J. Peterson also holds that responsibility & meaning are connected. This contains a certain truth, but he presents this as meaning that a responsible life in the bourgeois sense creates meaning. In fact, artists—from Van Gogh to Cellini—are irresponsible, except to their work.
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Yet these are the people with, arguably, the lives of richest meaning. Meaning and responsibility are connected. But responsibility, when diffused, probably doesn’t create the highest meaning. This also poses a moral dilemma for Peterson’s though: is meaning the highest value?
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He seems to think so. Yet, if meaning is best pursued by being only narrowly responsible then should we all just give up our other responsibitlies. Again, this derives from Nietzsche who would say there are men who can do so, who simply “become what they are.”
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But most people will not. And so, in this sense, Peterson is overselling the meaningfulness of being an individual in under liberal capitalism, which is in fact not particularly meaningful—as Nietzsche understood.
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