Meaningful Maps, Global Brain Singularity, and Real Speculations (Part II)

The Logic of Hegel on Religion and Absolute Knowing, Peterson and Last

Photo by Vimal S

IV

To turn back to Peterson: ‘[t]he meaning we attribute to objects or situations is not stable,’ and so there is always the risk of a chaos breaking through that overwhelms us in every act of intelligibility (“The Real,” we might say).³⁸ We have to know how to keep unstable things from falling into (Real) chaos, and this requires a certain skillfulness that I take Peterson to be arguing a relationship with mythology can help afford us (I don’t disagree with Peterson that much rides on how we can handle uncertainty, which is why “surprise” is such a critical focus of O.G. Rose). “Myths” can provide us a way to get better at “living with that which we don’t understand” (which the humanities like literature can also help with), and on this our entire ability to make the world intelligible might depend. Without “myth,” we can be bad at handling the unknown, according to Peterson (lacking any training with “(un)veiling”), and since the unknown is unavoidable, anxiety could then eat us alive — which is exactly what seems to have happened.³⁹ Also, we can’t avoid being “mythological” insomuch as we can’t avoid being “always already mapped,” so a society that doesn’t honor the myth will also set itself up to not honor itself, which could lead to pathology. If this is how Peterson thinks, I don’t disagree; however, I do not think we can deal well with “the problem of internally consistent systems” (which all of this is part of) in Global Pluralism by simply presenting “a better map” or “a Religious map” — we need “a map/territory of Absolute Knowing,” per se, which I think a path with Hegel-Nietzsche-Lacan (as Cadell presents) is more likely to get us (but Belonging Again will have to make this case). At the same time, if “spreading the conditions of possibility for Absolute Knowing” is ultimately impossible, perhaps Peterson is “practically” the best we can hope for — time might tell.⁴⁰ ⁴¹

Discussing if “things” exist or not, Peterson says ‘that ‘objective’ things are in fact the product of an interaction between whatever constitutes our limited consciousness and whatever constitutes the unlimited ‘background’ that makes up the world, in the absence of a subject. This is a stance informed by mythology—in particular, by myths of the origin.’⁴² What we experience is tied to what we can experience infused with what we value to experience, and this is “always already” infused with some mythology and/or “map.” In this way, we could see how Peterson might say we are “always already” Jungian, but Cadell teaches us with Lacan that we are (also) “always already” libidinal. The mind is innately “mapped,” but so is it innately “desiring”—on what then should we place our focus and emphasis? We might say that Peterson focuses on the mapping-mind, while Cadell focuses on the libidinal-mind—what is the best path? Rieff sided with Freud, and so does Cadell, perhaps oddly for Jung’s sake, for Religion only avoids self-effacement to the degree it negates/sublates into Absolute Knowing. In this way, Cadell’s efforts are not necessarily against Jung; in fact, only a thinker liker Cadell might save him.

‘My work aims towards the level of absolute knowing,’ Cadell writes, and his argument is that Peterson is stuck on Religion in an age when we need Absolute Knowing.⁴³ What does Cadell mean? To Start, Cadell is referring to The Phenomenology of Spirit by Hegel, and Hegel is positioned in Real Speculations at “thought foundations,” suggesting that if we don’t think Hegel, we lack a necessary foundation for thinking our present moment. A critical claim of Hegel is that thought itself, which collectively we can refer to as “Spirit,” entails a logic in itself which causes it to ‘develop[] itself in basic stages unfolding in shapes we can call consciousness, self-consciousness, reason, spirit, and religion.’⁴⁴ Critically, these movements are “in” thought itself, and so if thought fails to come to terms with one of these movements (and/or to “negate/sublate” them), thought fails to come to terms with itself, and thus it is at risk of being pathological. Thought has “always already” actually moved through these steps — what Hegel traces out is not a process of addition but a realization of the imminent — but problematically it is possible for Spirit to deny what it “is,” leading to trouble. Well, if Peterson is on Religion, hasn’t he realized all the steps? He’s remarkably close, and he’s embedded in a state that attempts to ‘connect[] the universal beyond individuality to communal embodiment’ (even if he does ultimately “fall back” into individualism under Capital), but Religion lacks something important: the ‘understanding that universal idea is a contradiction to singularity.’⁴⁵

