most dear and close to hand.

Suffering, as far as I can make out, is universal. This has the advantage of being something that everyone can identify with, given the right example for a particular life and time. The collective unconscious seems to reflect this in the contribution to tragic mythologies over time, which seem to have a universal application.

“We interpret everything by our values or what meaning we give our life.”

I don’t accept this formula. There is nothing that is not thought, and therefore all is “meaning”, i.e., it is understood. A theory of values is always misleading because it has nothing to distinguish itself from.

Again, this is down to basic survival. However, the brain thinks, the body is attuned to survival mechanisms and can override at times. Ask those suffering from psychosomatic illnesses. Finding meaning in life may be a social construction, but it is based on these basic instincts of survival and becomes more complex depending on the degree of satisfaction of human needs.

Nouns are already (collective, characteristic) agendas (e.g., the rat for the Chinese, for the Westerner). That is what we are speaking of here, in the history of being. The fullness of being. not some “meaning” as distinguished from a theory about something else. The whole.

Okay, but if you want the whole, you have also to account for the simple aspect of survival, or at least the protection of conditions that guarantee survival to a certain degree. I have always been someone who has called for non-violence even though I have a violent temper. Of course, I have to contain that temper within the values I want to uphold. However, I am witnessing generations growing up with no sense for danger. They try to wipe it out of their minds – a kind of Huxelian “Brave New World” is forming. I feel like I am the “savage” speaking out against the “clones of postmodernity”. It is the mythology of the traditions that feed us stories that can get us out of this lethargy, and make us wary for the dangers that our times still pose for us.

The final end is what such-like as Nietzsche speak against, e.g., that the world is an apple that can be nurtured to perfection or ripeness (ergo, nihilism in the sense of no teleology doesn't deny collective meaning, which would make no sense).

I read Nietzsche as a prophet against the developments of his age and, of course, Peterson says he was very right and points to the terrible wars and atrocities of the twentieth century as examples of that. There is a similarity to be seen in Europe before WWI and today. It also had a short revival in the 1920s, just before Hitler arose. The German elite didn’t take him seriously and couldn’t imagine the people wanting another war. In Russia, where the revolution was thought to free people, it turned on them tragically and brutally. The idea of “perfection” is a dangerous imagination. “There is no being, just becoming” I have heard. I believe it to be right.

“The constructivist view that all order is only a social construct, and can be treated with contempt goes one step further to complete that confusion.”

This is a misunderstanding of the issue. […] The simpler issue is this. When something seems possible, it seems unjust that it is not done. And the rapidity of change in our time makes any judgment concerning what is and is not possible monstrously difficult. Think of Aubrey de Grey. Beside from myself, no one has noticed how violently this shakes the tradition, based on the certainty of death, into a blurred image in contemporaneity.

I’m not sure what you are getting at here, Aubrey de Grey was pro-science, as I am too. However, there is a limit to what science can give us as a guide for life. Confusion is the last step towards chaos, where anything is possible and nothing is possible. The constructivist views are pushing society away from clarity and towards chaos. The gender issue is typical of this. Science (biology), for example, cannot cope with sex being equated with a new understanding of gender. There are biological differences between the two sexes, as well as those people born with both sexual organs. That means there are, biologically, four different sexes. However, hermaphrodites have the chance to choose their sex, if they are fortunate enough not to have had the decision made for them by doctors at birth.
The constructivists have come up with 71 differing personal pronouns and in Canada, people are being forced by law to use them. This is just one example of the chaos that is being caused.

Obviously Christianity is a “collective” movement that led to more harm than the short lived failed regimes named (the good of which was not allowed to mature at length). His views, and what you write, are not credible. He should drop the notion of the collective if what he wants to speak about is dangerous experiment. It’s childish though, since European science is most manifestly the greatest danger to all life on the earth and the most comprehensive collective identity movement on the planet controlling the education of the young. (Cf. my “abiotic Mirror” thread., which speaks very importantly to this).

