🪟 37 - The cosmic origin of despair pt. II
Chapter #37 (Part 5): A critique on Jordan Peterson’s ‘clean your room!’ in relation to human action.
Writer’s note: I am hitting ‘Publish’ on each chapter as soon as I am remotely happy with it, as a sort of minimum viable product. Once I have let everything on my mind out, they will all go under the knife, so to speak, and be tightened, refined, and made rigorous—both conceptually and aesthetically. Please read the following as one transcript among many transcripts.
…
Table of contents
PART 1: NATURE » on the relation between man and nature: man as feeble and the consequence of forces.
PART 2: COURT OF JUSTICE: » on the relation between man and justness: reality as court and canvas.
PART 3: HOUSE OF MIRRORS » on the relation between man and others: the necessity of love and compassion toward the ill, that is, us all.
PART 4: EXISTENTIAL LETTERS
PART 5: IDEALS
The cosmic origin of despair pt. II
🪟 37 - The cosmic origin of despair pt. II
“One thing I do, forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead.”
— Philippians 3:13
…
Jordan Peterson—in a fit of rage against the so-called ‘postmodern neo-marxists’—is well known (and often caricatured) for saying this.
‘If you can't even clean up your own room, who the hell are you to give advice to the world?’
But is it better to see a world that needs changing and refrain from changing it, or is it better to become a revolutionary with your room in ruins? The ‘postmodern neo-marxist’ acts on a nexus of choice not unlike the young globetrotter: should I maintain order in my life, or should I drop everything and act?1 Picture one such instance of Peterson’s boogyman, let’s say, a young woman possessed by a desire to change the world, to change something of the world, and whose idols are among the ranks of activists, writers, and politicians. For Peterson, her desire represents a temptation. There is no divine calling at this stage, there is only temptation, that is, until she has her bed made, until she has her house in order, until she has her relationships in order. This is a basic conservative position. Remember the common scorn of conservatism as being the folly of “old white men”? That is, in fact, a rather incisive observation, for conservatism is indeed rather paternal in nature. Its expression is akin to the student who says, ‘I hate school!’ to which the old father simply shouts, ‘do your homework!’ This is precisely what ‘clean your room!’ is: a paternal commandment.
But now, let us not arbitrarily assume such a role. Let us offer her our belief, and allow her the room to act. Let us say, ‘Go forth, and …’. After all, what if it is her divine calling to bring about a revolution in the order of the Suffragettes, or to be remembered as a radical activist like Simone Weil? No, let us not needlessly rebuke the ‘postmodern neo-marxist’, for the sake of this discussion, let us try to be a figure of affirmation to her. Let us see in her and have her see in us a friend! We will affirm her desire to act as she sees fit, as long as it is done out of good faith. We will heap words of encouragement to her in all genuineness, just as it was said to Queen Esther, ‘who knows, perhaps the Lord has called you for such a time as this’. Though in all probability, her desire is a desire birthed out of the social tyranny as much as ethical conscience (for at the youthful stage there is hardly a difference between the two), by all means, let her act as she must! So long as it is an earnest shot at goal—at the very least, she will have scratched the itch, and it will be a training in initiative and resourcefulness.
Consequently, when she motions to reshape the world by the violence of her youthful passion, she will most likely find a few things to happen. First, her desire will be absolved by her action. She will feel affirmed by her own acting out as she saw she ought, especially if it is accompanied by the affirmation of others, and she will march down her path with an ever-intensifying insistence. She will begin to make declarations brimming with spirit: ‘I have a dream…’ And she will be pleased with herself, for a time. Over time and effort (assuming boredom does not get to her first), she will realise that the world does not cave easily; that it cannot be dismembered and reassembled into her shape of justice without monumental resistance, and that it remains stubborn against even her burning anger. The given social order is as a brick wall she will find herself butting her head against, without her budging so much as two or three bricks among a multitude of bricks. She finds herself in a predicament not dissimilar to our young globetrotter; having left behind the affairs of her house for the world’s stage, the world-changer finds herself insufficient to change the world, while the globetrotter finds the world insufficient to change her.
