Jordan Peterson continues his presence on YouTube and elsewhere, apparently still mysteriously unwell. He (or his staff in his stead) has recently started the Jordan Peterson Academy and, to help promote that online offering, he placed a free lecture out there so people could get a feel for his "academy." It is ostensibly an introduction to Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil, packaged in a high-tech studio with dramatic lighting, graphic overlays, and the full production weight behind it. It is meant to be a promotional piece, really. Still, you have to measure up to the content you create.
I became aware of Peterson several years ago through my interest in Nietzsche. My YouTube feed gave me a college professor who spends 45 minutes discussing a single paragraph from Beyond Good and Evil. I was impressed with the effort. I didn't necessarily think this guy had Nietzsche figured out but I admired what he had to say. As long-time readers know, I have followed Peterson ever since with his awesome discussions with Sam Harris being the highlight of his public voice, as far as I am concerned.
The more I watched Peterson and the more he sporadically referenced Nietzsche, I gradually came to see that he has a specific perspective on Nietzsche that serves his own agenda. What he has to say is interesting and revealing but it is fundamentally wrong. As I watched the free introductory lecture I considered writing a response myself. The guy is super articulate and intelligent — but he also happens to misunderstand Nietzsche. Luckily, someone more qualified than I posted a marvelously detailed response less than 24 hours later.
Keegan Kjeldsen is someone I have followed almost as long as I have Peterson. They are nothing alike. His The Nietzsche Podcast is absolutely the best source for understanding Nietzsche available online, though it offers none of the production glitz of Peterson. After watching Peterson's sample lecture Kjeldsen had this to say: "production value is like a... candy [wrapper], but what you actually want is the candy, right? That's the actual content. So when you spend all this money on like a really fancy [wrapper] and the candy tastes horrible, not only does the production value not help you, but it actually makes me like the video less."
What Kjeldsen found inside the wrapper was thin. Not one idea from Beyond Good and Evil appears in Peterson's introductory lecture. Peterson never mentions the book except in passing. The Bible is cited more frequently than Nietzsche himself. As Kjeldsen notes with dry exasperation near the end of his reaction: "not a single citation for Beyond Good and Evil. Not a single idea from Beyond Good and Evil." In fairness, this is the first of an eight-lecture course — you have to pay big bucks to see the rest of it. So I assume Peterson gets around to the book eventually, but still, where's the beef? The beef is that Peterson, like most people, has misread Nietzsche and so draws the wrong conclusions.
Peterson subtitled the lecture "How to Philosophize with a Hammer" — borrowing the subtitle from Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols. Immediately, Kjeldsen catches him misreading even that. Peterson suggests the phrase refers to smashing axiomatic certainties and to the psychological impact Nietzsche's work has on the unprepared reader. Not wrong exactly, but not the actual meaning either. Kjeldsen corrects it directly from the source: in the preface to Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche says he wishes to strike his hammer against the hollow idols of mankind "as one taps with a tuning fork." The idols are hollow. The hammer sounds them out. What Nietzsche is after is the tone — the resonance of what's actually inside an ideal when you tap it. As Kjeldsen puts it: "the actual meaning of how to philosophize with a hammer is sort of sounding out what the inner meaning of an ideal is... the ultimate foundational valuations that sit at the basis of that ideal or that idol."
The distinction matters because it tells us what kind of thinker Nietzsche actually was. He wasn't primarily a demolisher. He was a diagnostician. Peterson wants a Nietzsche who smashes — it fits the drama of the presentation. The actual Nietzsche wanted to know what was hollow and why.
Kjeldsen is not an academic philosopher in any institutional sense. Before hosting The Nietzsche Podcast, where he goes by the name "essentialsalts" — a nod to H.P. Lovecraft, interestingly enough — he spent a decade touring the United States in a doom metal band called Destroyer of Light. In 2019, he took that band to Europe and turned the experience into a book — The Ritual Madness of Rock & Roll: An Inquiry into Aesthetics — which works through Socrates, Nietzsche, Tolstoy and Barthes while moving at breakneck pace through European venues with an irresponsible record label and a punishing tour schedule.
He came to Nietzsche likely because he was a philosophy major. But his musical calling led him on a different path, not to become an academic but to directly foster his genuine need to understand what art is and why it costs so much to make it. That is, in its own way, precisely the kind of engagement Nietzsche demanded of his readers. Peterson, by contrast, is a former Harvard and University of Toronto psychology professor. He has the credentials, the budget, the studio, and the global audience. What he apparently does not have, based on this lecture, is a close reading of the assigned text.
