CHAPTER 31
Jordan Peterson’s Fascination with Nietzsche,
Dostoevsky, and Solzhenitsyn
In
Chapter 18 of my most intimate memoir The
Pearl of Great Price, “The Dust on a Butterfly’s Wings,” I wrote: “Stories
bear the truth of the human condition, and the human condition is the story of
our becoming; but not until we solve the riddle of our becoming will literature
resolve the issue of the human condition. This makes literature endlessly
fascinating, because every writer speaks to their place in the enantiodromiac process of man’s
becoming, which Jung called “individuation,” and in their stories they stake
out the geography of man’s soul, whether it be the happy country of one’s being, the unhappy country of one’s non-being, or that miserable place of
being stuck between two countries—the no-man’s land of one’s soul.” The writers
Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, and Solzhenitsyn staked out the geography of their soul
in their writing, and with such passionate intensity that their work will
resonate for ages; this is why the young seeker Jordan Peterson was attracted
to their writing, because he too was staking out the geography of his own soul.
In Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief,
he recalls his youthful crises of faith, concluding that religion was for the
ignorant, weak, and superstitious. “I stopped attending church and joined the
modern world,” he wrote, and he turned to socialism and became active in the
New Democratic Party and got his first degree in political science where he
sought an explanation for “the general social and political insanity and evil
of the world.” But socialism came out wanting. This was the Cold War era, and
student Peterson was preoccupied by the possibility of nuclear annihilation,
which literally gave him nightmares,
and he concluded that the question was a psychological one; so, he sought
psychological answers and earned a Ph. D. from McGill University in Montreal and
became a clinical psychologist and a professor of psychology, first at Harvard
and then at the University of Toronto.
In his quest for
an answer to “the general social and political insanity and evil of the world,”
he discovered Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, and Solzhenitsyn—and G. G. Jung, of
course, who became his guiding light and abiding hero; and he studied these
authors with such passionate commitment that one could call it pathological. I
know that feeling well from my own need to find an answer to my question, who am I? Like he said, he was
“obsessed” in his quest for an answer to his haunting question; but why did
these authors have such an attraction for the budding professor and clinical
psychologist? What set these authors apart from the rest of the literary world?
What was their truth that set
Peterson’s soul on fire?
The answer can be
found in the sacred mystery of story, the archetypal imperative of soul that
seeks out meaning and wholeness through individual life experience, just as I pointed
to in a spiritual musing that I posted on my blog Saturday, November 11, 2017, because every person’s life story
bears witness to the sacred mystery of their becoming:
The Power of Story
The idea for
today’s spiritual musing hovered above my head like a heavy rain cloud waiting
for the right atmospheric conditions to set its refreshing life-giving moisture
free, and the right conditions came with the natural daily addition of more
thoughts and insights that added to the specific gravity of the idea of my
spiritual musing, the simple idea of story.
Penny and I were
having coffee in my writing room early one morning, as we always do, and she
put the book she was reading down and said to me, “This is boring. I’m tired of
reading this kind of stuff. I’d rather read a good story instead—”
She was reading
Robert Moss’s book, The Boy Who Died and
Came Back, Adventures of a Dream Archaeologist in the Multiverse, an
autobiographical account of his near-death and dream experiences which I had
read, along with four or five of Robert Moss’s other books.
“Why?” I asked,
intrigued by the abruptness of her comment, as though she had just had her fill
of that kind of literature. “Why would you prefer a good story instead?”
“Because I get more
out of a good story than this stuff. I don’t know what it is, but I just can’t
read these kinds of books any more. I like your writing. It doesn’t bore me
like this stuff, but I’d rather read your stories instead. I get much more out
of a good story.”
That did it. The
cloud burst and the idea for today’s spiritual musing on story possessed me
with daemonic imperative, and I had to explore it…
I had just
finished writing My Writing Life, Reflections on My
High School Hero and Literary Mentor Ernest “Papa” Hemingway, an
unexpected sequel to my memoir The Lion
that Swallowed Hemingway, unexpected because the call to write this sequel
came with a surprise Christmas gift of an Indigo
Hemingway Notebook from Penny’s sister which called me back to creative writing
that I kept putting off for one reason or another, like my book of short
stories Sparkles in the Mist, my
novel The Waking Dream (in which Carl
Jung actually came to me in a dream to talk about “the alpha and omega of the
self” and also to discuss my book The Way
of Soul, which was published on the inner planes because Jung was holding
it in his hands but was not yet published out here), my novel An Atheist, An Agnostic, and Me, an
allegorical novel called The Gadfly, and
several other works that are still waiting to be re-worked; so Penny’s comment
hit home, because I could no longer hold back what I had come to realize about
story upon completing My Writing Life,
I love Hemingway
more for his short stories than his novels, but story is story, and a short
story simply concentrates the teleological imperative of the human condition much
more succinctly than a novel; that’s why I was called back to my high school
hero and literary mentor with my sequel to
The Lion that Swallowed Hemingway, because I could no longer put off
writing the stories that have been calling me for years. But not until Penny’s
comment about her preference for reading a good story over those other kinds of
books, of which my library shelves are burdened, did I finally get the message;
and before I jump in with both feet into creative writing, I have to explore
the imperative power of story in today’s spiritual musing.