In turn, she finds herself resigned in despair, resorting to a more stoic idealism, opting to strike her hammer selectively on five or six bricks instead of the multitude, calling it ‘realism’ (similar to an older person playing Jenga conservatively with a younger person—if there are blocks he can foreseeably remove, he will do that—while the younger one naturally envelops the whole structure). Or she may resort to a more nihilistic despair, thinking that the world in its injustice is a catastrophe without the possibility of salvation, and withdraw herself from the battleground in utter hopelessness. Or she may resort to yet a more poetic despair, writing in all solemnity of the pain and injustice of the world that is, and the beauty and goodness of the world that could be. ‘If only …’, she laments. In any case, by pursuing the realisation of her Beyond, she realises her predicament—that though she is powerful over much, she is powerless over much more. Of course, if she maintains her political convictions, she may be able to keep up her revolutionary tendencies for a long time. Still, in doing so, reason has to eventually make her aware of her own limits, from which she will take a Socratic turn of recognising her own negations, and perhaps say to herself, ‘The more I do, the more I know of what I cannot do’2.
It is true, however, that our ‘postmodern neo-marxist’ leaves some kind of chaos in her wake, and this is one sense in which Peterson’s commandment is valid. His eternal worry of totalitarianism is at stake, as he warns over and over again, 'the road to hell is paved with good intentions’; whereas for the globetrotter, any hellfire is brought about only inwardly, and the collective is spared. Ethical reproach is thus valid, yes, but only in this (rather one-dimensional) political sense. Where it falls infinitely short is in the inward sense, which I regard as of ultimate importance pertaining to this matter. As long as our postmodern neo-marxist’s neediness to act remains uninitiated, her soul remains angsty and restless—unresolved. Her will to the Beyond, that actualisation of her possibility by which she will finally be at peace, that teleological grandiosity so sublimely alluded to by the poet Rilke’s words—‘flare up like a flame and make big shadows [God] can move in’—remains resolutely unmoved before her. Whether her political idealism is effective or not, justice has not been done to her own soul, and yet, her predicament of being alive demands that she must do justice to it. In this way, to rebuke her with the paternal-ethical commandment ‘clean your room!’ is infinitely alienating and mocking3. It is akin to the words of a street evangelist, whose spiritual authority one does not at all recognise, and yet ethical reproach is heaved intolerably upon them.
This is the order of life’s predicament pertaining to action. The neediness to act and to do justice is ever-present and inexhaustible—eternally recurrent. Either way, she has to act. And if she has to act, no prohibition will dissolve her enthusiasm. She cannot even resign against it, rescinding her choice to act or not act, for even a non-action constitutes an action! Her withholding of choice still maintains its relation to whatever she sees she ought to do. If she puts it off for too long, remorse will simply remind her with a strong arm. Whichever way she goes, she is compelled to act in one way or another; to act in a manner that corresponds to the desire by which she was in the first place compelled; to act in a manner just or unjust (or, true or untrue) to its origin. If she acted affirmatively at all, she would bear the brunt of Peterson’s rebuke for going too far ahead of herself. Ah! But the truth of the matter is something much deeper. Whether she has set her house in order or not, yes!—even whether she has reformed the world or not—she remains cursed to act.
Contrast Peterson’s ethical concern with another approach from Rilke—who put forward an aesthetic-religious commandment4 in his arousing poem ‘Go to the limits of your longing’:
God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.
These are the words we dimly hear:
You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.
Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.
The question pertaining to action is thus not of acting or not acting. There is no escaping action, for consciousness presupposes action. As blood is needful of oxygen, the actor is needful of oughts; for action is only aroused and drawn together by spirit, and spirit is always concentrated upon possibility, whether it be an imminent fear of destruction or an infinite longing. The question pertaining to action is thus of my oughts, the locality of where it is that my spirit appears most perfectly embodied in action. And out from the oughts arise a particular directionality; it is the direction against I which I am to progress, where I find myself to have moved not to the left or right, but forward5.