Christianity is the basis of our society and helped the modernists to make rationality the basis of finding the truth. Modernity may have turned on Christianity since then, and we have the abomination of the consequences of celibacy (a relatively new and non-biblical tradition), but the majority of harm done in the name of Christianity was by making it into an ideology, rather than a religion. Peterson went to the trouble of explaining this in his lectures. The narrative of the Bible, which is incredibly viable, despite having numerous sources and idea of the metaphysical God is a safeguard against such harm, as much as it can be. That means that those doing the harm actually turned away from their own confession. They betrayed their belief for an ideology.

[Guide]

Dear wild bore, courageously absorbed in mad fury, at the spear tip of a silvery death, from a human,

“So you’re saying that there are dominating idiosyncrasies that are particular to an age, whether or not they are present in particular people. However, that doesn’t really address my point, which was that individuals must at some time in their lives treat the simple straightforwardly, even if we derive the answers to simple questions from the experience of others. The very simple experiences in life have to be made personally, or we lack the learning incentive. I think sometimes that aspiring philosophers forget that they are biological beings that have to pee sometimes, in a metaphorical sense.”

There is something wrong with a human that does not think. That has its basis in necessity. And is not a philisophic teaching. One must consult daily life. Now, if European science, the teaching of our youth, which we forget we have in our bones, is right, then thinking is a waste of time. One should simply do technological science with one’s whole heart and mind. Yet, we can not know that without stepping away from ourselves, so as to question whether our current way is the true perfection, the right piste leading towards, the zenith of all life on the earth.

You don’t consider that we all had many years of compulsory education. Such that we talk all the time in extreme abstractions without noticing it. Darwin, for example, was the first biologist in our sense. No other beings ever found such talk of “biological beings” readily intelligible. Men understood animals, since they lived near them. But, animals are simply brutes, born from a mother, they are not first thought as some abstracted region of existence like the biological as set alongside the region of mathematical physics, and the chemical region, and perhaps also the psychological or human region proper. The very idea of biology is the most extreme abstraction from daily life, it tacitly speaks of a region of being, and is by no means a simple or “personal” issue.

We grow into being human. You know, for example, Aristotle says, and one has surely had occasion to observe it, or even be aimed at by it, small children call every male “papa” or the like at first. The number and sort of things that are trained, that come over us, befall us as becoming beings, are incredible to sleepwalking humans who take their foundation for granted. The only way we genuinely can see this is by attempting to sense the play of the other ways of being.

“Suffering, as far as I can make out, is universal. This has the advantage of being something that everyone can identify with, given the right example for a particular life and time. The collective unconscious seems to reflect this in the contribution to tragic mythologies over time, which seem to have a universal application.”

It’s obvious the reverse is also true. So this is empty. This question was dealt with at length by Leopardi, Nietzsche, and then a whole generation when the west collapsed into nihilism after the failing of Kant denuded the deep foundation of the European, then Western, confidence in its own development. There is removal of pain, the highest name for that is the sublime, but there is also exalting and rejoicing in the grandeur of being. The highest name for that was, in the Christian age, beatitude. Do you really deny the existence of beauty? Beauty and the noble go together, kalon, it is what is worth our effort, and what in the expenditure of the effort fills us with the encouraging strength to expend more in further exertion.

“Again, this is down to basic survival. However, the brain thinks, the body is attuned to survival mechanisms and can override at times. Ask those suffering from psychosomatic illnesses. Finding meaning in life may be a social construction, but it is based on these basic instincts of survival and becomes more complex depending on the degree of satisfaction of human needs.”

I don’t accept all these wild theories and mad abstractions, “the brain thinks” and so forth. Life Is not experienced at such strange theoretical remove.

I eschew answering the rest of what you put down, since I think you are dogmatically, so to say, insistent in speaking in the terms of an abstract fantasy which excludes communication concerning direct reality as one finds it based on your answers so far. One lives, indeed, in such a “key idea” as is half present in the average way of speaking, but one can also see that it is vacant. That is when one thinks. You describe the “meaning” already when you write the story you here outline in all the fantastic array of bosh verbiage “the brain thinks” “survival mechanisms” “psychosomatic illness” “basic instincts”. Did anyone speak in such terms even one hundred years ago, will they in thirty thousand? There is your “meaning”, so, it's already in the appearance of anything for a human.

