Why Ken Wilber Is Wrong About Postmodernism

[zurew]

1 hour ago, Nilsi said:

He’s not trying to prove that moral statements are objective in the rigorous analytic sense. But I don’t think that’s a confusion on his part - it’s just that he’s operating in a completely different discourse.

When Peterson talks about morality, he’s responding to Nietzsche’s death of God - the collapse of any stable master signifier - and trying to rebuild meaning from the structure of lived human existence, not from transcendental, mind-independent facts.

He’s much closer to Heideggerian existentialism than to analytic moral realism. He explicitly draws on Heidegger’s distinction between the ontic and the ontological: humans are the beings who both exist contingently and are aware of Being itself. So for Peterson, morality is rooted in the primary structures of human Being - not in some detached logical realm. His claim to “objective” morality is Heideggerian in that sense: it is objective within the clearing of human existence, but still ultimately contingent on human primacy. It’s not objectivity in the sense of truth existing independently of all life - it’s objectivity that emerges within Being, because of Being.

Honestly, I thought analytic philosophy had already caught up to this after Dreyfus…

You, on the other hand, seem to be asking for a form of objective morality that’s external to human life altogether - morality as truth independent of all subjects. Which is fine, I guess - but it’s simply not the project Peterson is engaged in.

I might have a completely wrong read on him, but I think that he is trying to establish objective morality in the sense I outlined it, but I can be wrong.

To me this is similar to how he uses the term "God". Given his definition of God "whatever is on the top of your  value hierarchy", all atheists can say that they value God and that they believe in God, but lets not pretend that given this completely different sense of God that somehow he established that all atheists believe in some kind of all powerful , all good Mind.

 

 

Also to be clear, it doesn't have to be transcendental in the sense that 'truth existing independently of all life' (like truth existing in some weird realm independent from this world), its just that its not dependent on the opinion of any agent or any group of agents.

Its similar to the idea that consuming a large amount of poision will kill you, no matter what any group of agents say or think about it (because the truthvalue of it killing you isn't dependent on their opinion.) This doesnt entail, that the truth of the poision killing you exists in some transcendental logic realm, because it can be dependent on the laws and vulnerabilities of this particular world (where changing the truthvalue would be done by changing physical laws and it wouldnt be done by changing the opinions of people)

So the definition I gave is compatible with both a transcendental realm, but its also compatible with it being the fact of this world.

Edited yesterday at 04:55 PM by zurew

[Nilsi]

2 hours ago, zurew said:

I might have a completely wrong read on him, but I think that he is trying to establish objective morality in the sense I outlined it, but I can be wrong.

To me this is similar to how he uses the term "God". Given his definition of God "whatever is on the top of your hierarchy of values", all atheists can say that they value God and that they believe in God, but lets not pretend that given this completely different sense of God that somehow he established that all atheists believe in some kind of all powerful , all good Mind.

 

 

Also to be clear it doesn't have to be transcendental in the sense that 'truth existing independently of all life' (like truth existing in some weird realm independent from this world), its just that its not dependent on the opinion of any agent or any group of agents. Its similar to the idea that consuming a large amount of poision will kill you, no matter what any group of agents say or think about it (because the truthvalue of it killing you isn't dependent on their opinion.) this doesnt entail that the poision killing you exists in some transcendent logic realm, it can be dependent on the laws and vulnerabilities of this particular world( changing the truthvalue would be done by changing physical laws and it wouldnt be done by changing the opinions of people)

Again, I think you’re missing that we are working within completely different discourses.

When we talk about something like “poison,” from a Heideggerian view, we’re talking about a relational phenomenon. Poison is not “poisonous” in itself - it becomes poison through its relation to a vulnerable living being, through the structures of embodiment, mortality, and care-for-being.

And you can even get rid of the anthropocentrism if you want. Even if we extend this beyond humans - to animals, ecosystems, machinic life - the relational structure still holds.

There is no poison without a body that can be poisoned. No death without a being for whom death is meaningful. No danger without a world already opened up through care and exposure.

The example of poison doesn’t prove some objective truth floating apart from ontico-ontological Being. It simply shows how certain phenomena stabilize within specific relational fields.

When you insist on separating these phenomena from subjectivity altogether, you’re still clinging to a Kantian transcendental idealism: a hidden thing-in-itself that somehow persists outside appearance.