What does this mean? It means Religion still ascribes to the possibility of a totality (A/A), and it does not understand there is an irreducible tension between the singular and universal that nevertheless must be tarried with, day in and day out. Religion lacks Absolute Knowing in this sense, which is the acceptance of an essential tension. We can associate this with what Žižek writes about in Tarrying with the Negative, where he claims that, for Kant, ‘metaphysics endeavors to heal the wound of the ‘primordial repression’ (the inaccessibility of the ‘Thing which thinks’) by allocation to the subject a place in the ‘great chain of being,’ ’ while in Absolute Knowing we accept that this “wound” cannot be healed.⁴⁶ In accepting this though we gain freedom, for ‘[w]hat metaphysics fails to notice is the price to be paid for [placement in ‘the chain of being’]: the loss of the very capacity it wanted to account for, i.e., human freedom.’⁴⁷ Absolute Knowing avoids this mistake, and so in it we have freedom, though this is a difficult and anxious freedom (of lack). Looking ahead, we can say Peterson in Religion lacks the freedom of contradiction accepted in Absolute Knowing, which ultimately leaves him ill-equipped for Global Pluralism, Global Capital, and the Global Brain. So long as he lacks Absolute Knowing, Peterson is not habituated to contradiction, and since there is a contradiction at the heart of Capitalism, say between stabilizing-culture and accelerating-technology (as we’ll expand on), he is ill-prepared to “tarry with it” and instead positions himself to correct the tension which, for Hegel, cannot be corrected. Peterson seems stuck in circles, ever-frustrated, ever-likely to simply explicitly identify with a tradition like Christianity and be done with the problem, which “rationally” will be a justified move (“the problem of internally consistent system”). For rationality requires the nonrational, but in Religion we have “rationality and a more Kantian nonrationality,” while in Absolutely Knowing we have “Hegelian (non)rationality,” a slight distinction that is of great consequence.

Kant’s effort is to ground freedom in that which is across a noumena, similar to the Counter-Enlightenment, and Peterson does the same. Freedom is based on a “Transcendent X,” per se, versus freedom be found in “a lack of being” itself, but to their defense that seems to be the only option to save freedom, because scientifically (in Reason and Spirit), freedom is hard to defend (not that it can’t be done). And if there is no freedom, the moral and ethical life is in great jeopardy, so saving freedom seems necessary for saving the Social, but how freedom is defended is everything: in Hegel’s Absolute Knowing, freedom is saved by “an essential lack” and contradiction, notably in “substance as subject,” which Peterson approaches with his necessarily mythologized subject, but Cadell warns that Peterson lacks the last step. ‘With the level of absolute knowing we get a special inversion of the logic that characterizes the phenomenal drama,’ and if this inversion is missed then Spirit is in jeopardy (and I would argue the consequences of failure could be more dire at Religion than they would be at say Spirit or Reason: for Peterson to fail could be worse than for Harris or Dawkins).⁴⁸ Why? Consider:

‘these processes [of Spirit in Hegel] are explored from their logical interiority, and thus if (your) thought follows carefully, he takes one on a thought-adventure through these processes as historical shapes. In this way, one can study how spirit stumbles and falls in the sheer unrest of life towards knowledge of its own truth as the lack in being itself, which precisely opens up the capacity for constant self-superseding and communing with otherness.’⁴⁹

Without Absolute Knowing, the movement of Spirit is unfinished, and we lack capacities for “ever-(be)coming” (Nietzsche) and handlings difference, which in Global Pluralism is an especially dire mistake. We could say that if we stay in Religion, we never move from ‘the ‘God of the Beyond’ [to] what we might want to call the ‘God of Historical Freedom,’ ’ which also means we lack ‘constant self-superseding and communing with otherness,’ which are critically necessary today faced with Pluralism and technological advancement (which is foundation to Cadell’s thinking).⁵⁰

The subject cannot locate the subject in itself (as a camera cannot record itself without an eternal regression, to use an image from Peter Kreeft and Hofstadter), and so there is a “lack” the subject and Spirit are always orbiting, and primarily identifying with this ever-orbiting itself as (part of) the Absolute, versus “the Thing being orbited,” is a key move of Absolute Knowing (for this is the movement and development of subjectivity, and “substance is subject,” making possible the concerns of psychoanalysis: we accept Lacan’s ‘constitutively divided[] $’ as absolute).⁵¹ Žižek stresses that ‘the subject emerges as the crack in the universal Substance,’ a point which ‘hints on the notion of the subject as the ‘vanishing meditator’ in the precise sense of the Freudian-Lacanian Real, i.e., the structure of an element which, although nowhere actually present and as such inaccessible to our experience, nonetheless has to be retroactively constructed, presupposed, if all other elements are to retain their consistency.’⁵² Peterson, the CE, and Religion are so close to this in that they understand there is something about the subject which develops in relation to something inaccessible (and necessarily so unless we are to “unleash the unconscious/chaos”), but while the more Kantian approach places the inaccessible outside the subject, Hegel places the inaccessible imminently with(in) the subject itself, as Spirit develops historically in relation to this realization. Cadell’s claim is that Spirit cannot develop beyond Religion if it historically develops according to a subject that places “the inaccessible” outside itself versus in itself, and this is what Peterson indeed does. Since Religion cannot address Global Pluralism or Global Capitalism, this is not enough for our historic movement.