Ah! And this is the development in which I find myself unwittingly swung back from my angst of action into my initial angst of narration. My earlier question of ‘Who am I?’ (that damned question!) in its evolution into unquestionable self-acceptance, stumbles into the directional question of ‘What am I to do?’—which, by the infinite mystery of human nature, turns out to be a reassertion of that first question ‘Who am I?’ If I don’t know what I am to do, can I really say that I know who I am? Or, to put this line of thought another way: first, having been concerned with the fixation of my own boundless existence, I had realised my self by nailing it to the ground of the here and now; but once I was nailed to it, like a paper to a pinboard, I became disconcerted by a newfound spatial awareness which re-cast my fixation into doubt, for I realised myself to be standing awfully still. It is worth noting, however, that this reasserted ‘Who am I?’ has a slight difference to the original assertion. It contains a slight difference in tone, which, though faint, means all the difference in the world. It has a newly acquired tone of urgency, as if asking the question ‘Who am I, really?’, and it is an urgency born of my realisation that I was being determined by my active capacity—my actor—alongside my passive or reflective capacity—my narrator.
As lightning is nothing without its flashing, so my ‘I’ is nothing without its correspondence in action. My narrator and my actor persist not in isolation but in an unceasing dialectic with each other, actively determining and constituting the other, like man and woman. This was the case regardless of whether I had been aware of it or not6. But, certainly, what is a human being without the dialectic of action and narration? If there was one human being who did not narrate and who did not act, one might as well say that that person was not a human being, or at least, more probably, that he was unconscious—since it is the case that consciousness presupposes and enforces both, even for the most vitally poorest human beings. This can also be seen from a cosmic point of view. As it was written in the Scriptures, God is the great ‘I Am’7. Appropriately so, since God is absolute. I on the other hand, am unwittingly a human being and not the absolute ‘I Am’. As such, I have to follow the proposition with something—an action, or a narration—my ‘I’ has to be resolved in something, since it cannot be resolved in itself. I have to say ‘I am … [being and doing so and so]. Even if I narrate my ‘I’ to be axiomatic, I cannot simply say ‘I Am’. I am merely saying, ‘I am whoever I think I am’, or as Descartes said (I am rephrasing), ‘I am because I think I am’. The best I can do is rule out any doubt or self-deception over my ‘I’ as pointless and unproductive, and thus, beyond question. I have no ‘true’ or absolute self hidden somewhere in me. Only God can say ‘I Am’ and end it at that. Only God is absolute, without contingency. As for me, I am needy for everything beyond myself—to ground my boundless being, and to act upon something—yes, even if it is within me, for within me exists a multitude of parts that is both me and not me.
I am constituted by my action and narration (or my capacity as such). Yet, this is still not the end of the story, for my narrator and actor appear sculpted with a predisposition to the infinite. As Fichte summed it up: “The real world has meaning only in relation to the human self’s infinite striving.” Whether it may be said that he conceived of such a thought, or such a thought conceived of him—either way, it must be acknowledged that the human neediness to strive (for striving is action and narration in tandem) has itself laid out in a universal way—in relation to that inwardly-constituting voice that says, ‘I am nothing, but I must be everything’8. And what is ‘everything’, seeing that it is in fact also nothing, seeing that it cannot be caught, grasped, and it infinitely progresses beyond me? My neediness to act directionally, my teleological imperative, only thrusts me back into absurdity—for I possess in me a longing9 that denies itself from actualisation, and still, yet I must act! It is precisely this absurd, infinite longing that I am identifying as the Beyond, as the beyond that constantly leapfrogs itself, ad infinitum.
And so too this is the case for our ‘postmodern neo-marxist’! She is in this way, born on a road that leads inevitably to despair—and it is the despair of not being able to ever fully apprehend or actualise her infinite possibility, which goes persistently around, about and ahead of her, and that never settles with mere finitude. It was written, ‘[God] is the one who goes ahead of you10’. Or, to borrow Rilke’s words, the ‘limit of your longing’ goes ahead of you. For her, I find the more poignant framing in Kierkegaard’s paradox11, to put a spin on it: Leave your house and change the world, you will regret it; remain in your house and leave the world alone, you will regret it also; either way, you will regret it. Whichever way she chooses, as magnetic poles repel its integration, the Beyond resists its actualisation. She remains forever cursed to act, in an unceasing dialectic of affirming or negating, realising or not realising her Beyond, from which it nevertheless continues to compel her and move ahead of her, swift as a rabbit but heavy as a mountain.
