Yeah, actually - there's a fair amount of simplified existentialism in his thinking. He's obsessed with Nietzsche, often cites Kierkegaard, and Camus and Heidegger make occasional appearances as well. He hates Sartre because he was a commie, but he's a fan of most of the other existentialists. It's the post-structuralists that he loathes.
I don't like that Nietzsche is used by Peterson, but it isn't surprising:
Nietzsche wasn't entirely a philosopher, tbh; he was (by degree) a linguist, and his first work was a comparison of ancient elements in drama, the somewhat famous treatise on the apollonian and the dionysian. Other works show strong sociological interest, rather than philosophical; for example his theory regarding ethics and how it might have come to be formed in non-christian societies (eg ancient Greece).
Even Zarathustra is a hybrid, having many sociological focal points. Even some of his most quoted passages are - in context - about his reaction to (from a sociological perspective) (german) idealism. Eg the one about staring for long into an abyss, and the abyss staring back, is actually about that, and not something more poetic.
While Nietzsche obviously is far more of a philosopher than (actual uni degree in philosophy) Marx (because Marx isn't a philosopher at all), he still should be categorized mainly as a thinker who dealt with and wrote about sociology and ethics (ethics are part of philosophy, but of the rather more surface philosophy).
Many people used Nietzsche as an influence, including (mentioning it cause it shows how influencial and aso how easy to twist to fit one's own agenda he was) Adolf Hitler. Which is even funnier given that Nietzsche himself was very angry about "antisemites" using his views. Iirc parts of Ece Homo are about this issue as well.
One of the most famous quotes by Nietzsche is the one about life being a "will to power". Again, if someone hasn't read Nietzsche, they wouldn't know that he had very lingering psychological issues, which led to his early death. He did lose his mind, in the end, and collapsed. His worth is not equal in everything he presented. His fight against (what he viewed as, imo crudely) idealism was mixed with and driven by personal problems, which he did try to account for by presenting himself as a victim of german church/religious (thus idealistic) view, which he saw as anti-life.
That said, Peterson isn't anything of Nietzsche's value. At least Nietzsche did provide some work of note, and was a serious thinker.
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