Something happens, then it becomes "experience" when we repeatedly catch it, when we explain it through some notion, and make a predication of the something. For instance, we call something "psychosomatic illness" and bring it into many spheres of thought and doing that were unavailable in form ages and places and won't be there in the future. Such things change, and, on occasion, are deliberately changed.

You conflate meaning with another question. That of a perfection of the essence of the human being in a teleology = in “happiness” or the discovered best way to live. That is like, we have an apple seed, now, what is the way to get the best fruit from it. I can't speak with you because you refuse to clarify terms, you speak from a kind of hypnotic trance which is your blinding promise for thoughtlessness.

"Okay, but if you want the whole, you have also to account for the simple aspect of survival, or at least the protection of conditions that guarantee survival to a certain degree."

This is talk about the whole. The whole is "simple". It can be found, here, there, and receding into we know not where, "the brain" is one theory about where the whole universe is, a bad, amazingly confused one. The whole might find a prediction: all things. In our age: all "facts"?

PS

You wrote quite a bit based on radical empirical ignorance. It would take decades to learn these things you opine falsely on properly.

[Bob]

Dear wild bore, courageously absorbed in mad fury, at the spear tip of a silvery death, from a human,

What a pleasant nature you have, especially considering you live in the clouds, way up in your ivory tower where you can look upon the Savages like me and even consider communicating with one.

There is something wrong with a human that does not think. That has its basis in necessity. And is not a philisophic teaching. One must consult daily life. Now, if European science, the teaching of our youth, which we forget we have in our bones, is right, then thinking is a waste of time. One should simply do technological science with one’s whole heart and mind. Yet, we can not know that without stepping away from ourselves, so as to question whether our current way is the true perfection, the right piste leading towards, the zenith of all life on the earth.

“Humans aren’t as good as we should be in our capacity to empathize with the thoughts and feelings of others, be they humans or other animals on Earth. So maybe part of our formal education should be training in empathy.” Neil deGrasse Tyson was right of course with this statement. As he went on to say, “Imagine how different the world would be...” Of course, when you are steeped in the history of Philosophy, it could be that this blocks your attempts to reach out. It could be that you lose contact and with that, the ability to empathize. I consider this to be a huge problem, and yes, there are enough people so wired up to social media that they can’t think, but there are a lot of people who are wired up to other people. They think a lot, but they act on that thinking interacting with people. They try too, to reach those who are on a different level of thinking, distant from their everyday lives. It would be presumptuous to think that these people are “non-thinkers”.

You don’t consider that we all had many years of compulsory education. Such that we talk all the time in extreme abstractions without noticing it. Darwin, for example, was the first biologist in our sense. No other beings ever found such talk of “biological beings” readily intelligible. Men understood animals, since they lived near them. But, animals are simply brutes, born from a mother, they are not first thought as some abstracted region of existence like the biological as set alongside the region of mathematical physics, and the chemical region, and perhaps also the psychological or human region proper. The very idea of biology is the most extreme abstraction from daily life, it tacitly speaks of a region of being, and is by no means a simple or “personal” issue.

We didn’t “come into” this world, we came out of it. We are nature, we are biology. That may be a new discovery in your view, but it was always a part of the collective unconscious, as many illustrative mythologies teach us. Therefore this “region of being” obviously has to be taken into account.

We grow into being human. You know, for example, Aristotle says, and one has surely had occasion to observe it, or even be aimed at by it, small children call every male “papa” or the like at first. The number and sort of things that are trained, that come over us, befall us as becoming beings, are incredible to sleepwalking humans who take their foundation for granted. The only way we genuinely can see this is by attempting to sense the play of the other ways of being.

