Jordan Peterson: The Logos at Ephesus

"For the world to be intelligible it must consist of patterned regularities. That may have been the great discovery of the Greeks: that there are patterned regularities that are superordinate to immediate perceptions."

Ralston College presents the inaugural lecture of its Chancellor, Dr Jordan B. Peterson, delivered at one of the most iconic sites of the ancient world, the Library of Celsus in Ephesus. This ancient city was the birthplace of Heraclitus, the philosopher who first articulated the idea of the Logos (Λόγος), and the final resting place of St John, who uses that same Greek word to name the Divine Word. In his lecture, Dr Peterson argues that the intelligibility of the world depends on patterned regularities that are superordinate to our immediate perception; this underlying order—which, from the Greeks onward, we have called the Logos—is both the horizon that enables human perception and the basis for the possibilities that we realize in the world. Such an account of our intrinsic, rational, and self-determining capacity constitutes a challenge to the assumptions of many prevailing schools of thought—such as behaviorism, rigid empiricism, and postmodernism—and lays the burden of personal ethics, and the formation of a good society, squarely on the shoulders of the individual.

This lecture took place during the first term of Ralston College's inaugural MA in the Humanities on August 31st, 2022.

Authors, Ideas, and Works Mentioned in this Episode

Library of Celsus
Heraclitus
Logos (λόγος)
John the Apostle
The Gospel of John, Chapter 1
Carl Jung
John Milton
Book of Genesis
Book of Exodus
Friedrich Nietzsche
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Links of Possible Interest

Dr Jordan Peterson
https://www.ralston.ac/people/jordan-b-peterson

Dr Stephen Blackwood
https://www.stephenjblackwood.com

Ralston College Short Courses
https://www.ralston.ac/humanities-short-courses

Ralston College Humanities MA
https://www.ralston.ac/humanities-ma

Timeline

0:00 – Beginning
0:57 – Lecture begins
4:18 – The world of what matters versus the world of matter
10:08 – Patterned regularities are superordinate to immediate perception
13:30 – Our perception shows us what is, but also what could be
16:30 – We are not automated machines; we are rather an embodiment of the Logos
22:10 – We prioritize perceptions, thus see the world through a system of values
31:30 – We cannot see the world except through an ethic
36:50 – We act out the world through what we describe as a narrative
47:25 – Social cohesion is dependent on perceptual prioritization
50:00 – Consequences for the future