But that’s simply not the world we’re concerned with. It’s not that you’re wrong within your framework - it’s that your whole framework belongs to a different discourse. And honestly, neither I nor, I think, Peterson, are particularly interested in having that kind of conversation.

If you really want to understand what’s happening here, it’s important to recognize that this conversation isn’t ultimately about poison, or Peterson, or even Heidegger. It’s about discourse itself - about the conditions that make certain statements meaningful or even possible.

Peterson’s interest in Foucault makes perfect sense once you see this. Throughout his career, he’s constantly clashed with the dominant framework of American academia - analytic philosophy, logical positivism, and Dawkins-style scientism. Whenever he talked about God, meaning, Jung, or objective morality, he was dismissed as irrational, delusional, or unscientific.

Foucault offered him a way out of that trap. Foucault showed that different discourses exist, that meaning is structured historically, that truth isn’t simply what survives rationalist scrutiny. That’s why Peterson can deeply respect The Order of Things even if he rejects Foucault’s ethical and political conclusions. (And it’s worth noting explicitly: Foucault’s own work is profoundly influenced by Heidegger - perhaps more than by any other thinker.)

Peterson, however, faces a problem: publicly praising Foucault would be a PR disaster in the current culture war climate, where “Foucault” is often caricatured as the source of everything wrong with postmodernism.

That’s why Heidegger becomes so important for him. Heidegger is safer to cite - ambiguous enough, distant enough from the political caricatures. But philosophically, much of what Peterson says about Heidegger - about Being, order, chaos, historical unfolding - could just as easily be said about Foucault.

And that’s also why I can disagree with Peterson. Because despite all differences, he and I are still operating within the same general field of discourse: a post-Nietzschean, existential, Foucauldian understanding of meaning, structure, and Being. We are speaking the same language - which makes disagreement possible.

But you are not. You’re coming from a completely different world. Which is why these conversations always seem to miss each other, no matter how precisely we argue.

Edited 23 hours ago by Nilsi

[zurew]

42 minutes ago, Nilsi said:

Again, I think you’re missing that we are working within completely different discourses.

When we talk about something like “poison,” from a Heideggerian view, we’re talking about a relational phenomenon. Poison is not “poisonous” in itself - it becomes poison through its relation to a vulnerable living being, through the structures of embodiment, mortality, and care-for-being.

And you can even get rid of the anthropocentrism if you want. Even if we extend this beyond humans - to animals, ecosystems, machinic life - the relational structure still holds.

There is no poison without a body that can be poisoned. No death without a being for whom death is meaningful. No danger without a world already opened up through care and exposure.

I guess I just dont see how that contradicts what I said. I dont think I necessarily need to affirm a particular metaphysics (that wouldn't be compatible with what you outlined) in order to make the statements I made.

 

I will lay out what I believe and assume is happening here, but again I can be wrong and Its perfectly possible that I don't track at all.

 

Working with the poison example further - its irrelevant whether being poisioned is a relational phenomenon or not, what matters is what makes 'you dying from consuming poision' true or false. Does Trump telling his opinion about this particular matter has any weight whether it will kill you or not? No, even if Trump tells you that it will kill you, thats still irrelevant , because sure his opinion can be right, but you won't die because he said it or because he had the belief that its true, you die because its a fact of the world.

We can define facts in a relational way, but I think that won't have any bearing on what I am saying (because in a similar way I can have false beliefs and opinions about those relational facts as well).

Further clear up - by opinion I just meant having an attitude towards a proposition and by proposition I just mean a declarative statment that can be true or false. 

There are truths that are true independent from what attitude (opinion or belief or preference) we have about them - this is what I meant by objective truths  and by independently true, I mean that even if all agents would change their opinion about a particular proposition, the truthvalue of said proposition still wouldn't change (in the case of subjective truths, it would change).

Edited 23 hours ago by zurew

[Nilsi]

6 minutes ago, zurew said:

I guess I just dont see how that contradicts what I said. I dont think I necessarily need to affirm a particular metaphysics (that wouldn't be compatible with what you outlined) in order to make the statements I made.

 

I will lay out what I believe and assume is happening here, but again I can be wrong and Its perfectly possible that I don't track at all.

