Peterson: What We Should Learn from Milton’s Paradise Lost

and then the Tower of Babel is a very interesting story it's very very short and what happens is that it just starts pretty much abruptly after the flood story ends and it's it's a story about the decision that human beings take to build a mighty building like a huge huge edifice that would reach all the way up to the heavens to supplant God roughly speaking and so what happens is that the building B is built higher and higher and higher and higher and God gets annoyed about this and divides everyone who's building the building into small groups who speak different languages who then dispersed and the construction project comes to a halt now it's a very strange story but here's one way of thinking about it the larger you build a system the more there is a proclivity to worship it as if it's everything that's the story of ideology let's say you want to build a comprehensive utopian system that supplants anything transcendent you want to build it as large as possible so it accompanies encompasses everyone well what happens as it grows well it incorporates more and more people but the people within it become more and more different from one another and so essentially they start speaking different languages and so the entire project of raising this massive edifice to supplant everything disperses into chaos and comes to a halt okay so that's one story so here's another story this is a story that John Milton wrote John Milton wrote Paradise Lost which is one of the prime literary masterpieces of the last 500 years now here's what Milton did Milton said he was trying to justify the ways of God to man that was his purpose and so what he was trying to do was take a look at the world the way it's constituted with all its suffering and malevolence and corruption and to make a case why it was still acceptable and so he did the first what you might think about a psychoanalytic study of malevolence evil so around the corpus of biblical writings there's an idea of heaven and hell and they're not referred to much within the corpus of biblical writings but there are what you might describe as legends that have compiled around them so they're they're stories that never became canonical and those are stories for example of the idea that God's highest angel who was Satan Lucifer the bringer of light the spirit of rationality fomented a rebellion against God in heaven and was cast into hell as a consequence and so there's this idea Milton wrote this before the rise of the nation states for example there's this idea that there's this idea that there's this tension between the political and ideological and rational constructions of the rational mind and the sort of transcendent mythology that guides human organization and that Satan as God's highest as the highest angel in God's heavenly kingdom is a personification of the tendency of the rational mind to produce totalitarian systems and then to fall in love with them so to produce a system that encompasses everything like the Tower of Babel so that nothing outside the system is allowed to exist well Milton's intuition because he collected the stories about satanic rebellion that had been accumulating across centuries from far before Christianity was even was even constituted turned this into a great poetic drama and his hypothesis was that the the element of the psyche let's say the spiritual element of the psyche that characterized the rational mind would by its proclivity to produce these totalizing systems end up casting itself into hell and so you could think about it as a prophetic visualization of what was going to come down the centuries after Milton wrote because the poets get there before the philosophers the artists get there maybe before the poets the Philosopher's follow in their wake the poets are the people who have the visions of what's coming farthest down the road so this is from Milton this is disgu being Satan after he's cast into hell because of his rebellion his totalitarian the consequence of his totalitarian rationalism for now the thought both of lost happiness and lasting pain torments him round he throws his baleful eyes that witnessed huge affliction and dismay mixed with obdurate pride in steadfast hate as once at once as far as angels can heave used the dismal situation waste and wild a dungeon horrible on all sides round as one great furnace flamed yet from those flames no light but rather darkness darkness visible served only to discover sites of woe regions of sorrow doleful shades where peace and rest can never dwell hope never comes that comes to all but torture without and still urges and a fiery deluge fed with ever burning sulfur unconsumed such place eternal justice had prepared for those rebellious here their prison ordained in utter darkness and their portion set as far removed from God and light of heaven as from the center thrice to the utmost pole it's an existentialist claim or maybe it's the existentialist claim that the conditions of human life are such that suffering is an integral part of existence now it's an important thing to understand it's also a viewpoint shared by the bulk of the great religious systems of the world life is suffering why well one reason is because of society's arbitrary judgment right every single one of us has traits and features and and quirks and idiosyncrasies that are far from ideal and that are judged by the standards of society as insufficient and so you suffer because of your imperfect insufficiency in the eyes of others and you can certainly make the claim that fairly frequently that's arbitrary and so that's the claim that society is tyrannical and judgmental and needs to be constantly reconstituted so that the tyrannical element doesn't take full control and fair enough you have to stay awake so that that doesn't happen but the thing is it doesn't matter what society it is although they vary in the degree of their tyranny the mere fact that you're grouped together with other people and have to come up with a common value structure in order to live together means that many of the things that characterize you are going to be suboptimal and so the price you pay for social being is that much of you is deemed insufficient now hopefully there are various ways that you can be within a society that's sufficiently diverse so that you can find a place where what's good about you in the eyes of others and perhaps in your own eyes can flourish of its own accord because you don't have to be good at everything if you can be good at one thing well enough that might allow you your niche and hopefully a healthy society allows for that certainly societies can become so tyrannical that they don't so you can lay one source of human suffering at the feet of tyrannical social structures but the other element of it clearly is the mere fact of the arbitrariness of the natural world if you have a lifespan that's going to be counted in the number of decades that you can count on two hands and that has nothing to do technically with the tyranny of the social structure now you could say if we got our act together more completely perhaps you could live longer and fair enough but the fact of the limits of your lifespan and the suffering that's necessarily a consequence of that the death of your parents and the death of most people that you will know before you means that that part of suffering is an integral part of existence itself and so that can't be laid at the feet of an insufficient social structure except insofar as it's tyrannical and blind it's a condition of existence and then by the same token you have your own responsibility for some of your unnecessary suffering because there's things you could be to make your life better and to make life better for other people that you know perfectly well that you're not doing and so if you stopped doing all the unnecessary things that make your life bad then it would improve to some degree that it's not really computable because you don't know how far you could push that so there's three reasons why you suffer and one is well look at you and the way you're built it's inevitable there's not very much of you and there's a lot of everything else and so you just don't last that long and your fragile across multiple domains and then you're harshly treated by society and there's no doubt about that and then there's responsibilities that can be laid at your own feet well the existential take on that and the thing that all these diverse people that we've been talking about including Viktor Frankl and including Alexander Solzhenitsyn as well as Kierkegaard Nietzsche and Dostoevsky and the people that I've already talked to you about is that the proper pathway through that is to adopt the mode of authentic being and that is something like refusing to participate in the lie in deception in the lie to orient your speech as much as you can towards the truth and to take responsibility for your own life and perhaps also for the lives of other people and there's something about that that's meaningful and responsible and Noble but also serves to mitigate the very suffering that produces say the nihilism or the flee into the arms of flee or or the or the escape into the arms of totalitarians to begin with

Channel: PhilosophyInsights

Views: 53,095

Keywords: Milton, paradise lost, Jordan b. Peterson, Peterson, psychology, Nihilism, meaning, life, suffering, tower of babel, god, story, interpretation, literature, poet, lecture, ideology, system, rebellion, Christianity, jesus, drama, hypothesis, psyche, mind

Id: DyHIqbJudcU

Length: 10min 31sec (631 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 03 2019