The central philosophical disagreement between these two men is not a minor one. It goes to the heart of what Nietzsche actually argued about nihilism and Christianity — and Peterson, according to Kjeldsen, gets it precisely backwards. Peterson's reading goes roughly like this: Nietzsche successfully demolished the axiomatic certainties of the Western philosophical tradition by pointing to the death of God, and this left us in nihilistic chaos, spiritually rootless, vulnerable to the totalitarian ideologies that rushed in to fill the vacuum. The implication — never quite stated but always present in Peterson — is that the solution is to return to or at least preserve those traditional values. Nietzsche is the diagnostician of our disease, and the cure is what he destroyed.
Kjeldsen finds this not merely shallow but fundamentally inverted. His response, drawn directly from Nietzsche's own texts, is blunt: "nihilism comes out of Christianity. It's not [that] we lose Christianity and then therefore we have to confront nihilism because our values have been questioned... No, that's not actually what Nietzsche is arguing. He's saying part of why Christianity has to die is because it's created a nihilistic approach to life." This is the part almost everyone misses about Nietzsche. Nihilism is the result of established faiths and traditions no longer serving us in a world of dramatic change.
This is the pivot everything else turns on. Christianity is not the cure for nihilism. For Nietzsche, it is its origin. The mechanism is not difficult to follow once stated. Christianity places all ultimate value in a world beyond this one — after judgment, after death, in heaven, in the eternal. This world, the world of sensation and desire and ambition and earthly pleasure, is sin-cursed, fallen, temporary. Everything genuinely human is circumscribed or condemned.
As Kjeldsen traces it: "it's a religion that puts all the value for our lives in a world beyond in an other world and essentially says that... this world, it's a sin-cursed world, it's a fallen world... and all of your vain glory, all of your pursuits of your desires for your own selfish ambitions or for aesthetic pleasures or even for just... fulfilling your base impulsive desires — that's all sinful. Everything human beings do in some sense is sinful... and Nietzsche says that this attitude in which the good life becomes impossible in this world... produces... the crisis of nihilism."
A civilization taught for centuries that earthly life is spiritually worthless has been systematically drained of its investment in the world. That is nihilism — not the absence of belief, but the devaluation of life itself. The death of God doesn't create this condition. It exposes it. There is a further dimension here that compounds the problem. Christianity is not merely one valuation among others that happened to exhaust itself. It is, by its nature, a valuation that works to prevent future revaluations.
As Kjeldsen puts it: "because of its universalism and its dogmatism, it's even closed off the possibilities. Unlike in polytheism, where new gods can be born and new gods can be brought in with a whole panoply of existing gods, and there can be a more free contest of values, Nietzsche sees a kind of stultifying complacency in Christianity that even prevents future revaluations." The game board doesn't just run down. It is frozen.
Kjeldsen offers a striking metaphor for what Christianity has done in the meantime. It operates as "a kind of disguised nihilism that may be like a kind of poison [that] can be used medically." It may have been the appropriate worldview for a particular human type at a particular time — he suggests the Roman slaves of the first century may genuinely have needed it, that it made existence tolerable for people who had very little reason to affirm their lives.
But the poison that once preserved is still poison: "the nihilism is contained within Christianity already, and it was a form of nihilism that strangely enough managed to preserve life while weakening and exhausting it. The problem is like we keep taking the poison over and over and over again." This goes considerably further than anything Peterson offers. And it explains why Kjeldsen is so frustrated by Peterson's implicit answer — return to traditional values, back to church — because for Nietzsche, Christianity was not the medicine. It was the long illness presenting as a cure.
Peterson seems to assume, like most who read Nietzsche, that when Christian belief collapses, nihilism rushes in to fill the vacuum. Lose the faith, lose the values, lose the foundation. That is the sequence he fears and implicitly wants to reverse. But Kjeldsen draws out what is for Nietzsche the far more disturbing truth: the death of God does not end the nihilism. It deepens it. "Christianity is the suprahistorical category," Kjeldsen says, "and that's what Nietzsche wants to destroy and that is not destroyed by the death of God. It continues after the death of God. It gets worse after the death of God, this nihilistic value system."
The values don't die with the belief. The metaphysical habits of Christianity outlive God himself. Scientific positivism, utilitarian morality, the belief in an objective world accessible through reason alone — these are, for Nietzsche, Christianity in secular dress. The God is gone but the structure of valuation remains intact: a "true world" beyond appearances, a universal morality binding on all, the subordination of this life to an abstract standard that sits above it. As Kjeldsen puts it: "the values are still gripping us, right? In the forms of like what I mentioned before of positivism, utilitarianism, all of these things. That too is a form of Christianity. That too is the shadow of God cast on our thought." The altar is removed but everyone keeps arranging the furniture as though it's still there.