I tried one more
time to draw Penny out, but she could not express why she got more satisfaction
out of reading a good story than those other kinds of books that Robert Moss
and Carolyn Myss and Neale Donald Walsh and Thomas Moore and Gary Zukav and Dr.
Wayne Dyer and kindred inner-directed truth-seeking people have written, and I
have no choice but to abandon to my muse to explore the allure of story in
today’s spiritual musing; but I fear this may be a dangerous spiritual musing.
A dangerous
spiritual musing dares to say the unsayable, and I hate being called to explore
an idea that will take me beyond the edge of thought, because I know it will
defy logic; but such is the nature of story, whose aesthetic imperative is to
nourish the soul and resolve the inherent paradox of man’s dual nature. That’s
the danger, because how can one
expect anyone to believe that man is both real and false, that he is and is not
what he is, a walking, talking paradoxical creature?
It took me a
lifetime to resolve the paradoxical nature of the dual consciousness of man,
the being and non-being of man’s individuating reflective self-consciousness
which has been the central theme of all my writing; but it wasn’t until Penny,
in her exasperation with Robert Moss’s The
Boy Who Died and Came Back, blurted out that she got more out of reading a
good story than those other kinds of books did it dawn on me why; and as simple
as it may be, she got more out of reading a good story because story has the
power to resolve the paradoxical nature of man’s dual self that those other
kinds of books can only point to.
That’s a big
statement. Big enough to explore in a whole book, which curiously enough I’ve
already done in books like The Lion that
Swallowed Hemingway, Gurdjieff Was
Wrong, But His Teaching Works, and especially in my book The Pearl of Great Price; so, I need not
explore it in today’s musing. My point is to explain what Penny meant by saying
that she got more out of reading a good story than she did out of those other
kinds of books; so, just what is it about story that satisfies this longing in
one’s soul for—what? Just what is it
exactly that a good story satisfies, if not personal resolution of one’s
paradoxical nature?
That’s the
epiphany that came to me when Penny said she got more out of reading a good
story than those other kinds of books that she now found boring; but just what
did she mean by those other kinds of books, anyway? And why cannot they satisfy
that longing in one’s soul for resolution of one’s real and false self, soul’s
longing for meaning and wholeness?
I’ve been reading
those other kinds of books my whole life, ever since I was called to find my
true self by Somerset Maugham’s novel The
Razor’s Edge more than half a century ago, and if I were to define what
Penny meant by those other kinds of books I’d have to say inner-directed books,
books that address the author’s own journey of self-discovery, books like The Seven Storey Mountain by the
Trappist monk Thomas Merton, Shirley MacLaine’s Sage-ing While Age-ing, Victor Frankl’s remarkable Man’s Search for Meaning, C. G. Jung’s
even more remarkable “confrontation with the unconscious” that he chronicled in The
Red Book, and the incredible personal chronicle Proof of Heaven, by Doctor Eben Alexander.
The marketplace is
flooded with those other kinds of books, with new ones coming out every time
someone feels compelled to tell their “amazing” story of self-discovery, which
often translate into self-help books of spiritual awakening, each person’s
story being but another path to one’s true self little realizing that all paths
lead to Rome eventually (I’m still waiting for Shirley MacLaine’s next book
just to see how far her journey of self-discovery has taken her); and that’s
the gist of today’s spiritual musing—the simple fact that every person’s own life is
the way to the resolution of one’s dual nature, one’s personal path to
wholeness and completeness. That’s the power of story that Penny
intuited…
“But they all
serve their purpose,” I replied to her, coming to the defense of all those other
kinds of books which, incidentally, I love to read. “Those books point to the way, each according to the author’s
personal journey of self-discovery; like Moss’s book The Boy Who Died and Came Back. But I guess when you’ve read enough
of those books, they can get boring,” I added, assenting to Penny’s literary
ennui.
“Well they bore me
now. My next book’s going to be a good story,” she said, and when she finished
reading Moss’s book (Penny is stubborn and will finish every book she starts,
including Joyce’s ponderous Ulysses
which she called “a conglomeration of words”) she came into my writing room for
our morning coffee with June Callwood’s Twelve
Weeks In Spring, (“…the inspiring
story of how a group of people came together to help a friend, and in doing so
discovered their own unexpected strength and humanity”), which she found on
one of my shelves and which, ironically, bridged those other kinds of books to
what Penny called a good story with the story of sixty-eight year old Margaret
Fraser’s death by cancer which she did not have to face alone, because her
writer friend June Callwood and a group of friends helped see her through to
the end; but I have not shared this irony with Penny yet. I’ll wait until she
finishes reading Twelve Weeks in Spring first;
then I can share with her why a good story can be so satisfying.