Of course, we have been taught from an early age the wisdom of our heritage. How else would someone make their first steps in the world? However, the only way we see this clearly is, as far as I have experienced, is to quieten the endless monologue in our minds and be. To be free from thought inasmuch as we let it go, and do not latch on or cling to it. This allows us to see things for themselves and not as we have been taught to see them. The beginner's mind helps us overcome prejudice or preconceptions, but it doesn’t wipe the slate clean. Quite simply stated, by humility, we can rediscover the things we’ve been taught and reassess them.

“Suffering, as far as I can make out, is universal. This has the advantage of being something that everyone can identify with, given the right example for a particular life and time. The collective unconscious seems to reflect this in the contribution to tragic mythologies over time, which seem to have a universal application.”

It’s obvious the reverse is also true. So this is empty. This question was dealt with at length by Leopardi, Nietzsche, and then a whole generation when the west collapsed into nihilism after the failing of Kant denuded the deep foundation of the European, then Western, confidence in its own development. There is removal of pain, the highest name for that is the sublime, but there is also exalting and rejoicing in the grandeur of being. The highest name for that was, in the Christian age, beatitude. Do you really deny the existence of beauty? Beauty and the noble go together, kalon, it is what is worth our effort, and what in the expenditure of the effort fills us with the encouraging strength to expend more in further exertion.

“A click; the room was darkened; and suddenly, on the screen above the Master's head, there were the Penitentes of Acoma prostrating themselves before Our Lady, and wailing as John had heard them wail, confessing their sins before Jesus on the Cross, before the eagle image of Pookong. The young Etonians fairly shouted with laughter. Still wailing, the Penitentes rose to their feet, stripped off their upper garments and, with knotted whips, began to beat themselves, blow after blow. Redoubled, the laughter drowned even the amplified record of their groans.

"But why do they laugh?" asked the Savage in a pained bewilderment.

"Why?" The Provost turned towards him a still broadly grinning face. "Why? But because it's so extraordinarily funny." (Brave New World 11.54-6)

This “broadly grinning face” was around when the great catastrophes of the twentieth century took place and was there when the sexual revolution started and sounded the entrance of decadence and nihilism.

We can of course attempt at desensitizing ourselves to human suffering, especially voluntary suffering, and sneer at it at a distance, but life shows us that we can’t have mountains without valleys, we can’t have hot without cold, or long without short, or sweet without bitter. And the dilemma of the human being is that he is both mind and body, with thought that transcends nature, but also an animal that remains a part of nature.

I don’t accept all these wild theories and mad abstractions, “the brain thinks” and so forth. Life Is not experienced at such strange theoretical remove.

I eschew answering the rest of what you put down, since I think you are dogmatically, so to say, insistent in speaking in the terms of an abstract fantasy which excludes communication concerning direct reality as one finds it based on your answers so far. One lives, indeed, in such a “key idea” as is half present in the average way of speaking, but one can also see that it is vacant. That is when one thinks. You describe the “meaning” already when you write the story you here outline in all the fantastic array of bosh verbiage “the brain thinks” “survival mechanisms” “psychosomatic illness” “basic instincts”. Did anyone speak in such terms even one hundred years ago, will they in thirty thousand? There is your “meaning”, so, it's already in the appearance of anything for a human.

Strange that you abstain from reacting to what I have written on the basis that it is abstract fantasy, whereas I have the feeling that I am confronted with reality in a direct way far more than you are. Reviewing the history of philosophy is, after all, the review of a region of human thought, but not its fullness. If you shun the stories that try to find and convey meaning in a life of suffering, it is you who is insistent in speaking in terms of abstract thought.

Something happens, then it becomes "experience" when we repeatedly catch it, when we explain it through some notion, and make a predication of the something. For instance, we call something "psychosomatic illness" and bring it into many spheres of thought and doing that were unavailable in form ages and places and won't be there in the future. Such things change, and, on occasion, are deliberately changed.

So the discovery of psychosomatics is something that you regard as ephemeral, although the same experiences were explained by use of the words “Spirits” or “Demons” in the past. Just because the vocabulary changes, it doesn’t mean that the experience is null and void or will pass.