This is the infinite gap—everything by which her longing (despairingly) exceeds the finitude of the present moment, everything by which her finite nature (despairingly) has the habit of overreaching itself. In this way, she, unwittingly a human being, is cosmically tuned. Every strum of her action echoes through the sentimentality of history and slices through the infinity of the future, even as any sound is embodied only in the finitude of the present moment. Some of her strums will reverberate more harmonically, some with more dissonance. Either way, the Beyond will continue to follow her wherever she sets foot, as if God was walking with her silently in the night and yet also ever ahead of her, as a ‘lamp unto [her] feet, and a light unto [her] path’12. And it is both infinitely wonderful and infinitely painful to behold.
Akin to that matter of Seneca reproaching Lucilius (albeit much more kindly), “do you ask why … flight does not help you? It is because you flee along with yourself”.
Socrates: ‘The more I know, the more I realise I know nothing.’
There is a sense in which ‘clean your room’ is sound advice, however. But I think it is not as universally applicable and not nearly as antagonistic as Peterson conveys. I think it is sound advice, an ethical principle, for the individual whose despair is so deep that her spirit is in tatters (and seeing that Peterson is a clinical psychologist, perhaps appropriately so). If she cannot so much as get her own house in order, if she cannot be trusted and if she cannot trust herself with the simplest task—possessing not the will nor capacity to do so—she feels an intensified powerlessness, being in failure to do something as elementary as keeping her own room in order. Her despair becomes viral and takes hold of her. It renders her ultimately powerless to herself. If she cannot complete the first task, shuddered by the monumentality of the effort before her, and then by the despair that befalls something so trivial appearing to be so monumental—she falls into more despair, she affirms and re-affirms her own powerlessness. ‘What am I if I cannot even do this? I am useless, I am worthless, I cannot be helped’. To declare ‘clean your room!’ is useful as a call to action for the one in despair: it is a prompt to sweep away the first task, to jumpstart one’s action from a state of despaired resignation not unlike jumpstarting the engine of an idle ship, springing up from a state of idleness into motion. It is to say this: ‘If you lack the spirit to begin with striving towards the Beyond, begin with the smallest task… here, “clean your room!”’ The core of Peterson’s antidote in this context is, simply, to start moving decisively towards where you see you ought.
In my mind, Peterson does in fact embody this approach. I see him to be well-loved at core not because of his technical mastery or even his articulation, but because of his earnestness to truth—which is itself an aesthetic-religious predisposition—for it is done not out of duty but the neediness of the soul. It stumps me why he keeps resorting to the stage of ethical drama, so often demonising others, despite him seeming like a man of perceptiveness and wit. Perhaps it is because he is so deeply embroiled in the battleground, compounded by the immense reaction that accompanies such fame, that he cannot see beyond it.
Certainly, whichever way I choose to act, I will also reap the fruits of my choice in time, and some will be more sweet and some more bitter; I believe all this to be a part of life’s necessity.
Rather interestingly, in fact, similar to my first crisis of self-narration, my awareness had only come about by my revelation of its negation—initially, by my self-narration losing its ground on reality, and this time, it came about by my realisation of the asymmetry of my action in relation to my renewed self-narration.
Exodus 3:14 (ESV): God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM.” And he said, “Say this to the people of Israel: ‘I AM has sent me to you.’”
As per the defiant words of Marx, ‘I am nothing, but I must be everything’, except if it was not merely politically posited, but infinitely posited.
Desire, over time, becomes longing. For desire at some point ceases to be determined through a particular object, and it begins to become unhinged from the particular—finding its resolution only in the inexhaustible—and that is when we call it ‘longing’.
Deuteronomy 31:8: "The LORD is the one who goes ahead of you; He will be with you He will not fail you or forsake you. Do not fear or be dismayed.”
Kierkegaard: "I see it all perfectly; there are two possible situations—one can either do this or that. My honest opinion and my friendly advice is this: do it or do not do it—you will regret both."
Psalm 119:105 (KJV): “Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path.”