The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
536. Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth | Jacob Howland
Mon, 7 Apr 2025
Jordan Peterson sits down with author, professor, and Dean of Intellectual Foundations at the University of Austin, Jacob Howland. They discuss man’s finitude and his grasping for the infinite, how orientation can provide limitless abundance or a bottomless fall, where Socrates and the Talmud overlap, and why God offers Abraham adventure as the covenant. Jacob Howland is the Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs, and Dean of Intellectual Foundations at the University of Austin. Previously he was McFarlin Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the University of Tulsa, where he taught from 1988 to 2020. Howland has published five books and roughly sixty scholarly articles and review essays on the thought of Plato, Aristotle, Xenophon, Kierkegaard, the Talmud, the Holocaust, ideological tyranny, and other subjects A past winner of the University of Tulsa Outstanding Teacher Award and the College of Arts and Sciences Excellence in Teaching Award, he has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, The Littauer Foundation, the Earhart Foundation, and the Koch Foundation, and has lectured in Israel, France, England, Romania, Brazil, Denmark, Norway, and at universities around the United States. His most recent book is Glaucon’s Fate: History, Myth, and Character in Plato’s Republic, Paul Dry Books, 2018. This episode was filmed on March 15th, 2025. | Links | For Jacob Howland: Read Howland’s most recent publication “Glaucon's Fate: History, Myth, and Character in Plato's Republic” https://a.co/d/7EGH57y Howland’s philosophy website and blog https://www.jacobhowland.com/?_sm_nck=1
Chapter 1: What is the significance of questions in our lives?
One of the things I figured out recently, the significance of the fact that the root word of question is quest. You have a question, which is your plea to the gods, let's say. You await a revelation, and then the critical process is something like internalized dialogue.
I got interested in the Talmud. It's a lot like the Platonic dialogues. And you have this fictional colloquy. That's the only way to describe it. Rabbis who maybe lived centuries apart are brought into debate and discussion.
If we lose touch with those ancient stories, we lose our ability to actually understand what's going on. Elijah, you mentioned Elijah. Elijah's foes are the nature worshipers. That's kind of relevant in today's society, given the rise of nature worship. Something will attain the pinnacle point.
What happens in a universe where finite beings try to find some meaning and encounter something or are afflicted by infinity in some way.
This is a terrifying thought, I think. You said you saw a similarity with the dialogues.
Yes, yes.
So what else caught your attention?
There is a question that I know to be absolutely fundamental because it shows up both in the Hebrew Bible and in Plato.
Okay.
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Chapter 2: How do the Talmud and Platonic dialogues compare?
philosophical relationship between enlightenment rationality and the underlying narrative substructure. That's a good way of thinking about it. And we discussed that in terms of the relationship between Athens and Plato and the ancient religious texts of the Western world. So join us for that. So Dr. Holland, I wanted to talk to you today primarily, there's a bunch of reasons.
I think the main reason was that we have overlapping interests in new approaches to higher education and maybe education in general. And you're involved with the University of Austin and I've been involved in Peterson Academy and also Ralston College. And so I thought we could talk about that more narrowly, but we share philosophical interests and
I'm also curious about your take on new developments in AI, especially with regards to the large language models. That'll be an interesting discussion because I've used them quite a bit now. And I have a colleague who's helped me program a number of them, custom LLMs. And they're uncanny machines. And I have no idea where they're headed. Well, that doesn't make me special.
No one knows where they're headed. And so that's the...
broad landscape that i hope to traverse with you today but i think we should start with let's start with a little background about you so that people can situate you you're a philosophy professor you're an acclaimed educator so fill us in on who you are first let me say i appreciate your having me on your podcast uh this is a great opportunity um so i uh
How far back do you want me to start?
Back away. We can start with undergraduate if you want.
Great, sure. So, well, I'll start with my parents. My father was a biology professor at Cornell University. My mother was a writer. First... nine, ten years of my life. I live with my mother. I have an older brother. My parents were divorced before I have any recollection of them being together. So I was just maybe a year old.
During that period, my mother was a struggling writer and lived in poverty. We lived in Chicago, and I had the unfortunate experience of being in Chicago public schools in 1968, 69, and a lot of tension. Things became very difficult because my mother was quite poor and couldn't sort of make ends meet.
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Chapter 3: What does it mean to grapple with the infinite?
As a child, I had strong influences on my mother's side, let's say literary and cultural influences. One of my earliest memories was being in Iowa City when I was a kid. My mother was reading me a story by Tolstoy called How Much Land Does a Man Need?, And my older brother got me up early in the morning, and I don't know, I was probably four or five.
He was a couple of years older, and he finished reading the story to me. So we always had, she always took us to, you know, see ballet and museums and things like this. Anyway, fast forward, we moved in with my father. I graduated from Ithaca High School at the age of 16 because my dad...
said, well, I'm going to go on a sabbatic leave, and I don't want to take you with me, and so you can graduate early, which I did. Went to Swarthmore College, took a philosophy course. I initially thought I was going to be a physics major.
I see. So you really are split between the aesthetic and the more scientific engineering.
Exactly, exactly.
Okay, because that's useful to know.
Yeah, and I was very – I'm not a mathematician, but – I did very well in mathematics. But I found that the physics was frankly too challenging. And I took an English course and some other things. And I finally took the philosophy course with a very brilliant man named David Lockerman. And he's one of these people that anyone who knew the guy said, this is the most brilliant person they'd ever met.
I was very fortunate too.
And that was at Cornell?
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Chapter 6: How does education shape our understanding of the past?
And then we'll figure out what to do with them. Like the technological thing comes before. It actually reminds me of like the CIA discovers LSD. I mean, they don't discover it, but they're like, we got LSD. So now their question is, what can we do with it? There's a book about this. And so they say, well, is it a truth serum? So they give LSD to this CIA guy. No, it's not, you know.
Well, maybe it's an anti-truth serum. We give it to our agents if they're caught and stuff like that. No, it's not. But this kind of reasoning, right? Like, this is potent stuff. This is super potent stuff. What can we do with it, right? But anyway, you're absolutely right about the misaligned aim.
Well, you know, people end up unable to communicate because the aim gets so misaligned. Words themselves lose their meaning. And that's a reference to exactly what we're describing, is that if you mess up the underlying narrative substrate enough... Rationality becomes impossible partly because words don't mean the same thing to different people.
Well, that's true. Right.
Well, we can see that now.
Yeah. I mean, and so what you said about the Sermon on the Mount is anticipated by God in the very first commandment. I am the Lord thy God, thou shalt have no other gods beside me.
Right. Exactly.
Now, what's interesting is that, you know, it doesn't mean that we don't have subsidiary aims. But what it means is that's the highest. That's the highest. Yeah. For Socrates, what is the highest? Well, he calls these things ideas, you know, justice, for example. And the Socratic, what Socrates is trying to do is a sort of shuttling movement.
First of all, to come to the best possible understanding he can of, for example, the idea of justice, which plays a huge role in his life. But you know the cave image. There aren't any signs that say you are now leaving the cave and entering into the full light of truth, right? So there's always a question. Have I truly understood this thing?
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