 

Working with the poison example further - its irrelevant whether being poisioned is a relational phenomenon or not, what matters is what makes 'you dying from consuming poision' true or false. Does Trump telling his opinion about this particular matter has any weight whether it will kill you or not? No, even if Trump tells you that it will kill you, thats still irrelevant , because sure his opinion can be right, but you won't die because he said it or because he had the belief that its true, you die because its a fact of the world.

We can define facts in a relational way, but I think that won't have any bearing on what I am saying (because in a similar way I can have false beliefs and opinions about those relational facts as well).

Further clear up - by opinion I just meant having an attitude towards a proposition and by proposition I just mean a declarative statment that can be true or false. 

There are truths that are true independent from what attitude (opinion or belief) we have about them - this is what I meant by objective truths.

Aren’t you into John Vervaeke, or am I mixing this up?

We could also put it like this: it’s not ultimately about opinion or belief, but about relevance realization - which is actually a very Heideggerian position.

There’s a direct relationship between truth and relevance realization.

Thus, it’s only true that poison is poisonous in so far as there is an agent for whom this fact bears any relevance.

[zurew]

13 minutes ago, Nilsi said:

Aren’t you into John Vervaeke, or am I mixing this up?

We could also put it like this: it’s not ultimately about opinion or belief, but about relevance realization - which is actually a very Heideggerian position.

There’s a direct relationship between truth and relevance realization.

Thus, it’s only true that poison is poisonous in so far as there is an agent for whom this fact bears any relevance.

Yeah im kind of into his work and again - yeah everything that you are saying seems to be 100% compatible with what I am saying.

"There’s a direct relationship between truth and relevance realization." - would this proposition become suddenly false if I had the opinion that its false? No it wouldn't, therefore its truthvalue isn't dependent on my opinion, its true independent from what attitude I have towards it.

And we can apply the same thing to the proposition of "it’s only true that poison is poisonous in so far as there is an agent for whom this fact bears any relevance."

Edited 22 hours ago by zurew

[Nilsi]

19 minutes ago, zurew said:

Yeah im kind of into his work and again - yeah everything that you are saying seems to be 100% compatible with what I am saying.

"There’s a direct relationship between truth and relevance realization." - would this proposition become suddenly false if I had the opinion that its false? No it wouldn't, therefore its truthvalue isn't dependent on my opinion, its true independent from what attitude I have towards it.

And we can apply the same thing to the proposition of "it’s only true that poison is poisonous in so far as there is an agent for whom this fact bears any relevance."

I see what you're getting at - and to some extent I agree. Once an assemblage of relevance has formed, certain propositions can indeed be judged as true or false independent of personal opinion.

But this only holds within a historically constituted field of intelligibility. And that's exactly the Foucauldian point.

The fact that "poison" is even a stable category - the fact that it shows up as a phenomenon that can be the object of true or false statements - depends on prior processes of historical formation: the emergence of discourses around life, health, death, risk, danger, care, vulnerability.

In Foucault’s sense, truth is always bound to the conditions of discourse. Not just in the trivial sense that people talk about things, but in the deeper sense that what counts as a thing, what can be said about it, and what relevance it has are all produced through historical operations of knowledge and power.

Thus, you're right to say that my opinion can't change whether poison is poisonous within a given historical field. But you're missing the deeper point: that the field itself is not natural or self-evident - it is the product of historical relevance structures.

And from a Deleuzian perspective, there’s also an ethical dimension: The point is not to map and fix these assemblages once and for all, but to keep the dice rolling, to keep the horizon of relevance and meaning unfolding.

Any attempt to stabilize and map these assemblages absolutely is already unstable - because life, desire, Being itself are always exceeding the structures that try to contain them.

That’s the real horizon I’m speaking from.

Edited 22 hours ago by Nilsi

[zurew]

23 minutes ago, Nilsi said:

I see what you're getting at - and to some extent I agree. Once an assemblage of relevance has formed, certain propositions can indeed be judged as true or false independent of personal opinion.

But this only holds within a historically constituted field of intelligibility. And that's exactly the Foucauldian point.

The fact that "poison" is even a stable category - the fact that it shows up as a phenomenon that can be the object of true or false statements - depends on prior processes of historical formation: the emergence of discourses around life, health, death, risk, danger, care, vulnerability.