‘[W]hat [Hegel] ultimately prepared scientific spirit for is the logic of its own free self-determination in truth,’ and Peterson does the same, warning Reason and Spirit to take seriously that ‘Hitler was human; Stalin too […] What does that say about being human?’⁵³ ⁵⁴ But without Hegel, Peterson cannot address his valid terror at humanity, for he lacks the needed logical structure. Peterson rightly stresses Nietzsche, but Nietzsche also needs Hegel’s logic, which ‘reveals its truth in the dialectic of Being-Nothing, opening a process of Becoming ever-returning to itself, in what appears to be an infinite boot-strapping process, a progressive self-recursive loop, or simply a ‘circle of circle.’ ’⁵⁵ ⁵⁶ But is that really the case if ‘[i]ndividual persons […] ‘unconsciously’ embody mythological themes[?] Such embodiment becomes particularly evident in the case of great individuals, where the play of ‘divine forces’ becomes virtually tangible.’⁵⁷ For Peterson, if subjects are “always already” mythological, then we contain profound resources for Nietzschean “Overmen” and Children within us, and indeed, Last would agree we “contain” resources for Childhood, but the question is “how” we do so. Our those “inner resources” based on lack or myth (ergo, “collective unconscious”)? Generally, while Peterson with his Jung want us to realize divine and heroic potential within, Last and Žižek want us to realize an essential lack. Who’s right? If our historic moment was one of developing Religion, Peterson “practically work” (even if “technically lacking”), but if ours if one of Absolute Knowing, Peterson will cause a self-effacing regression if not sublated. These are the stakes of rightly identifying our moment, and if we take Global Capital and Global Pluralism seriously, I think we should side with Last and Žižek.⁵⁸ ⁵⁹

Our emphasis here on the need for Absolute Knowing is not meant to cast out Jung, Peterson, and Religion: the argument is that only at Absolute Knowing can these be maintained without pathological and dire consequence. Could some people emphasize Religion while others focus on Absolute Knowing? Why must everyone be the same in Absolute Knowing? A fair question, but it is because this move to Absolute Knowing is not a matter of personal choice; it is necessary because of our historic moment, which has given us Global Pluralism and Global Capitalism, bringing us to a place of radical connectivity between people of “deep difference” that we cannot ignore (as efforts for “multiculturalism” attempted according to thinkers like Berger and Hunger, as discussed in Belonging Again (Part I)). We must face “deep difference,” and the claim is that this will destabilize Religion into pathology without Absolute Knowing. ‘Hegel saw the concept as universal only through historical particular becoming, as the real actuality of illusory appearance (religion) as a necessary detour to the state of true knowing (or what is described in the Science of Logic as the philosophical sciences).’⁶⁰ Does this mean Hegel thought Religion would be left behind? No, it would be negated/sublated, but that is only possible for those who are willing “to die to their Religion” like the Christ who unleashes Holy Spirit (Žižek).

Our emphasis here on the need for Absolute Knowing is not meant to cast out Jung, Peterson, and Religion: the argument is that only at Absolute Knowing can these be maintained without pathological and dire consequence. Could some people emphasize Religion while others focus on Absolute Knowing? Why must everyone be the same in Absolute Knowing? A fair question, but it is because this move to Absolute Knowing is not a matter of personal choice; it is necessary because of our historic moment, which has given us Global Pluralism and Global Capitalism, bringing us to a place of radical connectivity between people of “deep difference” that we cannot ignore (as efforts for “multiculturalism” attempted according to thinkers like Berger and Hunger, as discussed in Belonging Again (Part I)). We must face “deep difference,” and the claim is that this will destabilize Religion into pathology without Absolute Knowing. ‘Hegel saw the concept as universal only through historical particular becoming, as the real actuality of illusory appearance (religion) as a necessary detour to the state of true knowing (or what is described in the Science of Logic as the philosophical sciences).’⁶⁰ Does this mean Hegel thought Religion would be left behind? No, it would be negated/sublated, but that is only possible for those who are willing “to die to their Religion” like the Christ who unleashes Holy Spirit (Žižek).

Thought has “always already” entailed all the steps of “The Phenomenological Journey” described by Cadell and Hegel, but even “as” this gestalt, Spirit does not necessarily realize itself as what it “is” in itself. There could be individuals in every age who make the entire realization of gestalt, but collectively what the historic moment requires of a critical mass could shift. As Cadell writes:

‘On the level of absolute knowledge, we must think of reason, spirit, and religion as a type of fractal structure unfolding in every individual and every society historically, and so long as humans exist, we might say ‘eternally.’ Here the position of absolute knowing overlaps with, not a position of totalizing positive knowledge, but rather the position of the crack in knowledge where things are incomplete, where action is abyssal, and thus reason and myth alike, must serve a truth that escapes both.’⁶¹

There have been ages emphasizing Reason (Enlightenment), Spirit (Harris), and Religion (Peterson), and though this development is not straightforward or crisp (it is perhaps more wave-like, similar to a stock market), and though at any moment the world can be upended or destroyed (with say nuclear weaponry), it is fair to say that different moments call for different modes of subjectivity for more people than less. And whatever a specific historic moment calls for is that which must be increasingly realized (not “added”) in order for all realized-advances of the Phenomenological Journey to be maintained without pathology. If our moment calls for Absolute Knowing in light of Global Capital and Global Pluralism, then keeping Peterson and Jung requires Last and Lacan. Our effort is not to remove them but keep them in play (such are the stakes of never forsaking ‘the historic social community’).⁶²