You conflate meaning with another question. That of a perfection of the essence of the human being in a teleology = in “happiness” or the discovered best way to live. That is like, we have an apple seed, now, what is the way to get the best fruit from it. I can't speak with you because you refuse to clarify terms, you speak from a kind of hypnotic trance which is your blinding promise for thoughtlessness.

If happiness were the only goal in my life, then it would be very bland indeed. Since the main goal in most lives is to reduce suffering, we have here a central aim that has an effect on all of those we interact with. Since you regard yourself above such thoughts and deem them even “non-thoughts” then you are right – we have nothing more to say. However, just one more comment: This approach will gradually reduce the number of people you can have a meaningful life and conversation with.

I wish you well ...

[Artimas]

Existence is agony, if I put you in a room alone you will suffer on your own, by mind and eventually by body.

Purpose of life is to lessen suffering of self and of others around you by being kind(real conscious love) and investing time into art, expression of self and experiencing things of which you deem positive.

Asserting will upon any other individual is tyrannical in nature, to assert will upon one who deems it fine to assert will, is justice.

And no this is not from Peterson, I knew this all on my own, especially the Bible being a metaphor. It’s as obvious as day and night that heaven and hell are ideas we project on reality by consistency of thought.

[Artimas]

One detests and is done with the simple issues at once, we all can think them no further. They are absurd, their simplicity is beneath one. They must be a trick. Only the philosopher sees such difficulties for what they are. Philosophers are very rare beings, their kind is seldom seen on the earth. If novelty of the condition of being is sought, it is not to be sought among the mediocre mob of collective individuals, but at the fined and refined pinnacle of time's most free output.

I was struck by this as being a statement that assumes that we are all our own makers, as though we did not thoroughly profit from the struggles of previous generations throughout millennia. If Philosophers are so rare, why not value the work of those who have gone before, and not assume that the simple issues have to be sorted by each and every one of us, and are therefore not absurd or “below us”? There seems to be an arrogance about these days that is hard to understand, except in assuming that those people who are arrogant are ignorant of basic truths. They are steeped in many theories but either shy away from the lessons that reality teaches us or they cling to the most fashionable “ism” around at the time.

Perhaps it is because I have a very complex psychology that I think that the task of socialisation is such a struggle, and finding the right path so confusing. It took me decades to understand myself fully and only then are we really in the position to understand history and the development of philosophy throughout the thousands of years we have been developing. If I take this personal experience and assume that I am not so very different from other people, then the ups and downs of history are understandable, but also the horrific suffering that people have gone through before we came to be. The human rights that we have become accustomed to having been cut out of a bloody history, and acclaimed although they still remain utopian for many people.

There has been a variety of criticism of Jordan Peterson, most of which I fail to agree with because it misses the mark. I am by no means someone who would defend Peterson at every occasion because there are things he says that I disagree with. However, coming from a parallel development, discovering Jung late in life, having a Christian background but being disappointed with the church, and discovering suffering very close up through my vocation as a geriatric nurse, I must agree with Peterson on his starting point: Life is suffering. From there, we can develop different ideas about how to cope with that, indeed to combat suffering, as many in the past have already done, but we tend to find similarities despite cultural differences, which is what Jung and now Peterson have picked up on.

My criticism of Peterson isn’t that he is wrong, but that he fails to find an integral approach to history. The developments of the past, in history, but also our own developments, have aspects towards which we may now find animosity, but they are a part of our development and not all wrong. Some things we do because it is the lesser of two evils; sometimes we have been struggling to survive, and therefore unable to find the higher ground that we assume ourselves to be on today. I know that I have had many occasion to be frustrated at the path I took, but benevolent onlookers have appeased me by telling me that they didn’t see anything bad about what I did, it is just that today I would do something different.