The end point of this process — the terminus toward which Christianity's long exhaustion of the will tends — is what Nietzsche called "the Last Man." Kjeldsen describes it with some urgency: mankind "will be so tamed and domesticated. He will have become so pathetic and guilt-ridden and... unwilling to will" that "eventually he won't even have the capacity to engage in warfare." Beyond even that, Nietzsche sees the final expression of this nihilism not as dramatic collapse but as something far more banal and total: "mankind just becomes a sort of... great ant organizations just instrumentalized individuals that are machines of production and consumption and that will actually be locked into this stultifying complacency and that will be the end result of Christianity." This is the picture Peterson does not engage. He wants Nietzsche's death of God to be dangerous but recoverable — a wound that might still heal if we return to the tradition. Nietzsche's actual vision is of a civilization so thoroughly exhausted by its own values that it may no longer have the will to do anything about it. Peterson's answer — back to church — is, from this perspective, not a cure. It is a request for another dose of the same poison.
Kjeldsen draws out one further dimension of Nietzsche's thought that Peterson's reading essentially requires him to avoid. It concerns perspective — and it is where Peterson's own position becomes philosophically exposed. Nietzsche's perspectivism holds that every truth claim arises from a particular standpoint, and every standpoint arises from a set of drives, values, and impulses. There is no neutral ground. As Kjeldsen articulates it: "our view of the truth is topsy-turvy because we need to have an understanding with every truth claim that... there's no view from nowhere. There's no just pure seeing. There's always an eye that has to see. There is no... immaculate perception. There's no god's eye view that we can appeal to." This goes further than simply saying everyone has a bias. "Thought doesn't think by itself," Kjeldsen says, "but it's always appropriated by an impulse. It sees by an impulse." Nietzsche's project is not to destroy truth but to find the eye behind the seeing — to ask what drives are speaking through any given philosophy, morality, or truth claim.
Applied to Peterson himself, the result is uncomfortable. Kjeldsen is direct about it: "let's do what Nietzsche would do with any philosopher. Say, what are the impulses that are speaking out of Jordan here? It's again the back to church, back to Christianity, back to what's always worked." Peterson cannot use Nietzsche as a diagnostician of nihilism while exempting his own position from Nietzsche's diagnostic method. The man who philosophizes with a hammer — even understood only as Peterson understands it, as a tool for smashing certainties — taps every idol. Including the ones the reader arrived with.
Peterson has said on record that Nietzsche is simply wrong about value creation — that individuals cannot create values. It’s too problematic. Rather, values are discovered or inherited, embedded in the deep evolutionary and cultural programming of the species. Kjeldsen's response is essentially Nietzschean: of course it's problematic. That is precisely the point. And his evidence is history itself. There has never been a moment when humanity shared a single set of values.
As Kjeldsen observes: "there have been revaluations of values many times throughout history... every world religion has been a revaluation of values. Every major shift in the... religious character of a civilization is a... shift in values, a new legislation of values. So this happens all the time." The legislators of value are not gods. They are human beings compelling enough to reorder what a civilization considers most worth having. "Nietzsche thinks there will be sort of... nodes who will be... legislatory figure[s] like Plato or Jesus or Muhammad or the Buddha and then those people will create the values and those values will be sufficiently... compelling... that mass numbers of people will go along with them."
Peterson's universalism — his instinct that there must be a shared framework, that without one we collapse into Hobbesian chaos — is exactly what Nietzsche spent his career interrogating. Kjeldsen puts it plainly: "has human history been characterized by people everywhere agreeing on the same values? Or are there different states, different nations, different cultures, different empires, different civilizations, different religions, different moralities? That's always been what's characterized human life." And the contest between those competing frameworks is not the problem. For Nietzsche it is the engine. As Kjeldsen says: "it's conflict that drives that forward." Peterson cannot accept this. Or will not. Either way, it is the crux of everything he gets wrong about Nietzsche.
What Nietzsche actually proposed was a genuine revaluation of values. Not a return to old ones, not a defense of precedent, but new experiments, new legislators, new contests. The death of God opens what Nietzsche calls, in The Gay Science, "an open sea of possibilities." As Kjeldsen reads it, this is ultimately good news: "in spite of all the dangers of this and the societal upheaval, never before has such an open sea of possibilities existed for new valuations. And ultimately for Nietzsche that's good news."
Peterson presents the death of God as something closer to grief — dangerous, a wound in the Western tradition. Kjeldsen will not accept this reading: "it's just disingenuous to present it as if Nietzsche is weeping over the death of God. That's not really the vibe." This revaluation is not a blueprint. Nietzsche is not handing down the new religion. He is describing the mechanism by which new religions — new tablets of value — have always been made, and imagining what it might look like if that process were undertaken honestly, without the bad faith of a tradition that has already exhausted itself. The experiments will be many. Many will fail. As Kjeldsen notes: "[Nietzsche] hopes that many experiments will be conducted in legislating new values and most of them will be failures."
He carefully clarifies what Nietzsche actually predicted — not communism specifically, not any named ideology, but wars over valuations on a vast scale: "he foresees wars over valuations in the future in which millions will perish, hundreds of millions will perish." That is the cost of the open sea. Nietzsche is not a utopian. He is someone who looked at the logic of what was coming and refused to look away.