The irony of course is that life itself is the
way to one’s real self; and by way, I mean the natural individuation
process of man’s paradoxical real and false self—which makes every story,
whether it be biographical or fictional, one’s personal way to wholeness and completeness, the only difference being that a
good story satisfies soul’s longing for resolution much more than those other
kinds of books that only point to resolution. That’s why when I pressed Penny
again to explain why she got more out of reading a good story than those other
kinds of books, she replied: “A good story pulls me in, and I experience the
story as I’m reading it. Those other kinds of books don’t do that for me. They
only scratch the surface.”
“That’s because a
good story is about becoming, which
is the teleological imperative of man’s existence. You experience your own becoming when you’re reading a good
story, and this nourishes your soul’s longing for meaning and wholeness. This
is why you find good stories more satisfying.”
“Much more
satisfying than those other kinds of books,” Penny replied, with a note of
triumph in her voice, thus bringing closure to today’s spiritual musing.
———
So,
without going into detail, suffice to say that Jordan Peterson`s fascination
with Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, and Solzhenitsyn can be found in the unique
individual story of these heroic souls, their own personal way to resolving the
dual consciousness of their paradoxical nature, the being and non-being of
their reflective self-consciousness, because their commitment to personal
self-resolution was all-or-nothing for them, just as mine was when I vowed to
find my true self or die trying, and just as Jordan Peterson’s was in his obsessive
quest for an answer to “the general social and political insanity and evil of
the world,”
But
just what was it about Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, and Solzhenitsyn that has touched
the soul of so many readers, especially the budding clinical psychologist Jordan
Peterson? What made their personal story so different that
they influenced world thinking?
Nietzsche ushered in nihilism with his death-of-God
philosophy; Dostoevsky opened the gates of hell with his do-or-die inquiry into
good and evil; and Solzhenitsyn dared to point the finger at himself for the
evil of the world, a moral responsibility that helped bring down the Soviet empire;
this is why their writing will resonate throughout history, because their work speaks
to the haunting mystery of the purpose and meaning of our existence.
Still, that doesn’t explain the power of their
personal story; and the only way I can even begin to explain why seeker Jordan
Peterson was so fascinated with Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, and Solzhenitsyn would
be to explain the enantiodromiac
process of our becoming; or, what Jesus referred to as the making of our two
selves into one.
Gurdjieff had a saying that reflected the premise of
his teaching: “Happy is the man who has a
chair to sit on, happy is a man who has no chair to sit on; but woe to the man
who stands between two chairs.” This is a working metaphor. “Chair” stands
for man’s soul, and Gurdjieff is saying that a man who is born with a soul is
happy (because he doesn’t have to go through the torment of creating it); a man
who has no soul is happy also (because he is blissfully unaware of the torment
he will have to go through to create it); but a man who stands between two
chairs is in the throes of creating his own soul, and this is the worst kind of
suffering that one will ever experience, to which I bear witness in my memoir Gurdjieff Was Wrong, But His Teaching Work, and
more definitely in my most intimate memoir, The
Pearl of Great Price. So, the question is this: where do Nietzsche,
Dostoevsky, and Solzhenitsyn stand in Gurdjieff’s metaphor of the soul?
Gurdjieff was wrong
in his premise that not everyone is born with an immortal soul but can create
one if they know how (which is why he attracted so many followers, especially
intellectuals and artists); but I’ve explored this in Gurdjieff Was Wrong, But His Teaching Works. Suffice to say that
his metaphor holds true regardless, because making our two selves into one is
what the final journey through life is all about; and Nietzsche, Dostoevsky,
and Solzhenitsyn were called to the final journey of their life, the journey to
wholeness and completeness, and their story speaks to their journey of
self-discovery—Nietzsche’s story, which speaks with Zarathustrian bombast to the
desolate geography of man’s non-being
but which ultimately drove Nietzsche insane because he failed to resolve the
paradox of his being and non-being (his real and false self);
Dostoevsky’s story, which speaks with creative genius to his unbearable anguish
of standing between two chairs and in the throes of making his two selves into
one, a monumentally heroic effort that he never got to resolve; and
Solzhenitsyn’s story, which speaks to the most heroic effort of the three
writers, because he came closest to resolving the paradox of his being and non-being by assuming moral responsibility for his own evil that helped
to support the Soviet system that was responsible for the senseless suffering
and death of millions of innocent people. That’s why Jordan Peterson is so
fascinated with Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, and Solzhenitsyn; they provided him with
a road map for his own journey of self-discovery, which he shared with the
world in his Maps of Meaning: The
Architecture of Belief, and international bestselling character-building
book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
that has taken the world by storm…
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