I know everyone hates tangents, and please excuse the off topic, but crypto-fascist and intellectual lightweight are not a set of attributes I've heard or intuited against Peterson. I'd love to hear more detail if you have some time. Articles, blogs, books, videos all accepted.
There's the contrapoints video that gets brought up a lot when discussing Peterson, and imo it does better than other sources, but its probably not formal enough / contains too much humor / silliness for the HN audience.
Yea, I took a peak. I can't sit through that (even though I did say "all accepted", My bad. ). It's a pile of pandering palp for a pretty rarefied cheer leading group. If there's valid points they should be available elsewhere in a more palatable and coherent form, no? Nobody's got a proprietary hold on truth.
So, taking this moment to do my own searching all I find are character assassinations, and misunderstandings of his background and goals. That's from discussions on /r/askphilosophy to that New York times article to the one on thebaffler and video interviews too, from Cathy Newman to Vice all seem driven to the same goal as those sad and incoherent student protests in 2016.
Sure, they're leaders in different disciplines which seem to overlap in the zeitgeist. I doubt Zizek would be able to match Peterson when discussing practical psychiatry.
IMHO, after a brief fascination I've found my enthusiasm for Zizek fading. He seems to know his quotes very well and spits them out like a rapper on speed, but as a career philosopher and author I haven't seen his work leading to positive change in people. Peterson on the other hand has a growing cohort of I regret to say 'followers' who are purportedly cleaning up their acts.
IMHO the group (and subsequently the ideology) is the wrong level of analysis to diagnose and then treat our contemporary woes. Groups cannot be addressed simultainously, cannot be held accountable, and most of all are never clearly delineated (what is 'race'?). The individual CAN be held accountable, that's how every law system on Earth is engineered. The individual can be addressed. That's how almost every communication system in the world works (except public PAs, radio, and the like). And most of all individuals are trivial to delineate. An individual human is unlike anything else in the universe except other humans and each has their own unique history.
"During an event at the Cambridge Union Society in November 2018, Žižek had called Peterson's work "pseudo-scientific", labeled him as his "enemy" and criticized Peterson's work on the idea of cultural Marxism. Peterson said he could meet "any time, any place" to debate and it was announced on February 28, 2019 that the debate was scheduled for April 19. The two professors before had argued against happiness as something one should pursue. Peterson had said people should seek meaning through personal responsibility and Žižek had said happiness is pointless and delusional."[1]
Debate itself[2][3]:
"...In a similar fashion, Žižek asked Peterson to name him personal names of "postmodern neo-Marxists" in Western academia and from where he got the statistical numbers because according to him the over-the-top political correctness is opposed to Marxism, on which Peterson did not mention any names, yet statistical percentage of those who declare as Marxists in the academia according to Jonathan Haidt's research and explained replacement of the Marxist idea of class struggle with identity politics by which one group is oppressing the other. Some view this exchange as evidence that cultural Marxism had been invented by Peterson and other members of the intellectual dark web without any evidence of its existence. In the end, they both agreed that happiness is rather a byproduct of life itself."
From all I've digested of Žižek it seems he quite often bathes in exaggeration for theatrics. So, I wouldn't take "pseudo-scientific" as a flat and sincere statement. Also given that Peterson actually IS a scientist (with a few well sited papers).
I tried to watch the talk, but there was so much audience hooting and hollering it was too difficult.
But still, I don't see any evidence of Peterson being a "crypto-fascist" or "intellectual lightweight" as a previous user accused.
I'll concede that Žižek has a flair for theatrics, but I agree with Žižek that Peterson's claims are "pseudo-scientific" because they are fundamentally not truth-claims that are falsifiable. It's simply not science to say the things he's saying. He may wish to use science to fortify his philosophical or sociological claims, but you can't do that without making statements that are fundamentally at odds with the scientific method.
(First, thank you for continuing this discussion. I feel I have to say that because often they fall apart.)
(edit: oops, this was to comment on the wikipedia article you posted)
So, it seems to me this critique of Peterson's Boogymen of cultural Post-structuralist Neo-Marxists (or something like that) comes down to "He didn't use the right words to describe what he's talking about." as opposed to "What he's describing doesn't exist" or what I seem to smell in the most muddy of critiques "He's a dangerous idiot".
"He then proceeded to stumble his way through Marxist philosophy with such a shallow assessment as to be laughably incorrect."
But then doesn't back it up with anything. And shallow doesn't mean incorrect.
So it seems to me that his detractors are grasping at straws.
Again, a hearty shrug from me.
Though, looking at the work from Andray Domise, the author of above, like his articles and his TED talk "TEDx Toronto: Colour Coded: race, gender, and representation in video games" He seems very very occupied with group identity.
I see your point about Peterson being inarticulate regarding his knowledge and understanding of Marxism. However I don’t even know what the strongest interpretation of his views even are. It’s hard to steelman when your interlocutor is incomprehensible. It’s even more baffling because Peterson is using his audiences own unfamiliarity with Marxism and Žižek's views which are not even Marxist to have plausible deniability to strawman Žižek’s views, in order to try to call on Žižek to defend views he doesn’t hold and statements Žižek doesn’t make.
That critics gloss over all this by only saying that Peterson is shallow and incorrect is a shame. He’s not even wrong because his argument is not even making normative statements that could be proved or disproved. To say that the critic judging him didn’t do a good job is fair. However it seems like missing the point. If you have a test and get partial credit for showing your work and your answer is wrong and the work you show is wrong, it is hard to see where an instructor could award any points for an attempt. Nor do I see it as a failure of the instructor to not show their work on this when grading. I think Hitchen’s razor works best here.
"What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence."
Christopher Hitchens