I find that Peterson has laid down a worthy psychological description of what value mythology has in our lives, and has had throughout time. His 12 Rules are in a way just an excerpt from the bigger work Maps of Meaning, which is worth a read, even though it is pretty large. His Youtube videos can give further insight. I just can’t accept that people who have not yet achieved anything similar should ridicule 15 years of intense study and thirty years of clinical experience.

The first “gods” are archetypes of man. Religion, gods and mythology are just mankind’s attempt to describe psychology in the past. They projected this externally as an art form, one that today is taken too literal and it causes more suffering than the lessening of it. Now we have gold for the mind to look back at as philosophers and there is a lot of it hidden in symbology and reference.

Ultimately I agree with what you say.

[Meno_]

Agreed. The supra rational analyzed inductively has an orthogenisis of a thetic quality, which prefigured the coming of pragmatic psychological analysis, this is why psychology is transcendental, it is as much a science as it is am art.

The very basis of the interaction hinges on inter personal trust, or lack of, and that hinges on the determinancy of the level of belief or trust, which makes evaluations regarding them possible.

[Bob]

Existence is agony, if I put you in a room alone you will suffer on your own, by mind and eventually by body.

Purpose of life is to lessen suffering of self and of others around you by being kind(real conscious love) and investing time into art, expression of self and experiencing things of which you deem positive.

Asserting will upon any other individual is tyrannical in nature, to assert will upon one who deems it fine to assert will, is justice.

And no this is not from Peterson, I knew this all on my own, especially the Bible being a metaphor. It’s as obvious as day and night that heaven and hell are ideas we project on reality by consistency of thought.

Hi Artimas,
We seem to agree. What I found useful with Peterson is the use of language that helped me find words for things I couldn’t name before, and his clear structure of order//confusion/chaos, and tyranny/democracy/anarchy. Which are sorted something like this:

----------------Order-----------------

-----Anarchy---Democracy---Tyranny-----
--------------Confusion--------------

---------------Chaos-----------------

Too much anarchy and you’ll end up in chaos.
Too much tyranny and you’ll end up in chaos.
Order is opposite to Chaos and finds itself in the middle, as all clarity (and truth) does.
Democracy, which finds itself between anarchy and tyranny, can be prone to confusion, which can also be a shortcut to chaos.
Our task is to clear up the confusion and therefore maintain democracy. Thereby attempting to find the best solution to problems for everybody.

I have just finished reading and listening to maps of meaning, which is very challenging – if not merely from the volume of work put into it. There are many intriguing examples that he gives, which show the degree to which he has gone to clarify “Dasein” for himself – and for those interested.

That is why Meno is obviously right about psychology, and why Peterson is predestined to pursue this course of enquiry. His discovery, following Jung, of the narrative of being, which is something we are all using to make life make sense, has echoed something I have primitively always said, that human beings can be best identified as a species that tells stories to understand his experiences.

I was known here on ILP for a long time as someone who, despite acknowledging that the Bible isn’t primarily historical (there may be a few historical pinpoints), always defended the narrative as a portrayal of experience – good or bad. It is erroneous to imitate any part of it, to adopt its ruling blindly, or claim that it is accurate in a way it can’t be, but as a narrative, it is an interesting witness to spiritual development.

Being pre-science, it addresses issues using (for us) a strange vocabulary, but like other traditions, opens up the psyche of developing mankind, and is valuable for that purpose. I can't imagine anyone who has half understood what Peterson is telling us, thinking that he is an example of a failure to think.

[Meno_]

The collectivist Peterson states that we all should, in order to benefit the collective, view each other as "essentially" individual. Is this a collective demand to how each one should think itself? What could be more "low resolution" than the demand that each one take the same view in order to do what is best for all? Namely, to think themselves as essentially "individual" for the sake of the collective? 

Peterson, driving his ego into self annihilation, might now pick himself up and learn thought. Ergo, he might remember what is properly worthy in his inner teaching. 

---------------------

This is the epistemological problem: how can the ego be reduced through other than through an assumption of the essentialusm of ' faith' in the organizative lessons available at the time? (18th century) That era was the prima facea turning point where, in spite of the subtlety of the argument for nihilism, the general consensus was sustained through believe in that sustenance.

