Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning | Lex Fridman Podcast #448

The following is a conversation with Jordan Peterson, his second time on this, the Lex Fridman podcast. You have given a set of lectures on Nietzsche as part of the new Peterson Academy, and the lectures were powerful. There's some element of the contradictions, the tensions, the drama, the way you, like, lock in on an idea but then are struggling with that idea, all of that. That feels like it's a, it's a Nietzschean-

Mm-hmm. Yeah, well, he was a big influence on me stylistically and, like, in terms of the way I approached writing, and also many of the people that were other influences of mine were very influenced by him. So, I was blown away when I first came across his writings. They're so... They're so, uh, intellectually dense that I don't know if there's anything that approximates that. Dostoevsky maybe, although he's much more wordy. Nietzsche is very succinct, partly 'cause he was so ill, eh, 'cause he would think all day, he couldn't spend a lot of time writing, and he condenses his writings into very short... well, this aphoristic style had, and it's, it's really something to strive for. And, and then he's also an exciting writer, like Dostoevsky, and, and dynamic, and, and romantic in that emotional way, and so it's really something. And I really enjoyed doing the... I did that lecture that you described. That lecture series is on the first half of Beyond Good and Evil, which is a stunning book, and, uh, that was really fun to take pieces of it and then to describe what they mean and how they've echoed across the decades since he wrote them, and yeah, it's been great.

Taking each sentence seriously-

Mm-hmm.

... and deconstructing it and really struggling with it. I think underpinning that approach to writing requires deep respect for the person. I think if we approach writing with that kind of respect, you can take Orwell, you can take a lot of writers and really dig in on singular sentences.

Yeah, well, those are the great writers because the greatest writers, virtually everything they wrote is worth attending to. You know, and, and I think Nietzsche is, in some ways, the ultimate exemplar of that because (laughs) often when I read a book, I'll mark one way or another. I often fold the corner of the page over to indicate something that I've found that's worth remembering. I couldn't do that with a book like Beyond Good and Evil because every page ends up marked, and, and that's in marked contrast, so to speak, to many of the books I read now where it's... Uh, it's, it's quite frequently now that I'll read a book and there won't be an idea in it that I haven't come across before, and with a thinker like Nietzsche, that's just not the case at the sentence level, and I don't think there's anyone that I know of who did that to a greater extent than he did. So, there's other people who, whose thought is of equivalent value. I've, I've returned recently and I'm going to do a course on... to the work of this Romanian historian of religion, Mircea Eliade, who's not nearly as well known as he should be, and whose work, by the way, is a real antidote to the postmodern nihilistic Marxist stream of literary interpretation that the universities as a whole have adopted, and Eliade is like that, too. I, I was... I used this book called The Sacred and the Profane quite extensively in a book that I'm releasing in mid-November, We Who Wrestle With God, and it's of the same sort. It, it, it's endlessly analyzable. I mean, Eliade walked through the whole history of religious ideas, and he had the intellect that enabled him to do that, and everything he wrote is dream, dreamlike in its density. So, every sentence or paragraph is evocative in an image-rich manner and that also, what would you say, deepens and broadens the scope and that's part of often what distinguishes writing that has a literary end from writing that's more merely technical. Like, the literary writings have this imagistic and dreamlike reference space around them, and it takes a l- a l- it takes a long time to turn a complex image into something semantic. And so if your writing evokes deep imagery, it has a depth that can't be captured merely in words, and the great romantic poetic philosophers, Nietzsche is a very good example, Dostoevsky is a good example, so is Mircea Eliade, they have that quality, and it's a good w- way of thinking about it, you know? And it's kind of interesting from the perspective of technical analysis of intelligence, and there's a good book called The User Illusion, which is the best book on consciousness that I ever read. It explains the manner in which our communication is understandable in this manner. So imagine that when you're communicating something, you're trying to change the way that your target audience perceives and acts in the world, so that's an embodied issue, and... But you're using words which aren't... When obviously (laughs) aren't equivalent to the actions themselves. Can imagine that the words are surrounded by a cloud of images that they evoke and that the images can be translated into actions. Yeah, and, and the greatest writing uses words in a manner that evokes images that profoundly affects perception and action, and that's the... So, I would take the manner in which I act and behave, I would translate that into a set of images, my dreams do that for me, for example, then I compress them into words. I toss you the words, you decompose them, decompress them into the images and then into the actions, and that's what happens in a meaningful conversation. That's a very good way of understanding how we communicate linguistically.