Knowing Versus Understanding | Jordan B Peterson

you may no you may not that I'm an admirer of Nietzsche Nietzsche was a devastating critic of I would say dogmatic Christianity Christianity as it was instantiated in institutions I suppose although he's a very paradoxical thinker because for example one of the things Nietzsche said was that he didn't believe that the Scientific Revolution would have ever got off the ground if it hadn't been for Christianity and more specifically for Catholicism because he believed that over the course of really a thousand years the European mind so to speak had to train itself to interpret everything that was known within a single coherent framework coherent if you accept the initial axioms a single coherent framework so Nietzsche believed that that Catholicism of of the phenomena of life and of history produced the kind of mind that was then capable of transcending that its dogmatic foundations and then concentrating on something else which in this particular case happened to be the natural world and so Nietzsche believed that in some sense Christianity died at its own hand it had spent a very long period of time trying to attune people to the necessity of the truth you know absent the corruption and all of that that's always part of any human endeavor and then the truth the spirit of the truth that was developed by Christianity turned on the roots of Christianity and everyone woke up and said something like or thought something like well how is it that we came to believe any of this it's like waking up one day and noting noting that you really don't know why you put a Christmas tree up but you've been doing it for a long time and that's what people do and you know there are reasons that Christmas trees came about but the what would you say the ritual lasts long after the reasons have been forgotten so now Nietzsche although he was a critic of Christianity and also a champion of its disciplinary capacity because you see the other thing that Nietzsche believed was that it was not possible to be free in some sense unless you go unless you had been a slave and and by that he meant that you don't go from childhood to full-fledged adult individuality you go from childhood to a state of discipline which you might think is akin to slavery to self-imposed slavery that that would be the best scenario where you have to discipline yourself to become something specific before that you might be able to retain the generality that you had as a child and he believed that Christianity had played that role for Western civilization but in the late 1800s he announced that God was dead and you often hear of that as something triumphant but for Nietzsche it wasn't because he was too nuanced to thinker to be that simple-minded see Nietzsche understood that and this is something I'm going to try to make clear is that we there's there's a very large amount that we don't know about the structure of experience that we don't know about reality and we have our articulated representations of the world and then you could think of outside of that there are things we know absolutely nothing about and there's a buffer between them and those are things we sort of know something about and we don't know them in an articulated way here's an example you know sometimes you're arguing with one of your someone close to you and they're in a bad mood you know and they're being touchy and unreasonable and you keep the conversation up and maybe all of a sudden they you know they get angry or maybe they cry and then when they cry they figure out what they're angry about and it has nothing to do with you even though you might have been what precipitated the argument no one that's an interesting phenomena as far as I'm concerned because it means that people can know things at one level without being able to speak what they know at another and so in some sense the thoughts rise up from the body and they do that in moods and they do that in images and they do that and actions and we have all sorts of ways that we understand before we understand in a fully articulated manner and so we have this articulated space that we can all discuss and then outside of that we have something that's more akin to a dream that were embedded in and it's an emotional dream that were embedded in and that's based at least in part on our actions I'll describe that later and then outside of that is what we don't know anything about at all and in that dream that's where the Mystics live and that's where the artists live and there are the mediators between the absolute unknown and the things we know for sure and you see what that means in some sense is what we know is established on a form of knowledge that we don't really understand and that if those two things are out of sync so you might say if our articulated knowledge is out of sync with our dream then we become dissociated internally we think things we don't act out and we act out things we don't dream and that produces a kind of sickness of the Spirit and and that sickness of the Spirit it you see its cure is something like an integrated system of belief and representation and then people turn to things like ideologies which I regard as parasites on an underlying religious sub structure to try to organize their thinking and then that's a catastrophe and that's what Nietzsche Nietzsche foresaw you see he knew that when we knocked the slats out of the base of Western civilization by destroying this representation this this God ideal let's say that we would destabilize and move back and forth violently between nihilism let's say in the extremes of ideology he was particularly concerned about radical left ideology you know one believed and predicted this in the late 1800s which is really an absolute intellectual tour-de-force of staggering magnitude predicted that in the 20th century that hundreds of millions of people would die because of the replacement of these underlying dreamlike structures with this rational rational but deeply incorrect representation of the world and you know we've been oscillating back and forth between left and right in some sense ever since and you know with some good sprinkling of nihilism in there and despair some sense that's the situation of the modern Western person and increasingly of people in general

Channel: Jordan B Peterson Clips

Views: 125,183

Keywords: psychology, philosophy, Jordan B. Peterson, Jordan Peterson, JB Peterson, jordanbpeterson, jordanpeterson, personality, understandmyself, selfauthoring, neuropsychology

Id: Y0tGxcUaVm0

Length: 6min 54sec (414 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 08 2020