itself,” no, for it is “internally consistent” — that is the problem — but it will become increasingly pathological (“self-effacing”) while increasing the probabilities that something external to it and its logic will arise unexpectedly (like “black swans”) that will cause trouble. This is a critical move to understand, one Žižek can help us grasp in helping us see ‘by way of the Kantian transcendental turn, reality itself is virtualized, becom[ing] an artifact, becom[ing] ‘virtual reality’ […]’⁶³ Phenomena are not fully themselves — ‘[t]he whole point of Kant’s antinomies is that we can positively demonstrate that things-in-themselves cannot be of the same nature as phenomena: phenomena are constituted, their texture is structured, by transcendental categories’ — and so the world is not what it is in itself.⁶⁴ Every state of reality can be “virtualized” now after Kant, and hence every state can be made infinite “in itself” if a way can be found to keep it “virtual” as such. Reality is separated from what is, and so it is “unbound” insomuch as it can find a way to sustain itself, and my claim is this is precisely “the problem of internally consistent systems” — these “maps” (“that are not the territory”) have indeed found a way to sustain themselves indefinitely, “unbound” in their Kantian “virtuality.” This is similar to how Žižek brilliantly describes Keynes — these “maps” are playing a ‘virtual game […] to postpone ad infinitum the moment of final settlement’ (“with the territory”), and indeed, they can — until perhaps suddenly and all at once they cannot.⁶⁵

The claim is thus this: Peterson’s Religion can go on forever because it is “virtual,” and so it can successfully function like Keynesianism and forever avoid “a final settlement” (not that it will). All “internally consistent systems” can do this — the problem is that they work, that we can live our lives according to them (Peterson is right to say Religion can afford us a way of life that’s even better than most) — and all of them today are naturally trying to do so in Global Pluralism, but it is precisely “The Global Brain” and/or “encounters with Otherness” that can cause “the final settlement” to be triggered for “maps” (‘Keynes concedes that the moment of some final ‘settling of accounts’ would be a catastrophe […] the entire system would collapse’).⁶⁶ The suggestion of Last (and myself) is that it is highly probable that “the final settlement” eventually be trigged by Global Capital and/or Global Pluralism (the outside of Religion), and so Religion is not a viable option forever, even if it might be viable for a long time. But note now it is viable as ‘a monstrous form of creative-destruction that only gets stronger when it fails, and overdetermines all ‘material social processes’ ’ — is this at best, a whimper from Eliot without a bang?⁶⁷ There is no catastrophe or “great leveling” as Studebaker describes, but — what if there will be? Are we though thinking the future to think this thought, as Hegel warned against? Or are we only thinking that which Hegel’s “Phenomenological Journey” would have us think — the need for Absolute Knowing — given thought to itself? Are we thinking the future or only thinking thought? (The later, I think.)

A negation/sublation to Absolute Knowing is necessary (as I would argue something similar is needed for Demand, discussed in II.1), or eventually there will likely be a catastrophe that then Pinker could say was due to a lack of Reason, Harris a lack of Spirit, Peterson a lack of Religion…(“the problem of internally consistent systems”). But it’s different to say the problem is “a lack of Absolute Knowing”—how? Yes, because that is the final possible step: if that doesn’t work, then we lacked nothing, because lack would have at that point become “essential” (and so not nothing). Our failure would then just be contingency, and that might be at that point seen as heroic. If so, even for the sake of Peterson’s project, we must finish the Phenomenology Journey.

V

Hegel’s categories of understanding must emerge from history, which can be counter to Kant’s ‘a priori transcendental categories,’ and that means Spirit is always “limited” from thinking beyond the historic process (“The State of Now”), and this limit is “(part of) thinking” itself (for thinking is history realizing itself) — in this is Hegel’s hope to bridge the singular and the universal via history.⁶⁸ Hence, we are not to abandon ‘the Kantian critical philosophy which avoids regression back into endless mythological tarrying,’ but negate/sublate it: we are to stay with the contradictions of Now (say between Democracy and Captialism, as discussed by Benjamin Studebaker), which means ‘we stay with the rational antinomies of history, like we find in liberal capitalism and soviet communism, or in woke politically correct culture and traditional Christian culture […] not to remain in such oppositions eternally, but to derive from the antinomy a new positive result that would not have been possible otherwise.’⁶⁹ This is the work of philosophy, assuming the Now as Now/Creative (the only hope of avoiding the ‘double-bind’ where ‘the conditions of possibility coincide with the conditions of impossibility’ after Kant, for we accept the thinking of the future as impossible, the acceptance of which paradoxically opens “conditions of possibility” in the Now), and hence philosophy must be historic.⁷⁰ Otherwise, we will not be ready for the crisis that awaits us for which only Absolute Knowing can handle: ‘the ‘collapse of the big Other’ part of our everyday experience […] our very physical survival [easily] hinges on our ability to consummate the act of assuming fully the ‘nonexistence of the Other,’ of tarrying with the negative.’⁷¹

