A Warning to the West

Here is a video recently posted by Dr. Jordan B. Peterson entitled A New Years Letter to the World. It is quite interesting and I encourage you to watch it (just over 20 minutes).

Peterson states that the real problem of conflict in our world is not religion, but rather tribalism. And the problem with tribalism is that people will cooperate with each other but only in small groups which are in conflict with other small groups. This causes division and is unavoidable when people group together to defend a value system. The solution is not to devalue everything, which causes nihilism, nor is the solution a totalitarian state, which forces all people under one value system. The solution is individualism — but not a selfish individualism; instead, one of personal responsibility and caring action.

Human History According to Franz Rosenzweig

“What happens in history, [Rosenzweig] says, is not a struggle between man’s faith and man’s reason but a struggle between God and man. In world history the absolute powers themselves are dramatis personae [the characters of the play]. Revelation breaks into the world and transforms creation, which is the Alpha of history, into redemption, which is the Omega. Philosophy has a pagan quality. It is an expression of the Alpha, of creation, of pure nature to which God has given freedom — even against himself. But as revelation comes into the world, it gradually absorbs philosophy, deprives it of its pagan elements, and illuminates it with its own light. The Omega of history will be realized after the element of creation, the world’s freedom, has spent itself. Then God, who has allowed the world to be in the Alpha, will again be the First and the Last, the Alpha and the Omega.”

~Alexander Altmann, from Franz Rosenzweig and Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy: An Introduction to Their “Letters on Judaism & Christianity”, from Judaism Despite Christianity, University of Chicago Press, 1935, page 33.

Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy Quotes #3

On the birth of the University….

“[I]n Paris two great schools existed in the same place; this made room for a real university. The difference between a school of mere learning and the Higher School of fundamental thinking has been an element in European life since Abailard. Acknowledged competition between two schools of thought in the same place is what gives the Higher School its value. Wherever the disaccord of various and contradictory principles is born, the higher life of the mind begins to reveal its power. The forms of human life are indivisible and individual (you are a physician or a boy or a grandmother), whilst the forms of the life of thought are exactly the reverse. Thought is created and promoted in a dialectical process, by polarities and paradoxes, in a dialogue between pro and con. The existence of at least two complete sets of doctors at Paris gave the proper form of existence to thought and thinking for the first time in history.”

~from Out of Revolution, page 151.