Bani Isra’il played with words in order to refuse the orders of Allah. This is not unlike Peterson, who, when offered Da’wah, began to nullify language itself by questioning the meaning of basic concepts and vocabulary.

Interestingly, linguistic contortion is a virtue in orthodox Judaism, as can be seen in the Talmud or the mystical tradition of the Kabbalah. As academics recognize, Rabbinic interpretation of the Hebrew Bible often requires understanding the text as symbolic of a deeper meaning disconnected from the conventional meaning of the words. Numerology is also key to interpretation of the scripture, what is known as Gematria.

That point aside, we can notice how in secular societies, extreme skepticism about language doesn’t extend beyond religion: If Peterson were ordering fast food and was asked, “Which type of burger do you want?” we can be doubtful that he’d inquire about the definitions of “which,” “type,” “burger,” etc. But even in more academic contexts, such as his field of psychology, we do not see Peterson exercise such postmodernist tendencies.

Ultimately, in secularized society, only the Sacred becomes a mystery of meaning, to the extent that even “do” is inscrutable.

Is Language Relative? Western Philosophy from Plato to Wittgenstein

Peterson’s ramblings about language have deep roots in Western philosophy, beginning with Plato himself.

A.N. Whitehead, one of the most influential British thinkers of the last century, famously said that the whole of Western philosophy could be considered as a footnote of Plato, in the sense that whatever developed later in Western thought can be found in Plato’s dialogues.

In his Cratylus, Plato brings both perspectives which still define a philosopher’s approach to language today, that is whether language is the product of convention defined by society or whether language is something natural, even divine, preceding human attempts at rationalization.

In the typical fashion of his Socratic method, he doesn’t offer a definite answer, hinting at the fact that such debates themselves might be useless, obstructing us from having a deeper metaphysical understanding.

For the next centuries, Western thinkers did not add much to this debate, though there were original contributions from other civilizations, such as the 5th-century Sanskrit linguist Bhartrihari in India or Ibn Hazm in the Islamic world. (In medieval Europe, William of Ockham proposed his nominalism, but it was more concerned with epistemology rather than linguistics in the strictest sense.)

Only in modernity do we find Europeans providing a fundamental critique of language itself, beginning with Nietzsche, who wrote in his 1889-book Twilight of the Idols:

“Reason” in language — oh, what an old deceptive female she is! I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.

Nietzsche, a radical atheist, believed that grammar, because it contains a sense of causality (there’s always a subject followed by a predicate in a complete sentence), hinted at the existence of God. The ultimate cause, after all, is the Creator.

RELATED: “God Is Dead”: How Christianity Anticipated Nietzsche

Elsewhere Nietzsche wrote that the “I” is also a grammatical illusion.

Nietzsche’s “perspectivism” would influence much of modern Western philosophy, including the likes of Richard Rorty, who’s often considered the best American representative of the French Theory, arguing that there are multiple notions of truth because every individual has his own subjective experience.

Wittgenstein, considered to be the last century’s most important philosopher, in the latter part of his life also talked about “language games.” Wittgenstein argued in his “later philosophy” that words are defined by their context and use and that truth and meaning cannot be reduced to logical propositions.

But Wittgenstein was certainly not a postmodernist and did not believe that language can be defined to mean whatever we want it to mean. Wittgenstein, in the end, proposed a more skeptical approach to philosophy itself and proposed that, instead of theorizations that ultimately go nowhere, philosophy should have a therapeutic aim, something more practical such as helping individuals live a better inner life. (One of the leading contemporary philosophers, John McDowell, follows him in that regard.)

It’s unsurprising, then, that American philosopher Norman Malcolm, a student and close friend of Wittgenstein, was a devout Christian who tried to revamp traditional arguments for the existence of God (unlike this more recent Canadian public intellectual, who’s afraid to even mention God).

Peterson’s thought, therefore, is a far cry from Wittgenstein, and bears more similarity to another figure, an actual postmodernist: Jacques Derrida.

Jacques Derrida and Kabbalah in Western Philosophy

Jacques Derrida was a French philosopher of Jewish background who is considered  by some to be the most influential thinker of the second half of the 20th century in France, even ahead of Michel Foucault.

Influenced by Nietzsche but also the Swiss linguist De Saussure, in post-WWII France Derrida brought the concept of “deconstruction,” which is, as this article puts it:

In 1967, Derrida introduced a new method to philosophy, which he called deconstruction. Put simply – and it rarely is, especially by Derrida – this is the idea that if something is constructed, it can be de-constructed. That applies to objects in the world, such as chairs, cars and houses, but it also applies to the concepts we use, such as truth, justice and God.

Derrida’s influence would extend in the US from the ’70s onward, with the so-called “Yale School” headed by Paul de Man.

Derrida himself often linked his deconstruction method with Kabbalah, a form of mystical Judaism that relativizes language, and Kabbalists themselves proudly own such a connection.

We could thus legitimately wonder if Peterson’s recent shift towards Zionism doesn’t also explain his deconstructionist method in language as, like the Kabbalists and Derrida, he now mobilizes language itself to deconstruct religion.

It does seem that secularization and Zionism are interconnected phenomena.

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