Jordan Peterson Is Wrong About Ambiguity

Jordan Peterson is one of the most interesting public intellectuals alive. He's also one of the most frustrating. Not because he's stupid — he clearly isn't — but because he has a habit of wrapping ideas in so many layers of fog that by the time he's done talking, you can't quite tell what he actually said. That's a feature for him, not a bug. And it's exactly what makes his recent comments about art and ambiguity worth pushing back on.

In a recent interview, Peterson was discussing Ayn Rand's book The Romantic Manifesto — a text where Rand argues for a kind of rigorous, purposeful approach to art rooted in her broader philosophy of Objectivism. Now, Rand had her own problems. She believed you could be coldly objective about nearly everything, including the creative process, and that's a stretch. Art is not a spreadsheet. But Peterson's correction swung so far in the opposite direction that he ended up somewhere just as wrong, only harder to argue with because it sounds profound.

His claim, roughly stated: if you can explain a work of art, it stops being art. Great art, he argued, is almost ambiguous by nature.

I think that's worth examining carefully — because on the surface it sounds like wisdom, but when you press on it, it falls apart.

The Ambiguity Trap

Here's the thing about ambiguity: it can be a genuine property of great work, or it can be a shield. It can mean that a piece of art is rich enough to hold multiple true interpretations at once. Or it can mean that nobody — including the person who made it — actually knows what it means, and the vagueness is being mistaken for depth.

Peterson, whether he intends to or not, often benefits from the second kind. Watch enough of his interviews and you'll notice a pattern: when someone tries to pin him down on a specific claim, he retreats into complexity. He talks about Jungian archetypes, the structure of narrative, the logos, the chaos — and by the time he's finished, the original question has been absorbed into something so large and layered that holding him to a clear answer feels almost rude. It's an impressive rhetorical move. But it's not a virtue. And when he applies that same logic to art, he's not describing what makes great art great. He's describing what makes his communication style comfortable for him.

Ambiguity is not the source of artistic power. It is, at best, a byproduct of artistic richness — and there's a significant difference between those two things.

Almost All Great Art Was Commissioned

Let's go back to basics. Let's look at what actually happened when the greatest works of Western art were made.

Michelangelo did not wake up one morning, feel a mysterious stirring in his soul, and spontaneously begin painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling. He was hired. Pope Julius II commissioned the work. There was a contract. There were specific subjects to be depicted — biblical scenes, theological narratives, figures drawn from Scripture. Michelangelo knew exactly what he was setting out to create before he ever touched a brush to plaster. The work was purposeful, intentional, and deeply explainable. We know what the Creation of Adam means. We can say it. The explainability doesn't diminish it. If anything, the clarity of purpose is part of why it has endured.

Leonardo da Vinci was the same. The Last Supper was commissioned by Ludovico Sforza for the refectory of a convent in Milan. It depicts a specific moment from the Gospel of John — the moment Christ announces that one of his disciples will betray him. You can explain every figure in that painting. You can explain the geometry, the perspective, the emotional register of each apostle's reaction. The painting rewards explanation. It doesn't collapse under it.

Go further back. The great cathedrals of Europe — every window, every carved portal, every mosaic — were theological programs rendered in stone and glass. The artists and craftsmen who built them were working from explicit iconographic programs. They knew what each image meant and why it was placed where it was. The art was legible. It was meant to be legible. The peasant who couldn't read Latin could walk into Chartres and read the story of salvation in the windows. Explainability was the whole point.

Peterson's claim doesn't survive contact with art history. It survives only in the comfortable fog of the contemporary art world, where ambiguity has been elevated into a virtue precisely because it protects bad work from criticism. If no one can say what it means, no one can say it means nothing.

The Difference Between Richness and Vagueness

Now, I want to be fair here, because there's a version of Peterson's point that contains a grain of truth. Great art does tend to resist complete reduction. You can explain the subject of Starry Night — Van Gogh painted the view from his room at the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence — but explaining the subject doesn't exhaust the painting. There's something in the movement of that sky, in the way the light seems to pulse and breathe, that exceeds any single verbal account. The painting is richer than any description of it.

But notice what I just did: I explained it. Partially. And the partial explanation didn't kill it. It pointed toward it. That's what good explanation does with great art — it serves as a doorway, not a cage.

The mistake Peterson makes is conflating inexhaustibility with inexplicability. A great work of art cannot be fully contained in a verbal summary — that's true. But that's not the same as saying it can't be explained at all, or that explanation is somehow hostile to it. A river can't be fully contained in a photograph, but a photograph still tells you something real about the river. The inability to capture everything is not the same as the inability to capture anything.

Vagueness is not depth. Depth is what you find when you keep digging and keep finding more. Vagueness is what you find when you dig and find nothing, and then tell yourself the emptiness is the point.

Why This Matters Beyond Art

I've written before about the idea that almost any topic can be understood by almost anyone if it's explained well. That's not just a slogan for me — it's the operating principle behind everything I do here. It comes from a quote I keep close: "Beware of anyone who tells you a topic is above you or better left to experts." The same warning applies to art. Beware of anyone who tells you that great art is, by definition, beyond explanation — because what they're often doing is protecting a category of work from the scrutiny it deserves, or protecting themselves from having to make a clear claim.

This is a form of gatekeeping, and it's one of the subtler kinds because it disguises itself as reverence. It sounds like it's elevating art. What it's actually doing is removing art from the conversation — placing it in a sacred space where ordinary intelligence isn't welcome and ordinary questions aren't allowed. That's not reverence. That's mystification. And mystification serves the people who benefit from keeping things murky, not the people who are trying to understand.

Think about how Annie Duke frames decision-making in Thinking in Bets — a book that genuinely changed the way I approach almost everything. One of her core insights is that we have to be honest about what we know, what we don't know, and what we're pretending not to know. Ambiguity, when it's manufactured rather than genuine, is a way of avoiding that honesty. It lets you claim credit for profundity without ever having to demonstrate it. Peterson does this with language. The contemporary art world does it with imagery. The result in both cases is the same: a conversation that sounds important but never actually goes anywhere.

Clarity Is a Form of Courage

Here's what I actually believe about art, stated plainly: the greatest works of art are the ones where the maker knew exactly what they were doing and did it with total commitment. The ambiguity that sometimes emerges from great art is a consequence of its richness, not the source of its power. And the ability to explain a work — to say what it's about, why it was made, what it means — is not a threat to its greatness. It's evidence that there's something real there to explain.

Clarity is not the enemy of beauty. Clarity is a form of courage. It means you've thought hard enough about something to say what you actually think, and you're willing to be held to it. Michelangelo was held to it. Da Vinci was held to it. The builders of Chartres were held to it. They made specific things for specific reasons, and those things have lasted centuries precisely because they were grounded in intention, not adrift in ambiguity.

Jordan Peterson is a smart man who has done genuinely useful work. But on this point, he's wrong — and the wrongness is revealing. When someone tells you that the best ideas are the ones that can't be pinned down, it's worth asking who benefits from the pinning being impossible. Usually, it's the person doing the talking.

I'd rather make a clear claim and be wrong than make a foggy one and be unchallenged. At least the first one can be corrected. At least the first one respects your intelligence enough to give you something to push back on.

That's the standard I hold myself to here. It's the standard I think art should be held to. And it's the standard I'm holding Jordan Peterson to now.

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