In Foucault’s sense, truth is always bound to the conditions of discourse. Not just in the trivial sense that people talk about things, but in the deeper sense that what counts as a thing, what can be said about it, and what relevance it has are all produced through historical operations of knowledge and power.

Thus, you're right to say that my opinion can't change whether poison is poisonous within a given historical field. But you're missing the deeper point: that the field itself is not natural or self-evident - it is the product of historical relevance structures.

And from a Deleuzian perspective, there’s also an ethical dimension: The point is not to map and fix these assemblages once and for all, but to keep the dice rolling, to keep the horizon of relevance and meaning unfolding.

Any attempt to stabilize and map these assemblages absolutely is already unstable - because life, desire, Being itself are always exceeding the structures that try to contain them.

That’s the real horizon I’m speaking from.

Jordan Hall would summarize what you said with "digital vs analog" (implying constant change and the inability to pin down things)

 

But yeah it seems that you are talking about things that would ground some of the things that I take for granted in order to make my argument possible (theory of meaning, theory of truth, what makes intelligiblity possible, what is a category etc)

Those are discussions that are all beyond me and its very likely that because I dont understand how many ways those things can be cashed out, I unconsciously just use a set of theories that I can't even explicate, but my ability to analyze those things are all subject to the limitations of those theories.

All those unconsciously affirmed/begged theories are embedded in my thinking every time I attempt to analyze things.

But I guess this is a discussion for later, for a time when I have a better chance to track whats happening when those discussions come up.

Edited 22 hours ago by zurew

[Nilsi]

19 minutes ago, Nilsi said:

I see what you're getting at - and to some extent I agree. Once an assemblage of relevance has formed, certain propositions can indeed be judged as true or false independent of personal opinion.

But this only holds within a historically constituted field of intelligibility. And that's exactly the Foucauldian point.

The fact that "poison" is even a stable category - the fact that it shows up as a phenomenon that can be the object of true or false statements - depends on prior processes of historical formation: the emergence of discourses around life, health, death, risk, danger, care, vulnerability.

In Foucault’s sense, truth is always bound to the conditions of discourse. Not just in the trivial sense that people talk about things, but in the deeper sense that what counts as a thing, what can be said about it, and what relevance it has are all produced through historical operations of knowledge and power.

Thus, you're right to say that my opinion can't change whether poison is poisonous within a given historical field. But you're missing the deeper point: that the field itself is not natural or self-evident - it is the product of historical relevance structures.

And from a Deleuzian perspective, there’s also an ethical dimension: The point is not to map and fix these assemblages once and for all, but to keep the dice rolling, to keep the horizon of relevance and meaning unfolding.

Any attempt to stabilize and map these assemblages absolutely is already unstable - because life, desire, Being itself are always exceeding the structures that try to contain them.

That’s the real horizon I’m speaking from.

Actually, to make this even clearer: my position isn’t to stand back and watch the horizon unfold - it’s to step into it, to push it forward with everything I am.

This is exactly what Deleuze affirms in his final work, Qu'est-ce que la philosophie? (What is Philosophy?): that philosophy is not about representing the world, but about creating new concepts, new assemblages, new horizons of meaning - forging new ways to exist.

Because in the end - what else is there to do?

[Nilsi]

8 minutes ago, zurew said:

Yeah it seems that you are talking about things that would ground some of the things that I take for granted in order to make my argument possible (theory of meaning, theory of truth, what makes intelligiblity possible, what is a category etc)

Those are discussions that are all beyond me and its very likely that because I dont understand how many ways those things can be cashed out, I unconsciously just use a set of theories that I can't even explicate, but my ability to analyze those things are all subject to the limitations of those theories.

All those unconsciously affirmed/begged theories are embedded in my thinking every time I attempt to analyze things.

But I guess this is a discussion for later, for a time when I have a better chance to track whats happening when those discussions come up.

Fun discussion, anyways. Always down for this kind of productive friction.

Edited 22 hours ago by Nilsi

[Yimpa]

13 minutes ago, Nilsi said:

Fun discussion, anyways. Always down for this kind of productive friction.

It’s like mental masturbation, and you are the porn Star!

[Nilsi]

32 minutes ago, Yimpa said:

It’s like mental masturbation, and you are the porn Star!

Being a porn star seems like a solid deal, all things considered.