We cannot handle the loss of the Big Other all at once though (the “chaos” would be too much); the process must be gradual; it must be “(un)veiled,” or else our necessary ‘process of conceptual becoming’ could prove disastrous (even if a necessary risk), for we will not well ‘navigate the unity of being and nothing.’⁷² “(Un)veiling” is a critical concept in O.G. Rose, and Hegel’s history is necessarily a process of “(un)veiling,” of revealing and concealing simultaneously so that we are not either lost with uncertainty or overwhelmed by the (Real) whole; if this process is done well, we will improve in our capacities to handle ourselves as ‘a self-repelling one, a self-distancing one, that is constantly maintaining a gap between identity and difference, or self-similarity and otherness.’⁷³ There is a sense of “(un)veiling” (and so “Love(craft)”) in Peterson, which is to say an understanding that something like “The Real” can destroy us if we are not careful. ‘The exposure of the unknown can be regarded as beneficial under those circumstances where positive adaptation to the unknown is viewed as possible, but only as destructive where lack of faith in the heroic rules’ — Peterson is not navie.⁷⁴ I agree with him, but notice “heroic” in Peterson, which is suggested as the right posture toward “chaos.” This is not wrong, but a stress of Lacan is that an encounter with “The Real” can undermine also our very understandings of what it means to be “heroic” (“givens” are lost), at which point the resources and resolve of the hero to maintain his or her self could collapse and fail. The presuppositions according to which the “heroic” is defined might have to be preserved, which is to say an emphasis on “the heroic” could keep us firmly situated in Religion.

Does Cadell not support “the heroic” in his thinking? Yes, but “the heroic” situated in Religion must defend the presuppositions of the Religion, or else “the heroic” will be lost with its presuppositions if they are deconstructed, possibly leading to nihilism. If Global Pluralism and Global Capital threaten Religion and our only mode of response to Pluralism and Capital is “the heroic,” this will require an antagonism to Pluralism and Capital that preserves the Religion, which is not always bad, but in a historic time needing Absolute Knowing, this will lead to pathology and self-effacement. Cadell stresses “The Absolute Knower,” which at our historic moment is required if “the heroic” is indeed to be itself and not unwittingly fall into something regression (like “a fighter” a nation convinces to fight for it through propaganda and xenophobia). Peterson warns against confronting “chaos” too soon, which is true, but what is “chaos” on Religion is “lack” on Absolute Knowing—similar logic applies, but the response changes. The Absolute Knower stresses for us to be careful or else we could slip into self-effacement and pathology without realizing it.

Peterson wants us to avoid self-enclosure, and in that way accepts a need for the benefits of Absolute Knowing. ‘Ideology confines human potential to a narrow and defined realm,’ he writes, which makes people vulnerable to carrying out mass atrocities if manipulated by power, but the warning of Cadell is that Peterson himself could end up in “a narrow and defined realm” in Religion when confronted by the results of Pluralism and Capital.&75 Peterson knows there is danger when there is ‘[an] adoption of a particular (socially determined) conceptualization of the way’ (for who determines this determination?), but it is also necessary lest there be chaos: the hope is that there still be enough space for ‘provisional establishment[s] of the meaning of experiences,’ so that the overarching social determination doesn’t erase difference and individuation too much.⁷⁶ But Cadell’s point is that where the logical form itself necessitates closedness and so “pre-establishment” — and logic not thought at Absolute Knowing will end up A/A versus A/B — then some form of tyranny and self-effacement becomes inevitable, regardless how much “space” there is for differences within A/A (it’s ultimately all still A/A).⁷⁷ Absolute Knowing is better “in all possible worlds” compared to just Religion, especially as of the historic moment in which Absolute Knowing becoming most fitting, and for Last, due to Pluralism and Capital, that moment is now. Peterson writes:

‘at the bottom of human motivation for evil: People need their group identification, because that identification protects them, literally, from the terrible forces of the unknown. It is for this reason that every individual who is not decadent [(Fukuyama’s ‘last man’)] will strive to protect his territory, actual and psychological. But the tendency to protect means hatred of the other, and the inevitability of war — and we are now too technologically powerful to engage in war.’⁷⁸

Yes, but is Religion enough of an “address” for this problem? Cadell says not by itself, for the “address” needed when A/A-thinking itself is the problem is A/B, which is at Absolute Knowing. Again, Peterson despises fascism, and he is correct that ‘[t]he fascist is willing to sacrifice painful freedom for order,’ but here we will note another example of why Peterson “falls back” into what he critiques in sharing its logical form (A/A).⁷⁹ In my view, Peterson is problematic to identify the fascist and decadent as opposites (for example), for we learn in Hegel that decadence contains the logic of fascism as fascism contains the seeds of decadence. Peterson as a result falls into one-sidedness (stuck in Religion and A/A), versus identify “otherness” as always contained in what “is” (ever-“becoming-other,” A/B). Fascism contains decadence, as decadence contains fascism; Capitalism contains Communism (say in the family), while Communism contains Capitalism (or becomes an inverted State Communism). Order eventually “passes over” into chaos, as chaos eventually “passes over” into order: there is actually no one-sidedness. The mistake is “always already” there, ready to be made, say when we consider “chaos” and “order” as always opposites, which is perhaps fine on the side of Hegel’s Understanding, but if we do not then negate/sublate these opposites into a dialectical continuum (“situation”) on the side of Hegel’s Reason, we “fall back into one-sidedness” and easily end up like what we even rightly critique. Cadell is warning about this when he writes that ‘Peterson’s thinking […] tends towards […] one-sided positionality: capitalism over communism, traditional Christian culture over woke politically correct culture,’ and so on, and the very fact this happens in Peterson’s thinking suggests the logical form he operates according to is A/A, and hence Religion without Absolute Knowing.⁸⁰

If Peterson emphasizes “the heroic” from within one-sidedness, then we will have conflict, and the heroic will have to maintain itself by denying its “passing over into otherness” when that occurs, and the heroic will then be heroic in being in conflict with his or her self (the $ of Lacan will emerge and the intellectual resources prove inadequate to identify it). This will be chaos, following from a call to order. Hegel describes ‘the unity of the opposites,’ and this suggests we should expect Peterson’s hero (order) and dragon (chaos) to (at some point) prove continual.⁸¹ Peterson is not wrong when he writes: ‘The great dragon of chaos limits the pursuit of individual interest. The struggle with the dragon — against the forces that devour will and hope — constitutes the heroic battle in the mythological world […]’⁸² Yes, but what about the day when the hero transforms into the dragon because the hero was genuinely heroic according to say a Religion, a transformation catalyzed by the growth of Global Pluralism, Global Capital, and ultimately the technology leading us toward the Global Brain Singularity? ‘Meaning is the manifestation of the divine individual adaptive path,’ Peterson writes, and perhaps that is true up to Religion, but what about as of Absolute Knowing, when the hero and dragon (be)come the hero/dragon because the hero succeeded?⁸³ How do we “adapt” to being chaos because we are order? This will be an adaptation to a trauma, a learning to handle “The Real” — and it might be the greatest challenge of all. And if all we have is the logical form of A/A, we will be self-effaced.

A/A was sufficient for most of history, until our current moment (before our AI-Causer, discussed in II.1), but now we require realizing the A/B that was “always already” within A/A. Can Peterson think this trauma of “becoming-other”? If it’s too painful, Absolute Knowing is denied, and what becomes inevitable is what Althusser called ‘ ‘overdetermination’ [which is when] the very determining instance is overdetermined by the total network of relations within which it plays the determining role.’⁸⁴ To put this another way, Capital “overdetermines” because all free and creative possibility within it is “always already” set to be “too much like the logic of Capital,” and so no real “break” becomes possible (but also no “unleashing of chaos,” we might add). This suggests why Peterson tends toward one-sidedness: he must in being overdetermined, stuck ‘in-itself [versus] for-itself’ (Hegel).⁸⁵ In a historic moment requiring A/B, if we are in Religion, Spirit, and Reason, then we are “overdetermined” as A/A, and all that follows from us in all of our efforts to “address” our moment will also be “overdetermined” by the logical frame that lead to our moment needing “address” in the first place.

Peterson is not wrong to say ‘[t]he human purpose, if such a thing can be considered, is to pursue meaning — to extend the domain of light, of consciousness — despite limitation. A meaningful event exists on the boundary between order and chaos.’⁸⁶ Yes, but “a meaningful event” can be “overdetermined” by A/A or Capital, notably when A/A is precisely the cause of our need for “a meaningful event” (such as in our “Meaning Crisis,” as of 2025). This is what Religion will do in an age needing Absolute Knowing: only Absolute Knowing today, as the basis of ‘self-reflexive social constitution,’ can keep “the beautiful from collapsing into the good” (A/B), as Thomas Jockin warns about — but the meaning of this will take The Fate of Beauty to unpack.⁸⁷

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Notes

³⁸Peterson, Jordan B. Maps of Meaning. New York, NY: Routledge, 1999: 33.

³⁹The way Peterson describes how myth works makes me think of Leibniz and the matter of “similarity/difference,” where things are made intelligible through a likeness that is gradually unveiled to not be a sameness. ‘The metaphoric statements of myth work because unknown or partially known things inevitably share characteristics of importance with somewhat more thoroughly investigated, comprehended, and familiar things.’A Also, ‘[the] general symbolic construction takes many particular forms, each of which might be said to constitute a partial attempt to represent the unrepresentable whole.’B Myths work by gradual understanding through time, which habituates us to handle the unknown through time; without them, we are more likely to be anxious.

^APeterson, Jordan B. Maps of Meaning. New York, NY: Routledge, 1999: 137.

^BPeterson, Jordan B. Maps of Meaning. New York, NY: Routledge, 1999: 137.

⁴⁰When we cannot make the move from Religion to Absolute Knowing, and yet we cannot bring ourselves to explicitly and overtly follow say the God of Abraham, we might end up occupying a space for we don’t deny Christianity but also don’t explicitly own it. We acknowledge the need for Religion through perhaps Jung but can’t make a Kierkegaardian “leap of faith,” and so perhaps we might need Jung’s ‘collective unconscious’ to function as a source of value that might be called “God.”^A Peterson is in Religion but seems stuck trying not to fall back into Spirit with Sam Harris, and his move seems to be to argue that reality is unintelligible without mythology, which inherently means value, and if this is the precondition on which a reality rests, then it wouldn’t make much sense to say that the source of that value doesn’t exist. That must be “God,” and that is reasonably associated with “collective unconsciousness” to some degree—and so Peterson gives us a reasonable belief in God that nevertheless isn’t regression. Does this work? Others can decide that, but for me the question is if God as “the ground of all value” is enough to compel us into forgiving people who hurt us and “remaining open” like Nietzschean Children (to offer examples). If so, perhaps Peterson’s God is enough.

And Peterson might say that his “God” must be enough, for ‘[t]he mythic universe is a place to act, not a place to perceive,’ and since we are “always already” acting, we have already ascribed to this “God.”^B Since everyone is “always already” acting, this “God” has authority and real causal impact on our lives, and hence this “God” is real. Fair enough, but this “God” might only help us with individual problems—this “God” will not necessarily help us with the Social or Global Pluralism. I myself might choose to put myself under this “God” like Peterson has and have this “God” exercise real authority on me, but what will I do with the Christian, the Muslim, the Communist, the Capitalist…? What will I do with economics, politics, and the like? To this, Peterson might reply that we should worry about ourselves before we worry about changing the world, and I don’t necessarily disagree: his works on personal development and his “rules of life” should be generally followed before one thanks about helping others (or else we might be at risk of “loving humanity” instead of “loving individuals,” as Dostoevsky warned about). But all the same, we will have to have some stance to Global Pluralism, and what will that be?

^APeterson, Jordan B. Maps of Meaning. New York, NY: Routledge, 1999: 91.

^BPeterson, Jordan B. Maps of Meaning. New York, NY: Routledge, 1999: 109.

⁴¹It will require much more work and The Fate of Beauty, but I would claim that Peterson has responded to Rieff with his Jung toward Beauty, but I think this move requires Lacan. (Beauty is (re)turned to unexpectedly.)

⁴²Peterson, Jordan B. Maps of Meaning. New York, NY: Routledge, 1999: 139.

⁴³Last, Cadell. Real Speculations. Philosophy Portal Books, 2025: 32.

⁴⁴Last, Cadell. Real Speculations. Philosophy Portal Books, 2025: 42.

⁴⁵Last, Cadell. Real Speculations. Philosophy Portal Books, 2025: 43–44.

⁴⁶Žižek, Slavoj. Tarrying with the Negative. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993: 15.

⁴⁷Žižek, Slavoj. Tarrying with the Negative. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993: 15.

⁴⁸Last, Cadell. Real Speculations. Philosophy Portal Books, 2025: 44.

⁴⁹Last, Cadell. Real Speculations. Philosophy Portal Books, 2025: 44.

⁵⁰Last, Cadell. Real Speculations. Philosophy Portal Books, 2025: 44.

⁵¹Žižek, Slavoj. Tarrying with the Negative. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993: 30.

⁵²Žižek, Slavoj. Tarrying with the Negative. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993: 33.

⁵³Last, Cadell. Real Speculations. Philosophy Portal Books, 2025: 46.

⁵⁴Peterson, Jordan B. Maps of Meaning. New York, NY: Routledge, 1999: 310.

⁵⁵Last, Cadell. Real Speculations. Philosophy Portal Books, 2025: 47.

⁵⁶Peterson’s horror at the human leads to him considering Satan in “The Hostile Brothers” (Chapter 5), which is fitting for Religion. For Absolute Knowing, Peterson needs Thomas J. J. Altizer (as Cadell has taught on), but without him it makes sense that Peterson would end up writing We Who Wrestle With God, for he stays in Religion with “hero before chaos” versus Absolute Knowing with “subject/lack.”

⁵⁷Peterson, Jordan B. Maps of Meaning. New York, NY: Routledge, 1999: 320.

⁵⁸As an additional note, Cadell emphasizes that in Hegel we do not find a “theory of everything” (TOE), but a description of the develop of thought or Spirit to itself which has resulted in historic manifestations and forms, the consequences of which we are living with today. At best, Hegel is ‘a precondition for the science of a complete theory of the universe,’ and we might think of this precondition as teaching us that we must assume “a historic unfolding that (un)veils thought and Spirit,” which means we must not get ahead of “The Now” into the future, or flee from the present into the past.^A “The State of Now” (a play on “The State of Nature”) is what we must assume and “tarry with”: any TOE that somehow avoids the present is doomed. Hence, we should be ‘extremely skeptical of any totalizing theoretics and paradigmatics that tend towards an unreflexive knowledge in regards to the historical position and action of the actual theorist.’^B

Hegel’s focus is on ‘a ‘coming-to-be’ of knowing itself, and also to explicate for the reader what the ‘standpoint’ of knowing means for philosophy.’^C If we take Hegel seriously, we need our standpoint to be Absolute Knowing; anything less will deny thought’s very own “coming-to-be” as itself historically, setting it up for pathology. Indeed, ‘it is only at th[e] location of absolute knowing [that] we can start to ask ourselves questions about our relation to any notion of an absolute being’: is it a “collective unconscious” or “lack” somehow?^D Hegel’s warning is that if we ask such questions anywhere but from Absolute Knowing, we will take a standpoint that denies thinking’s historic development and coming-to-be, which in that development being essential to thought itself, means we are starting from a position that necessitates thought’s fail as and to itself. This is a mistake from Religion: there cannot be ‘absolute knowing to absolute idea to absolute freedom.’^E

^ALast, Cadell. Real Speculations. Philosophy Portal Books, 2025: 52.

