Jordan Peterson on True Passion

University of Toronto professor Jordan Peterson has a lot of clips up on YouTube, some of them short, like this one, some of them full lectures. They are usually worth your time. It is amazing how you can tell he is worth listening to almost instantly:

We always seem to keep coming back to the transcendentals of the ancient Greeks: the Good, the True and the Beautiful. I'm quite clear about music being a meaningfully engaging passion for me because, well, for a long, long time now what music is and what it does has absolutely fascinated me.

But yes, there are moral requirements as well. And eschewing deception, that is, "making truth your highest value" otherwise you can't even know yourself and whether you are meaningfully engaged or not. You see, he hits all three: the Good, the True and, if your meaningful engagement is with an art form like music, the Beautiful.

Let's hear some of that beautiful music (and no, it isn't that soppy stuff labeled as such on YouTube). This is the Symphony No. 6 by Jean Sibelius with the Swedish Radio Orchestra conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen: