Jordan Peterson, Martin Heidegger, and the Inescapability of Stories

“But Heidegger and Peterson differ when it comes to the origin of our stories, the meaning of nihilism, and the limits to the stories we can tell. To begin, it is useful to explore the question of the origins of our stories. In both Peterson and Heidegger, there is talk of something coming from nothing.”

Many people sense that something has gone off the rails in the West, as well as that the culture war is a manifestation that something is deeply wrong. These are claims made by Jordan Peterson in a recent appearance in Nashville, Tennessee for his We Who Wrestle with God tour. Peterson thinks we know the culture war is more than a mere kerfuffle because the debates are over bedrock principles such as free speech. Peterson’s diagnosis is that such battles are happening because the West is slowly realizing that Enlightenment thought contains an erroneous assumption.

The error is the belief that we perceive the world as a manifold of facts. The problem with this commonsense view is that the number of possible facts is infinite, which means that perceiving the world that way would be impossibly complex. During podcast episodes, including with British neuroscientist Karl Friston and another with Angus Fletcher, and in public appearances, Peterson has been developing an alternative model of perception, which is that we perceive the world as a story.

This theory suggests that science is a derivative mode of being, given that our aims, emotions, and values underwrite the scientific enterprise. From the perspective of science, emotions and values are irrelevant considerations, even hindrances. Nevertheless, Peterson holds that we must pick out what is important and useful if we hope to achieve anything. Perception forces us to discriminate among objects, so values are needed to determine what the proper object of our focus should be. Thus, the world is not a matter of fact but of value.