^BLast, Cadell. Real Speculations. Philosophy Portal Books, 2025: 55.

^CLast, Cadell. Real Speculations. Philosophy Portal Books, 2025: 63.

^DLast, Cadell. Real Speculations. Philosophy Portal Books, 2025: 70.

^ELast, Cadell. Real Speculations. Philosophy Portal Books, 2025: 71.

⁵⁹An important claim of Žižek is that we must think of Kant and the noumena in terms of desire and psychanalysis—‘Lacan’s ultimate point in his reading of Kant is that the distinction between phenomena and the Thing can be sustained only within the space of desire as structured by the intervention of the signifier: it is this intervention that brings about the split separating the accessible, symbolically structured, reality from the void of the Real, the index of the lost Thing’—and if we do this and also accept some “split” is needed for the subject to avoid “the unleashing of unconsciousness/chaos,” then we must take Freud and Lacan seriously, which at the same time moves us into a Hegel for whom Spirit contains limitation for its own historic unfolding and meditation.^A History is Absolute (Un)limit, and Absolute Knowing historic knowing of Absolute (Un)limit. ‘Hegel’s Absolute […] is the positivization of the very limit itself.’^B

^AŽižek, Slavoj. Tarrying with the Negative. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993: 37.

^BLast, Cadell. Real Speculations. Philosophy Portal Books, 2025: 101.

⁶⁰Last, Cadell. Real Speculations. Philosophy Portal Books, 2025: 104.

⁶¹Last, Cadell. Real Speculations. Philosophy Portal Books, 2025: 31.

⁶²Last, Cadell. Real Speculations. Philosophy Portal Books, 2025: 107.

⁶³Žižek, Slavoj. Tarrying with the Negative. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993: 85.

⁶⁴Žižek, Slavoj. Tarrying with the Negative. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993: 84.

⁶⁵Žižek, Slavoj. Tarrying with the Negative. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993: 80.

⁶⁶Žižek, Slavoj. Tarrying with the Negative. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993: 80.

⁶⁷Last, Cadell. Real Speculations. Philosophy Portal Books, 2025: 35.

⁶⁸Last, Cadell. Real Speculations. Philosophy Portal Books, 2025: 81.

⁶⁹Last, Cadell. Real Speculations. Philosophy Portal Books, 2025: 31.

⁷⁰Žižek, Slavoj. Tarrying with the Negative. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993: 171.

⁷¹Žižek, Slavoj. Tarrying with the Negative. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993: 237.

⁷²Last, Cadell. Real Speculations. Philosophy Portal Books, 2025: 112.

⁷³Last, Cadell. Real Speculations. Philosophy Portal Books, 2025: 119.

⁷⁴Peterson, Jordan B. Maps of Meaning. New York, NY: Routledge, 1999: 334.

⁷⁵Peterson, Jordan B. Maps of Meaning. New York, NY: Routledge, 1999: 358.

⁷⁶Peterson, Jordan B. Maps of Meaning. New York, NY: Routledge, 1999: 361.

⁷⁷To offer a formulation:

Decentralization + A/A = “The Fascistic”
Centralization + A/A = “The Totalizing”
(triggering potentially back-and-forth between them)

(Decentralization or Centralization) + A/B = (De)centralization
(a precondition for “Holy Spirit” and or Geopadia)

A/A + x = self-effacement and failure
A/B + x = perhaps failure but not self-effacement

Hence, A/A should always be negated/sublated into A/B, for though success isn’t guaranteed, at least self-effacement isn’t guaranteed either.
(Religion is perhaps “the best of all possible” manifestations of A/A, but it is still not A/B.)

⁷⁸Peterson, Jordan B. Maps of Meaning. New York, NY: Routledge, 1999: 460.

⁷⁹Peterson, Jordan B. Maps of Meaning. New York, NY: Routledge, 1999: 339.

⁸⁰Last, Cadell. Real Speculations. Philosophy Portal Books, 2025: 31.

⁸¹Žižek, Slavoj. Tarrying with the Negative. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993: 122.

⁸²Peterson, Jordan B. Maps of Meaning. New York, NY: Routledge, 1999: 467.

⁸³Peterson, Jordan B. Maps of Meaning. New York, NY: Routledge, 1999: 467.

⁸⁴Žižek, Slavoj. Tarrying with the Negative. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993: 139.

⁸⁵Žižek, Slavoj. Tarrying with the Negative. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993: 142.

⁸⁶Peterson, Jordan B. Maps of Meaning. New York, NY: Routledge, 1999: 468.

⁸⁷Last, Cadell. Real Speculations. Philosophy Portal Books, 2025: 89.

⁸⁸Last, Cadell. Real Speculations. Philosophy Portal Books, 2025: 37.

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