Jordan Peterson on history: what the evidence says · JRE #877
SUBJECT: HISTORY
The short answer
Peterson states that Carl Jung was a student of Friedrich Nietzsche and that Jung responded to Nietzsche's idea that people could create their own values after the death of God. Nietzsche (1844-1900) suffered a mental collapse in Turin in January 1889 and produced no further philosophical work before his death in 1900; Jung, born in 1875, was 13 years old at the time of Nietzsche's collapse and did not begin his university studies until 1895, six years later.
Not a true/false call. Every claim is logged with its sources; read the exhibits below.
And Carl Jung took issue with that. He was a student of Nietzsche's, and he pointed out, basically, that, well, wait a minute. Who says you can create your own values?
What the evidence says 01 / RECORD
Peterson states that Carl Jung was a student of Friedrich Nietzsche, but the two men never had a personal or formal teacher-student relationship. Nietzsche (1844-1900) suffered a mental collapse in Turin in January 1889 and produced no further philosophical work before his death in 1900; Jung, born in 1875, was 13 years old at the time of Nietzsche's collapse and did not begin his university studies until 1895, six years later. Jung read Nietzsche's published writings as a young man and was significantly influenced by them, and decades later, in the 1930s, led a well-known Zurich seminar analyzing Nietzsche's "Thus Spoke Zarathustra," but this was a scholarly and psychological engagement with Nietzsche's texts long after Nietzsche was incapacitated or dead, not discipleship under a living teacher. The broader point that Nietzsche's idea of self-created values drew critical responses from later thinkers, including Jung, is a defensible characterization, but the specific "student of Nietzsche's" framing misstates the historical relationship between the two men.