For a cogent rejoinder to untenable versions of deconstruction in certain fashionable academic circles, see Martha C. Nussbaum's article "Human Functioning and Social Justice: In Defense of Aristotelian Essentialism" in the journal Political Theory, volume 20, number 2 (May 1992): pages 202-246.
But also see the Canadian Jesuit theologian and Lonergan scholar Frederick E. Crowe's essay "Neither Jew nor Greek, but One Human Nature and Operation in All" reprinted, slightly revised, in the 1993 book Communication and Lonergan: Common Ground for Forging the New Age, edited by me and Paul A. Soukup (Sheed & Ward, pages 89-107; now distributed by Rowman & Littlefield).
Now, according to the word-count feature on my computer, my review essay is more than 12,000 words in length. Professor Peterson's name appears 84 times; Pope Francis' name, 27 times; Donald Trump's name, 21 times; Yale's literary critic Professor Bloom's name, 44 times; the late American Jungian theorist Professor Moore's name, 19 times; the American Jesuit Professor Ong's name, 47 times; the Canadian Jesuit Professor Lonergan's name, 23 times; and the Jungian term archetype (singular and plural) appears 124 times. In connection with Robert L. Professor Moore's account of the masculine and the feminine archetypes of maturity, I refer to "shadow" forms of the archetypes of maturity 69 times, and 40 times I use the word stuck to describe how people are accessing certain "shadow" forms of the archetypes of maturity. When I say they are stuck, I mean that they are stuck. When you are stuck in a shadow" form of an archetype of maturity, it is not hard to switch to the bipolar opposite "shadow" form, but it is hard to learn how to access the optimal form of the archetype of maturity in question. Thus, my review essay includes some wide-ranging discussions. I have interspersed recommendations for further reading throughout the following text.
PROFESSOR PETERSON'S 2018 400-PAGE SELF-HELP BOOK
In any event, in 2018, Professor Peterson published the accessible 400-page self-help book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. I cannot imagine that more than three million people have read Pope Francis' 2015 eco-encyclical, but perhaps more than three million people have read about it or heard about it. As to Yale's literary critic Harold Professor Bloom, I suspect that all of the sales of all of his books do not add up to more than three million sold. In any event, I googled for "Jordan Peterson + net worth" and learned that his net worth in 2019 is estimated as being $1.5million (in US dollars).
Granted, Professor Peterson devotes 400 pages to operationally defining and explaining his 12 Rules. Nevertheless, we should recognize that his formulation of those 12 Rules stands in the tradition in Western culture of the 10 Commandments in the Hebrew Bible (with certain variations in the books of Exodus 20:1-17 and Deuteronomy 5:4-25) and, later, in medieval Christian culture, of the seven deadly sins and the parallel four cardinal virtues (of prudence, justice, courage, and moderation) and three theological virtues (of faith, hope, and charity) in effect, 14 Rules for Life.
Because political-correctness zealotry has a zero-tolerance policy toward critiques of political-correctness zealotry, we should not be surprised that the New York Times published a lengthy hit-piece by the American journalist Nellie Bowles titled "Jordan Peterson, Custodian of the Patriarchy" (dated May 18, 2018. But the New York Times itself can accurately be described as the custodian of the anti-patriarchy.
https://nytimes.com/2018/05/18/style/jordan-peterson-12-rules-for-life.html
Now, the conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks devoted a column to discussing Professor Peterson: "The Jordan Peterson Moment" (dated January 25, 2018).
https://nytimes.com/2018/01/25/opinion/jordan-peterson-moment.html
Among other things, Brooks aptly says, "The implied reader of his work [Professor Peterson's 2018 book 12 Rules for Life] are men who feel fatherless, solitary, floating in a chaotic moral vacuum, constantly outperformed and humiliated by women, haunted by pain and self-contempt. At some level Professor Peterson is offering assertiveness training to men . . . ."
Now, one of the most famous self-help books ever written in the history of Western philosophy is Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. His son named Nicomachus, but so was his father. But Aristotle's son probably did not "feel fatherless" as Brooks suggests Professor Peterson's young male readers do, and Aristotle himself probably did not "feel fatherless" either. Moreover, if it takes a village to raise a child, as Hillary Rodham Clinton famously claimed, then young men today may have to look beyond their own fathers for suitable father figures to guide them. After all, there is only so much that one can expect from one's own father. Consequently, young men today who "feel fatherless" (in Brooks' terminology) may not be untypical of young men of earlier generations, most likely including Brooks as a young man (who became a journalistic apprentice to the American conservative William F. Buckley, Jr.).
In any event, in the 1970s, assertiveness training for women was popular in the United States and so were self-help books such as Robert Alberti and Michael Emmons' 1970 self-help book Your Perfect Right: A Guide to Assertive Behavior (10th revised ed., 2017). The cover of the 2017 tenth edition of their self-help book features the all-caps banner headline at the top saying "MORE THAN ONE MILLION COPIES SOLD" that is, cumulatively between 1970 and 2017. But more than three million copies of Professor Peterson's 2018 self-help book 12 Rules for Life have already been sold thus far.
Assertiveness is operationally defined and explained as the mean between the extremes of under-assertiveness (also known as passivity), on the one hand, and, on the other, over-assertiveness (also known as hostility). But this way of operationally defining and explaining assertiveness is the equivalent of Aristotle's way of operationally defining and explaining the virtue of courage as the mean between the extremes of cowardice (not enough courage), on the one hand, and, on the other, brashness (too much courage).
However, for Aristotle, courage is only one of the key virtues that needs to be cultivated along with the three other key virtues of temperance, prudence, and justice (that is, the personal virtue of justice, as distinct from the legal standard of justice).
The medieval Roman Catholic theologian St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) worked out an elaborate synthesis of Aristotle's thought and the Christian tradition of thought known as Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy and theology.
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