I want to pause on the text behind that claim. Kaufmann's translation of The Will to Power, Aphorism 964, gives Nietzsche's actual phrase as: "To gain that tremendous energy of greatness in order to shape the man of the future through breeding and, on the other hand, the annihilation of millions of failures, and not to perish of the suffering one creates, though nothing like it has ever existed!" Nietzsche says millions, not hundreds of millions. Kjeldsen's larger number belongs to retrospective interpretation — the twentieth century handing us the bill — rather than to the idea itself. His broader point about Nietzsche anticipating catastrophic value-wars is defensible. The numerical inflation is his own. Still, today's culture wars and, indeed, examples of instability and violence globally are an inevitable consequence of ongoing experiments in value creation.
What the Kaufmann translation makes plain, beyond the numbers, is the full weight of what Nietzsche is actually imagining. "Millions of failures" carries his biological-selection tone: not failed great men, but failed human types — the products of decadence, exhaustion, herd morality, the long poisoning. And the sentence does not end with the annihilation. It ends with the psychological demand placed on whoever causes it: not to perish of the suffering one creates. That is where the real abyss opens.
Nietzsche is not simply predicting mass death. He is imagining a creator-type with the strength to endure being its cause. Peterson's Nietzsche, weeping sorrowfully over the death of God, is nowhere near this passage. One further caveat the honest reader owes himself: The Will to Power is a posthumous compilation, assembled and arranged by Nietzsche's sister Elisabeth after his collapse. It is not a finished work. The notebook material it draws from is real; the editorial architecture imposed on it is hers. That does not make Aphorism 964 less Nietzsche. But it means the passage should be read as a notebook fragment, not as doctrine — a laboratory thought rather than a final position.
There is an irony running through all of this that neither man addresses directly, but which Nietzsche himself would have found rather interesting. Both Peterson and Kjeldsen are passionate advocates for their respective readings. Both have audiences who follow them with genuine conviction. Both are, in their different ways, legislating values — Peterson implicitly toward a perpetuation of traditional Western frameworks, Kjeldsen toward a more honest reckoning with what Nietzsche actually said and what it demands of us. They are not going to convince each other. The contest between them is real.
This is, more or less, exactly what Nietzsche predicted. Not Peterson and Kjeldsen specifically, of course. But this: competing value-legislators, each compelling enough to draw followers, going to war with each other on fundamentally incompatible grounds. The free cities of the moral interregnum, each running its own experiment. What advances the species, for Nietzsche, is not universal agreement on values but the competition between them. Stultifying complacency — everyone locked into the same framework — is precisely what he feared most.
There is one further thing worth saying about what Kjeldsen's reaction actually accomplishes. On his own podcast, he characteristically goes deep into the machinery of Nietzsche's thought — sometimes so deep that the wider view can recede. That depth is the podcast's great virtue. But here, forced to react to something this misguided posing as insight, he produces his most compressed and direct account of exactly the aspect of Nietzsche that matters most.
The candy wrapper is Peterson's studio. The candy is this argument — about nihilism, Christianity, the death of God, and what we are supposed to do now. It is a genuinely difficult argument, and it has been going on, in various forms, since Nietzsche first made it. What Kjeldsen's reaction accomplishes, almost accidentally, is to compress some of the most important parts of it into unusually clear focus. Without something this polished yet inaccurate to push against, Kjeldsen might have wandered the entire mountain range. Instead he points directly at the peak and says — that one. Stop confusing it with a chapel.
The title of Kjeldsen’s podcast reaction episode is “Peterson’s ‘Fake’ Nietzsche Course.” I don’t know if Jordan ever gets around to mentioning Beyond Good and Evil. I assume he does. He was a professor after all. But he doesn’t give us anything at all from that book to work with here. Instead he rambles all over the place, quoting everything except the title supposedly inspiring the course. So how am I supposed to know if anyone gets their money worth?
Kjeldsen critiques the lecture well, given what little he has to work with. In the process he offers the viewer are sharper, more succinct view of certain aspects of Nietzsche’s thought than he usually does. If you want to understand Nietzsche fundamentally, see what he has to say about Nietzsche as prompted by Peterson’s lecture-non-lecture. Your eyes will be opened to the world around us. This living, breathing, conflicted, competitive, experimenting, succeeding and failing Will to Power. You won’t see that dynamic sky through Peterson’s lens. But that inadequate take inspired Kjeldsen to deliver a tour de force of the real candy inside the wrapper.
If I step back for a moment, this is all pretty funny, isn’t it? All this argumentative to-do over a lecture that doesn’t deliver anything about its own title. We’ve come a long way from 45 minutes on one paragraph many years ago. Now it’s 45 glitzy minutes on nothing in the book at all.
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