Be as it may, lets not forget the famous murder case that befell the president of atheism 's most ardent promoter. (Regardless if motive)

The U.S. is still majoritively a religious nation, essentially.

Nihilism is generally non derivable.

[Bob]

The collectivist Peterson states that we all should, in order to benefit the collective, view each other as "essentially" individual. Is this a collective demand to how each one should think itself? What could be more "low resolution" than the demand that each one take the same view in order to do what is best for all? Namely, to think themselves as essentially "individual" for the sake of the collective? 

Peterson, driving his ego into self annihilation, might now pick himself up and learn thought. Ergo, he might remember what is properly worthy in his inner teaching.

I think you are wrong. Peterson says it is wrong to identify someone immediately as being part of a group and therefore giving them the attributes that are associated with that group. The racist argument and the numerous “#Phobes” which have been applied to people, just because they have a certain skin colour or particular sexual inclination, doesn’t fit. Peterson has demonstrated this by going on tour with someone who is openly gay.

People are first and foremost who they are as an individual, and not who they are for other people because of certain attributes. Back in the sixties I (a white person) had friends in GB who came from Jamaica and I was criticised by racists. Amongst the black community there arose concern that I was a white person who visited a black area. My friends made the point that racism can work both ways, and told the others that they should be careful not to fall into the trap. Now we are forty odd years on, and they have made that mistake, but were treated in a way that seemed to warrant their opinions.

What we need to do is, as individuals, work out the best way for everybody, which is what democracy should be (and not just defeating people by majorities) and be wary of where this goes wrong.

[Meno_]

The collectivist Peterson states that we all should, in order to benefit the collective, view each other as "essentially" individual. Is this a collective demand to how each one should think itself? What could be more "low resolution" than the demand that each one take the same view in order to do what is best for all? Namely, to think themselves as essentially "individual" for the sake of the collective? 

Peterson, driving his ego into self annihilation, might now pick himself up and learn thought. Ergo, he might remember what is properly worthy in his inner teaching.

I think you are wrong. Peterson says it is wrong to identify someone immediately as being part of a group and therefore giving them the attributes that are associated with that group. The racist argument and the numerous “#Phobes” which have been applied to people, just because they have a certain skin colour or particular sexual inclination, doesn’t fit. Peterson has demonstrated this by going on tour with someone who is openly gay.

People are first and foremost who they are as an individual, and not who they are for other people because of certain attributes. Back in the sixties I (a white person) had friends in GB who came from Jamaica and I was criticised by racists. Amongst the black community there arose concern that I was a white person who visited a black area. My friends made the point that racism can work both ways, and told the others that they should be careful not to fall into the trap. Now we are forty odd years on, and they have made that mistake, but were treated in a way that seemed to warrant their opinions.

What we need to do is, as individuals, work out the best way for everybody, which is what democracy should be (and not just defeating people by majorities) and be wary of where this goes wrong.

In the narrative You commented on Guide's narrative, which I paraphrased.

Although I have not decided on anything more substantial then on naaia of set theory( that the majority of US and even perhaps worldly majorities sustain a pro-theistic frame of belief.

I don't know that if that would make a great deal of difference in Your reply.

[Bob]

I don't know that if that would make a great deal of difference in Your reply.

I can't really say that you give me any indication as to why something should make a difference in my reply.

I have often found it interesting that people today think they must prove that they're living by contesting every statement other people make. It would be more interesting, don't you think, if we had a problem that we could consider from different perspectives - to try to sort it out.

That would be, in my estimation, something that J.B.Peterson would also agree with.

[Meno_]

can't really say that you give me any indication as to why something should make a difference in my reply.

[Meno_]

[quote_"]can't really say that you give me any indication as to why something should make a difference in my reply.

[/quote]


Because the naturalistic fallacy may be too close to call? in this case.

Why should it? Because there is no other way to identify someone on basis of all the characteristics listed, in Kant's time, perhaps.