Like ultimately he's trying to argue there's actual truth in our poetic, animalistic relation to the world, and that the reduction of our relation to the world to taxonomic categories misses something important about what it means to be true.

Nah, he's bungling reciting an evopsych theory trying to validate eurocentric "all art about anything serpentine with a non-snake face is a dragon" bad anthropology. The whole "dragon means ur-scary thing and represents instinctual imprints of features of the most scary things of our distant ancestors' lives" theory relies on "dragon" even being any sort of consistent archetype, which it's not. European dragons might be villainous, predatory serpents aesthetically inspired by actual european/mediterranean animals or art/descriptions of said animals that their creators would have seen or at least heard about, but the things european explorers labeled as "dragons" from other cultures are not only radically different in aesthetics and sort of meta or narrative role (eg Chinese "dragons" being lucky, good things associated with divinity), but are also aesthetically inspired by local animals the creators of the art and stories would have seen and known.

The whole thing is actually very silly and chauvinist. It would be like some otaku weirdo trying to use old Egyptian god artwork as evidence that "catgirl waifu" is an innate archetype.